Fourth Place Winner of Constantine Cannon’s Whistleblower Essay Contest: Grace Chisholm

The Constantine Cannon whistleblower team is pleased to share with you the Fourth-Place Winner of the firm’s Third Law School Scholarship Essay Contest on the importance of whistleblowers. That award (and the $300 prize) goes to Grace Chisholm, a first-year student at Yale Law School.

In her essay, Grace narrates the role of whistleblowers in shaping American press freedom, focusing on Gar Alperovitz’s courageous actions to facilitate the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Alperovitz is known for distributing classified documents to major newspapers, which exposed government deception about the Vietnam War. Grace discusses how Alperovitz and his team, the “Lavender Hill Mob,” inspired her in how they risked imprisonment to share the truth, ultimately leading to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that solidified the press’s right to criticize the government.

As Grace writes: “Whistleblowers like Alperovitz and Ellsberg demonstrate that even in the face of powerful opponents, individuals can make a meaningful difference for democracy, health, and safety through courage and wit …, propelling us closer to justice.”

We applaud Grace for her deep insights on whistleblowers and the critical role they play in speaking truth to power. And we congratulate Grace for her Fourth-Place finish in this year’s contest, which had scores of entries from dozens of law schools across the country. Please read Grace’s full essay below.

We will be posting the remaining winning essays over the next week. And please check back with us soon as we launch our next Scholarship Essay Contest in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you’re not already a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, please sign up today so you stay up to date on the latest whistleblower and fraud news and developments.

The Importance of Whistleblowers

By Grace Chisholm

While taking a course on free speech during my sophomore spring of college, I met Gar Alperovitz, the architect behind the strategy to release portions of the Pentagon Papers to multiple news outlets in 1971. Using his code name, “Mr. Boston,” Alperovitz called major publications like The Boston Globe, the St. Louis Dispatch, and the Los Angeles Times and offered them a set of the papers Daniel Ellsberg had stolen two years earlier. He worked with a group of runners, which included Harvard undergrad and graduate students, to deliver the documents to journalists at houses, hotels, and even Boston Logan International Airport. As I sat at my minuscule desk in Georgetown’s Maguire Hall, chatting casually with a man whose quick thinking had impacted the course of American press freedom, I was in awe.

The publication of the Pentagon Papers revealed that the executive branch had systematically lied to the public and Congress about the extent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam across several presidential administrations. Ellsberg, Alperovitz, and the rest of the “Lavender Hill Mob” (the chosen name of the full group of co-conspirators) risked years in prison to share the truth with Americans and end unnecessary deaths in Vietnam. Alperovitz’s plan to release the 7,000-page trove of documents in sections drew maximum attention to the story throughout June 1971 and proved critical to The New York Times’s triumph over the Nixon Administration in the Supreme Court later that month.

The fact that many newspapers had published some of the documents vitally undercut the government’s argument that widespread access to them would harm national security; the information was already widely accessible. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling, which reaffirmed the high bar for prior restraint, solidified the critical role of the press in criticizing the government and reporting on abuses of power. It also emboldened everyday journalists to dig deeper into the words and work of the authorities. “[The Pentagon Papers] established the understanding you could publish anything you could lay your hands on, and no one could stop you,”1 said Marcus Brauchli, former executive editor of The Washington Post and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Alperovitz’s actions ultimately helped establish a legal precedent that protected the media (often whistleblowers’ very mouthpiece) against intrusions by the government. Yet, he could not have known this outcome ahead of time. In fact, he chose to release the papers without thinking it through. “I’m a very cautious person,” he said. “But I didn’t blink.”2 He joined Ellsberg’s efforts because he felt a moral imperative to attempt to prevent more deaths in the war. In so doing, Alperovitz embodied the very best of whistleblowing: he took a stand, at great personal risk, to protect other people from harm. Whistleblowers like Alperovitz and Ellsberg demonstrate that even in the face of powerful opponents, individuals can make a meaningful difference for democracy, health, and safety through courage and wit. Their sacrifices spark policy debate, inspire legislative reform, and demand accountability, propelling us closer to justice.

1 Dana Priest, “Did the Pentagon Papers matter?” Columbia Journalism Review, June 2, 2016, available at: https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/did_the_pentagon_papers_matter.php.
2 Eric Lichtblau, “The Untold Story of the Pentagon Papers Co-Conspirators,” The New York Post, January 29, 2018, available at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-untold-story-of-the-pentagon-papers-co- conspirators.