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A.C.L.U. lawyer was about to break the secret, revealed on his radio broadcast the outlines of the salvage effort. At that point the New York Times ran a ready-to-go story by Hersh, devoting a full page to his reportorial details.
Was it right for the Times to rush the revelations into print? Times Managing Editor A.M. Rosenthal, who had originally postponed the story at Colby's request, had been willing to hold off until the mission was completed or called off, or until its cover was blown. Said Rosenthal: "The advantages of immediate publication did not outweigh the considerations of disclosing an ongoing military operation." But after Anderson's broadcast, he felt that the issue of publication was academic. "In future cases," says Rosenthal, "it's impossible to say how I would act. My answer is: show me the case, let me read the story, and then I'll come to a decision."
To some, like former California Governor Ronald Reagan, CIA operations are inviolate.
Last week Reagan excoriated the press for being irresponsible in its revelation of the CIA operation. But most newsmen side with the Rosenthal "case by case" approach. Explains Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post:
"When you have these decisions, you have a balance. On the one side, there's a claim by a government of some standing that what you're about to print will harm the country's security. And on the other side you have the conviction that you're being conned." The burden, in short, is on the editors to make up their minds in each instance.
Watchful Press. George E. Reedy Jr., the onetime press secretary to Lyndon Johnson and now dean of Marquette University's College of Journalism, does not accept so balanced a view.
Says he: "I don't think newspapers should be in the business of deciding what should or shouldn't be in the national interest. They should print the news. If every newspaper decided what is or is not in the national interest, you soon wouldn't have any newspapers, you'd just have Government propaganda sheets." Jack Anderson, in his turn, claims that since Watergate, "a lot of editors and reporters are wearing a hair shirt, trying to prove too hard how patriotic and responsible we are. The country was better served by a watchful press." Adds Columnist Tom Wicker of the New York Times, who criticized his own paper's restraint: "It is hard to see how a news organization—let alone so many —could have thought such a story ought to be withheld."
There seems little doubt that certain CIA and other Government secrets can be violated only at peril to the nation. Some projects, notably the CIA'S 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, may well need what Justice Louis Brandeis called "the disinfectant" of public exposure. But in the case of Project Jennifer, given what editors knew at the time, they were right to use restraint.