The newsroom of the 1970s in the United States and elsewhere in the world had a factory look, and the haggardly journalists were the down-and-out proletarians. What kept them going was the belief that they were doing something important and that it had something to do with the fundamental principles of democracy.

Steven Spielberg’s The Post conveys that idea of journalists-at-the-barricades spirit, especially when they are pitted against a dour and anti-liberal president of the country like Richard Nixon. But that is only one side the story. The other side is that of the well-heeled and well-connected like The Washington Post’s owner, Katherine Graham (played with her characteristic affectation by Meryl Streep), and the newspaper’s editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks’s immersed-in-the-character mode) who are friends with presidents and senators and the powerful and fashionable elite of Washington DC.

Journalists are the foot-soldiers, and the commanders are the owners and editors. They take the big decisions about the battles to be fought. The commanders at The Post were willing to fight the battle, and they fought it in style.

Spielberg’s ode to one of the most tense and victorious moments in American journalism is sincere and genuine. And the movie raises the glass to the ones who matter and who staked it all. It can be seen that Spielberg is doffing his hat to the woman of the moment in that battle, Katherine Graham, more than to anyone else.

She is the one who leads because she is forced into the situation. She did not get there on her own. She inherited it. But that did not make things easy for her. If anything, it made things more difficult for her. But she seems to have stood her ground alright and won her spurs. That is what Spielberg’s movie is all about.

There is also something very simplistic about it all as well. The journalists and young protesters on the streets seem to be appalled and enraged by the fact that their political leaders told them lies when they knew the truth. So presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson are labelled liars.

There are two scenes in the movie where the protagonists confront each other about the issue of telling or hiding the truth. The first is between Graham and Bradlee when Bradlee almost upbraids Graham for wanting to protect her friend Bob (McNamara), and she retorts by asking whether Bradlee had asked tough questions and wrote the truth about his friend, President John Kennedy. The answers each one gives is at best evasive.

The second confrontation is between Graham and McNamara, when she goes over to his house and asks him how he and the government could have told lies when they knew the truth. Bob winces but argues that truth is not as simple as it is made out to be.

These two scenes are amongst the most dramatic and sensitive moments in the film, and Spielberg tries to use them to make it appear that he is not really looking at the Pentagon Papers episode as just a morality tale where the good and evil are clearly marked out. He does what he can to underscore the complexity in a movie, which cannot afford to dwell too much on complexity at a time when a belligerent President Donald Trump is attacking the liberal media relentlessly and mindlessly.

Spielberg also sees the The Washington Post’s decision to go ahead with publishing the extracts of the Pentagon Papers after a judicial order restrained The New York Times from doing so as a crucial and momentous decision taken by Graham, a woman and The Post’s owner. Bradlee’s wife tells her husband that if he loses a job he will find another, but for Graham everything is at stake.

Spielberg, of course, does not let go of the opportunity to show Graham, a woman, in what is mostly an exclusively men’s arena. But behind Graham’s decision is the fact that it is the owner of the paper who had to stick his neck out as did the owners of The New York Times. The war for freedom of speech cannot be won by journalists and liberals alone. The owners of newspapers have to share the liberal view of the world as well for the battle to be taken into the enemy’s camp.

At the end of the movie, the 6-3 US Supreme Court decision upholding the right of The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers is shown as the triumph of journalism. But as in the case of the owners of the newspapers, the Supreme Court too played a laudable role in helping the liberals win the battle for free speech by interpreting the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution in the liberal spirit.

The most interesting and crucial part of the Pentagon Papers drama is the existence of Pentagon Papers in the first place. Without the existence of the Pentagon Papers, neither the journalists of The New York Times nor of The Washington Post, neither Graham nor Arthur Rosenthal of The New York Times, nor for that matter the liberal Supreme Court would have had anything to do with speaking the truth.

The credit strangely goes to McNamara that he got the ‘true’ history about US policy in Vietnam, from President Harry Truman to President Dwight Eisenhower to President John Kennedy to President Lyndon Johnson written, and those who recorded the facts did so faithfully. McNamara lied about the war in public, but he got the truth about the war recorded. What is this commitment to truth and where does it come from? Yet, McNamara is wily and complex enough to realise that truth cannot be spoken at any time. McNamara’s dilemma is as complicated as any situation in the byzantine Mahabharata, where we know nothing was straight and simple.

This brings us to a thought experiment in the Indian context. Is there a possibility for something like the Pentagon Papers in India? Is there a possibility of someone like McNamara in India dutifully getting truth recorded even as he speaks lies. It is quite unlikely that anyone in India would display this kind of strange commitment to truth as McNamara did, and McNamara is not the odd man out in America. He represents something deep in the American spirit and character. The Americans for all their diabolical follies at home and abroad seem to cling to a slender moral thread.

We have something akin to the Pentagon Papers in India. It is the Lt General Henderson Brooks’ report on the 1962 war with China. That report has not been made public in the last 50 years, and even a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that wants to tear the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation into pieces does not want to make the Brooks report public. Unsurprisingly, the Indian Army website in its history section omits any reference to the 1962 war though in the section on war heroes and bravery awards it mentions the soldiers who won the bravery awards in that war.

If the Indian newspapers get their hands on the report, will they publish it? The journalists of today who wear their patriotism on their sleeves would likely argue that it would not be right to make the report public because that could hurt the image of the country! The owners of newspapers may latch on to the patriotism card as well. And the Supreme Court could be arguing the case of national interest as well!

Of course, the question will have to be confined to the present moment in India where an overtly nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would raise the cry of the country being endangered.

But it is a thought experiment worth considering, to know if Indians are committed to free speech at a fundamental level, and whether they are passionate about looking unflinchingly at truth, and whether they have moral courage. The Pentagon Papers episode shows the American commitment to truth as well as to freedom of speech. Perhaps that is the reason that the American democracy thrives and inspires the rest of the world, notwithstanding its multitudinous acts of immorality and rapacity.