Politics & Power Quote by Floyd Abrams

Abrams is doing something lawyers rarely do in public: ranking history without pretending it is neutral. By calling the Pentagon Papers case "probably the most important", he isn’t just praising a Supreme Court win; he’s staking out a theory of American power. The sentence is built like a deposition - clauses stacked, dates pinned, facts nailed down - and that is the point. Precision becomes persuasion. If you can make the episode sound procedural, you make the government’s attempted censorship sound even more aberrant.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of executive reflex. Abrams frames the state not as a guardian of security but as an actor trying to "block" two newspapers from publishing a "secret study" about how the country slid into Vietnam. That phrasing turns the Papers from stolen goods into a kind of overdue receipt. It suggests the real scandal wasn’t the leak; it was the mismatch between public narrative and internal record.

Context matters: 1971 sits at the hinge of trust, when Vietnam had already corroded the credibility of official statements, and the courts had to decide whether "national security" was a trump card or a claim that needed proof. Abrams’s intent is to remind you that prior restraint isn’t an abstract First Amendment puzzle; it’s the moment when democracy either tolerates embarrassment or sanctifies secrecy. His understated delivery - "I would say", "probably" - reads less like hedging than like a veteran’s warning: the machinery of suppression always arrives wearing the badge of necessity.