By Robert Simonson
10 Mar 2010

That might have been the end of it. But in 2007 and 2008, the script was revived and adapted for the stage. It toured 25 cities, playing many college campuses, including Stanford, UC Davis and University of Arkansas, where Cowan found the story still resonated with students. "What I think students find is a combination of learning about history and also getting an impression of the world they're living in — issues of war and peace and the role of the press and the government lying to us and who do you trust."

Affinity's John Dias saw the play in Philadelphia and encouraged Cowan to bring it to New York. The New York Theatre Workshop production, directed by John Rubinstein, features a top flight case including Larry Pine as Nixon, Peter Strauss as Bradlee, Kathryn Meisle as Graham and Larry Bryggman as attorney general John Mitchell.

When Cowan adapted it for the stage, he made publisher Graham the narrator. "In a certain way, it's her story," he explained. "This was the pivotal moment in her life. The paper was run by her father, and then went in the hands of her husband Philip Graham, who committed suicide in 1963. But after that she relied on other people, even though she was the publisher. She had other people run the paper. The Pentagon Papers becomes a pivotal moment in her professional career, in the career of the Washington Post. It made all the Watergate coverage possible. She decided to publish, even though her entire family enterprise is at risk, and she could be charged for espionage, and could lose her television license. Everything was at stake, but she published them anyway."

Though the Death of the Newspaper has been the talk of the media world for years now, Cowan does not see this heroic episode from the early 1970s as a dusty-covered history lesson. "Part of what people feel when they see the play is they long for something," he said. "They think 'Oh my God, this is what the press can be.' Even though we live in an era in which so much has changed, there are still newspapers and they continue to have a vital function and people seem to still relate to it."