19-05-2025
When The Journal-News, during Watergate, offered a 'few words' about the role of the press
The Republican president was furious with the press, attacking journalists by name for casting his administration in an unfavorable light. Sound familiar?
This particular president, though, was Richard M. Nixon, who had three journalists on his "enemies list," targeting them with IRS audits and worse, according to a 1970 memo from White House Counsel John Dean on "how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration."
Or, Dean wrote: "Stated a bit more bluntly, how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
That was years before the Watergate break-in, the act of political subterfuge that would consume the divided nation and lead to Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
In the midst of that scandal, on March 13, 1973 — the day the initial Watergate burglary trial began — the Journal-News in Rockland County and its sister papers across Westchester published a full-page, full-throated defense of the press.
Under the headline, "Time to say a few words about the press," the text came from Franklin and Lincoln and Washington and from the judge in the Pentagon Papers case, among others. Their words were surrounded by pen-and-ink portraits, painstakingly rendered by the paper's resident artist, Frank Becerra.
Frank Becerra was a fixture at the papers for 38 years and his sons, photographer Frank Jr. (still on staff) and graphic artist Billy, followed him into the business. His art ranged from political and sports cartoons to courtroom sketches. He was a calm presence in the middle of a daily-newspaper storm, a gentleman as polite as he was generous.
Frank retired from the Gannett newspapers in 1992 and settled into life doting on his wife, Isabel, and the family they made: six children and nine grandchildren at the time of Frank's death on May 25, 2009.
Here's the full text of the illustration, which was reprinted repeatedly in the paper in the years to follow.
"Let the people know the facts and the country will be free." Abe Lincoln
"The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson
"In the First Amendment the founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people." Justice Hugo Black
"... the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter." George Washington
"A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right men prize." Winston Churchill
"The security of a nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." Judge Murray Gurfein, in the Pentagon Papers ruling
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all other liberties." John Milton
"That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory." Henry Ward Beecher
"All I know is what I read in the papers." Will Rogers
"Given a free press, we may defy open or insidious enemies of liberty." Daniel Webster
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of the press." Ben Franklin
"Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." Napoleon I
Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: When the NY Journal-News defended the press during Watergate in 1973
