The government understands – every government, every administration, both parties, understands – that that power, they just don’t have.

It is within the last quarter century or thirty years. And a lot of that law has turned out to be very, very protective of the press and the public’s right to know.

I just had the sense that at least the books that I had read about law just didn’t really have enough of that.

If the word gets out, if the perception exists that by speaking to a CBS journalist you are, therefore, inevitably, immediately speaking to the police, I don’t think there’s any doubt but that people won’t talk. And, therefore, the public won’t learn.

I really believe that a lawyer – no matter how good – if he or she is really worth their weight in salt, they will lose some cases because, after all, it is not really one of those secretive things that not everything is decided by who your lawyer is.

It’s not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.

I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 – in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam – that is probably the most important case.

The government understands - every government, every administration, both parties, understands - that that power, they just don't have.

I thought I could do that by telling stories of some of the cases that established those principles on a real life on the ground basis.

I really do think that if we had lost that case we would really live in a country that would be really quite different.