“Once the fighting begins, every American will be thinking primarily of the safety of our troops, the success of their mission and the minimization of Iraqi civilian casualties.”

-New York Times, March 18, 2003

We can remember reading those words in an editorial issued by the New York Times on the start of the Iraq war and feeling a rush of admiration. It reminded us of Abraham Cahan’s Jewish Daily Forward, say, or Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. Albeit for different reasons, one opposed World War I, the other World War II, only to emerge, out of sheer patriotism, strongly in the struggle. We wondered back in 2003 whether the Gray Lady would stay with the fight. Sad to say, the Times fell away quicker, and more abjectly, than even we could have imagined. That’s the context in which the latest controversy has erupted over the Times’s rebuff of a request by the war authorities that it withhold publication of material on a classified intelligence program.

President Bush said yesterday that the disclosure of this program is “disgraceful.” He said, “We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.” A number of our friends on the right want the Bush administration to pursue criminal charges against the Times. We’re happy to leave to a grand jury whether to act against the Times’s sources. But in our view, once information has leached from the government into the hands of agents of the press, the right person to make these judgments is – despite the mockery one hears on the point – precisely the proprietor of a newspaper or his editor.

So where is the Times’s proprietor? On May 21, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. boasted, in a commencement speech at the State University of New York in New Paltz, of how, when he graduated college in 1974, “my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. Okay, that’s not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace – but maybe there were larger forces at play. Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land.”

For what is the publisher of the Times apologizing? He likens the present conflict to Vietnam, whose secret history, the Pentagon Papers, the Times fought a Supreme Court battle against Nixon for the right to publish. It was a famous victory. Vietnam, like this war, was fought against an enemy that aimed to destroy, among other things, the freedoms under which the Times publishes. Communist Vietnam to this day lacks a free press, as America would were the Islamist terrorists to conquer us, a fact to which the Times’s defenders are oblivious. But publishing even a secret history of a war is different from a campaign to disclose the intelligence gathering practices being used in secret to defeat an enemy seeking to evade our methods in the middle of a war in which our troops are in the field.

The editor of the Times writes to readers that “nobody should think that we made this decision casually, with any animus toward the current Administration.” That protestation is hard to credit when nearly every word written on the war by the Times’ editorialists and its publisher reeks with the very animus the editor denies. The newspaper has done courageous reporting from the Iraq theater, but nothing else it has done since the fighting started suggests that it counts itself as among those thinking primarily of the safety of our troops and the success of their mission. The fact is that the American people want to win this war. They are saddened at every defeat, angered at every compromise of our secrets, joyous at every victory. And the question Americans are asking today is what happened that their hope is no longer primary at the New York Times?