Thorough examination of landmark case convinces book's author that legitimate U.S. security interests were at stake, but he doesn't make the case

That is unfortunate, because if there was one lesson that seemed to be so clear after the dramatic confrontation between the press and government it was that the entire classification system was too arbitrary to be trusted, even in time of national turmoil and war.

David Rudenstine in a new book, "The Day the Presses Stopped," maintains, nevertheless, that the victories for the press and America's democratic principles were far greater and even more significant than originally thought.

Rudenstine's excellent book revisits this celebrated case during the year of its 25th anniversary. It was Sunday, June 13, 1971, when after agonizing internally for weeks, the New York Times published its first story from the massive "top secret, sensitive" Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that it had surreptitiously obtained from a disillusioned former government researcher named Daniel Ellsberg.

The author, a law professor at New York's Yeshiva University, traces in meticulous detail the chain of events that resulted, events that had the undivided attention of the press and legal establishments and, indeed, much of America for nearly a month. While this book focuses more on the intricacies of the legal battle that unfolded as the rights of a free press and national security collided, there is plenty of the behind-the-scenes drama involving the press as well.

In fact, as Rudenstine sets the stage during the first half of his book, he captures the intensity and excitement of the debate that raged at the highest echelons at the New York Times and the Washington Post, a debate that pitted editor against lawyer, required gut-wrenching decisions by publishers, and monopolized the conversations of press people everywhere. Included is a riveting account of the battle between the Times' in-house lawyer James Goodale and the paper's longtime law firm headed by Louis Loeb.

He intersperses those scenes with the internal machinations that went on in the Nixon White House and at the John Mitchell-led Justice Department. Together, they make fascinating, page-turning reading.

Rudenstine describes, for instance, how Nixon at first wasn't all that concerned when the Times began its series based on the sensitive classified documents. The president reasoned that the Pentagon history documented the mistakes made by former presidents Kennedy and Johnson, both Democrats and old political foes. So why should he care?

But then Rudenstine describes how Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's national security adviser, convinced the president to sue the Times, not by arguing the dangers it posed to the nation's security, but by telling him he would look like a weakling to his political opponents if he didn't go after the newspaper.

"The Day the Presses Stopped" is the latest of a number of volumes that have been written about the Pentagon Papers case and its impact on the law and the press. But Rudenstine was able to see and research documents, manuscripts and closed-door "in-camera" transcripts of testimony that other authors didn't have access to.

The new information helps Rudenstine piece together a compelling story on how the Justice Department fumbled its way as it tried to carry out Nixon's edict that it "get" the Times. He tells the story of how top Justice Department official Robert Mardian refused to allow the government witnesses - even behind closed doors - to give any specifics about the alleged security threats the nation would face if secrets from the Pentagon Papers were revealed.

The arrogance that Mardian and other prosecutors and the government witnesses exhibited led New York District Court Judge Murray Gurfein to dismiss the restraining order he had temporarily issued against the newspaper when the case was first brought before him, two days after the Times began publishing the reports.

Gurfein, who was considered a "safe" judge because he was a Nixon appointee, so startled the Justice Department that it changed its tactics midstream as the case bounced between the district and appeals courts in Washington and New York and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And then, when push came to shove as the high court agreed to resolve the dispute, the Nixon administration sent in a totally unprepared Erwin Griswold, the respected solicitor general, to lead arguments.

Somewhat surprisingly, Rudenstine writes that his research for the book changed his mind about the significance of the case. There was a time, he says, when he believed, as many still do, that the Pentagon Papers case had little to do with national security, but was the product of a paranoid government hoping to stifle the publication of potentially embarrassing and arbitrarily classified information.

"At the time and under the circumstances of the case I placed more trust in the Times than I did in the Nixon administration," he says.

He now feels that there were indeed secrets in the Pentagon Papers possessed by the Times and, a few days later, the Post (and in the end, other papers as well) that indeed had the potential to threaten important security interests. The government, by its bumbling, failed to make the case.

But the book doesn't support that conclusion. Rather, his own penetrating looks at how the judges in the beginning and the justices of the Supreme Court in the end reached their decisions strongly suggests that there was nothing in the classified papers that posed an immediate and grave danger to the security of the United States, despite their classification, that could meet the agreed upon test to warrant a prior restraint on the press.

Aside from a penchant to repeat himself and a somewhat annoying habit of speculating how figures in the case may have felt, there is little to fault this book. For those who lived through that exciting and depressing era, it's an excellent review with loads of new information. For those who didn't, it's a succinct and compelling history lesson in the law of the press.

Rudenstine finds that in the end - personalities, private agendas and political ambition aside - the system worked.

"By following the course it did, the court decided that the risks of favoring press freedoms were significantly less than those involved in making injunctive relief more readily available to the government. Or to put the matter slightly different, the Court decided to risk the dangers inherent in a freer press because the alternative resolution - enhancing government power to censor the press - was even more threatening to a stable and vital democracy," he writes.

Now if only we could get the government to understand the importance of openness.

Zweifel is editor of the Madison (Wis.) Capital Times.

The Day the Presses Stopped by David Rudenstine, $34.95, University of California Press, 1996, 426 pages