In 1988 Washington Post owner, Katharine Graham, made a speech to a group of CIA recruits. She told them:

“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

She learned this from her husband, Phil Graham. who ran the Post until his suicide in 1963. In her Pulitzer winning autobiography Graham said this about the Bay of Pigs:

Ben Bradlee remembers Phil sort of dropping out of sight right after the Newsweek purchase but then becoming involved one Saturday morning just after the Bay of Pigs, over a Newsweek cover story on the CIA that Phil stepped in to tone down. Since Phil knew the players particularly well- friends of his like Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes- he was very concerned about this piece and went over the story with a fine-tooth comb. He was acting arbitrarily.

With regard to the Bay of Pigs fiacso, Chal Roberts ascribes the Post’s failure to send reporters to Florida and Guatemala to the fact that Phil, his editors, and Chal himself saw nothing wrong with such a CIA operation and indeed hoped it would succeed. On April 22, a Post editorial declared that events in Cuba were “only one chapter in a long history of freedom, which has encompassed many greater disasters and darker days before men have combined their wit and determination to write a brighter sequel.” Only on May 1 did an editorial refer to “the Cuban misadventure” and the next day to an “appalling mistake of judgment.”

The Washington Post has always been an insider’s paper. In many ways the Watergate investigation served to mask their overall tendency to carry water for whatever administration is in power. The Washington Post provides ‘resolve’.

The Plame case is unique in that it fits into a larger split in the foreign policy establishment. On the one hand, as early as April 2002, it was well known within the parlors of Washington that a decision to depose Saddam had been made. What ensued was a debate, not so much over the merits of that decision, but over the risks. Some foreign policy realists clutched to the hope that war could be averted, but most concentrated on convincing the public, attracting allies, pushing the neocons toward the United Nations, and so on.

As these debates roiled the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House, different columnists were enlisted to argue for different factions. Columnists like Tom Friedman signed up to push Colin Powell’s line. Columnists like Judy Miller and William Safire signed up to push the neo-cons line. But none of these insiders at the New York Times or the Washington Post seriously questioned whether the war should be fought at all. The war was a foregone conclusion and debating it was an exercise in irrelevancy.

And when the war produced no evidence of WMD, there was the question of maintaining American resolve for this mission. The Iraqis could not defeat us on the battlefield, but a loss of domestic support for the war effort could be crippling. Once again the old warhorses set aside their doubts, all too happy to downplay Joe Wilson’s allegations, and participate in the grotesque smearing of his name and reputation.

“Hey, Joe, Karl Rove says your wife is fair game. Heh heh.”

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t.”

Senator Pat Roberts has said as much about Abu Ghraib and Koran desecration. “We do not torture.”

“…democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

But this only works as long as the government’s policies are effective. When they are not effective the secrecy will not hold. And, in the case of the war in Iraq, there never was any consensus in the foreign policy establishment that we should preemptively invade. The press can’t suppress dissent forever, especially when it is coming from a bipartisan set of insiders, and even more so when the intelligence community is in open rebellion.

Woodward thought he knew best. Pincus was willing to go along. But Fitzgerald has exposed their little game. Now let the dominoes fall.