The Press: Anderson's Brass Ring

Columnist Jack Anderson, Washington's most persistent sensationalist, thrives on contention. His column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, gives his audience frequent scoops, but many of his fellow newsmen regard as frivolous his uneven mixture of muckraking and kiss-and-tell gossip. Last week, however, Anderson was basking in more serious attention, after his Merry-Go-Round grabbed off something of a brass ring. In four columns, he disclosed private policy discussions of the Washington Security Action Group, composed of experts from the National Security Council, State Department and Pentagon, concerning Administration action in the India-Pakistan war (see THE NATION). Both the New York Times and Washington Post asked Anderson's permission to print in full some of the documents on which the columns were based. He delightedly complied.

The affair raised three basic questions: 1) What did the papers prove about U.S. policy? 2) What did they prove about the Administration's information practices? 3) How did Anderson get them?

Overstatement. In fact, the papers did not add much to what was already known about President Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's strong pro-Pakistan, anti-Indian attitude. Anderson's charges notwithstanding, he did not catch the Administration in a gross deception. The Pentagon papers, dealing with more distant but more momentous events, showed the Government in a far more questionable light. But Anderson did provide fascinating detail about the Administration's decision-making processes as well as the tone and turn of its thinking.

As to information policy, Anderson exaggerated his accomplishment by trying to make it seem a victory of the free press over official censorship. Said he: "It is a secret now if a third-rate bureaucrat blows his nose. The security stamp is being used as promiscuously as a stapling machine." True enough, in general. But the Government obviously has a right to try to keep its consultations private.* The press, on the other hand, also has a right—and a responsibility—to print whatever inside information it can get, provided it does not violate military secrets or damage the national security. As to how Anderson got the goods, he suggests that he simply did a lot of hard digging to pry the documents out of a reluctant security establishment. Just how reluctant is far from clear.

Anderson will not, of course, identify his suppliers. "These are the same sources who have been giving me access to classified material for some time," he says. "The difference is that until now they have been very wary of letting me quote directly. But they became gravely concerned about what seemed to them a colossal moral blunder in the India-Pakistan situation." There is suspicion that the leak happened in the Defense Department. Anderson says that his sources at first would tell him only the general content of the documents, then consented to let him quote from them. When he insisted, "I must document this; you have to go all the way," they turned over copies of "dozens" of papers.