At some point people are going to start wondering, if they haven’t already, what leaders like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower would have done in respect of Wikileaks. We mention those names because they were presidents who led an army — or the whole nation — in a time of war. It’s hard to think of an attack on any of our nation’s war efforts quite like that which is being made by Wikileaks under the cover of a claim to be a publication. What would our greatest leaders expect President Obama to do in respect of Julian Assange?

Washington had an obsession with secrecy, about which he wrote in a famous letter that contained his celebrated sentence, sent from eight miles east of Morristown, New Jersey, in the middle of the revolutionary war. “For upon Secrecy, Success depends in Most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.” He took his secrecy so seriously that he refused to share, even with the Congress, the instructions he had given to the negotiator of the Jay Treaty with Britain that nearly precipitated war with France.

Feature what Washington’s successor, John Adams, did, during the almost-war with France, to Benjamin Bache. Bache, via the Philadelphia Aurora, operated against Adams and the Federalists and for the Jeffersonians. He “knowingly sided with the treacherous French,” as Abigail Adams put it, according to an account of the First Amendment Center. Her husband was so beside himself that he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts and started arresting editors thither and yon.

What the courts would have countenanced is hard to say, because, while awaiting trial, Bache got carried off by yellow fever at the age of 29. All that, in any event, was over a near-war that was never actually joined. It’s something to imagine what Adams would have made of things were America, as it is today, nearly a decade into a war and suddenly confronted by a publisher, if that’s what Mr. Assange is, issuing wholesale our un-redacted war secrets while our men and women were appearing in arms.

It is fearsome to think of what kind of black rage it would have put Lincoln in. He nearly brought Horace Greeley up for treason just for trying, as the famed editor of the New York Tribune did, to arrange peace talks with the South. Imagine if the oleaginous Greeley had been, while in foreign and even neutral countries, publishing tens of thousands of sensitive telegrams naming our agents, and our units, and disclosing to the Confederacy what we knew and when we knew it. Can one even conjure the intensity of Lincoln’s anger as he sat, as one can imagine, in Secretary of War Stanton’s cavernous office, poring over the details of the breach as an aide read out the sanguinary consequences?

Same with FDR. He was in a fury at the Chicago Tribune, and the Tribune was a patriotic paper. It did publish stories that, en passant, made it known that we had broken the Japanese code. But its purpose was not to destroy our war effort. It was a breach en passant. Yet FDR, as Conrad Black puts it in his biography, “Champion of Freedom,” “exploded” and ordered the secretary of the navy, William Knox, “to send marines to occupy the Tribune Tower.” Knox, himself an ex-newspaperman, dodged the order, while Roosevelt tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to get his attorney general to charge the proprietor of the Tribune, Colonel McCormick, with treason.

What a contrast, in any event, to how Mr. Obama has reacted to Wikileaks. “I know much has been written about this in recent days as a result of the substantial leak of documents from Afghanistan, covering a period from 2004 to 2009,” Mr. Obama was quoted by the Associated Press as saying in July, not long after one release of documents. “While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield, that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.”

The lastest release of documents from Wikileaks, involving something on the order of 400,000 documents, Mr. Obama has largely been dumb, as in silent. Wikileaks has published nearly half a million documents of potential value to our enemies on and off the battlefield. It has done so in the middle of a war, despite pleadings that it not do so. We would not suggest that the administration ignore the abuses that might be disclosed in such documents. We only wonder whether Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Roosevelt would have taken the wholesale violation of our military secrets sitting down.