The proposed legislation would make it a crime to reveal any classified information, however wisely or unwisely classified, military or non-military, true or false.

It would prevent publication of information in government offices about a war we fought 30 years ago, and 75 million pages, still classified, about the Korean War.

It would prevent publication of a classified White House "Talking Paper," instructing a presidential assistant to "put someone on The Washington Post to needle Kay Graham...set up calls or letters every day from the viewpoint of 'I hate Nixon but you're hurting our cause in being so childish, ridiculous and overboard in your constant criticism.'"

In short, it would prevent publication of any information which the government did not want published. This is the goal and practice of dictatorships, not democracies.

Ironically, five days before this official secrets act was introduced in Congress, Patrick J. Buchanan, special assistant to President Nixon, told 2.5 million people watching the Dick Cavett show: "Never in the history of the United States has there been a greater exercise of freedom of the press."

It is neither paranoid nor shrill, nor even defensive, to suggest that this proposed legislation is inconsistent with "great exercise of freedom of the press."

In the last 30 months, The Washington Post has been involved--to understate it--in the three great First Amendment fights of our time: the publication, followed by the injunction against publication, of the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971; the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of the Watergate matter and its endless sequels, from July 1972 to date; and the full-scale campaign by the Committee for the Reelection of the President later by then Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to subpoena "all documents, papers, letters, photographs, audio and visual tapes" and "all manuscripts, notes, tape recordings of communication," and "all drafts, copies and final drafts of stories, columns and/or reports" and "all writings and other forms of record, including drafts, reflecting or related to direct or indirect communications."

To understand The Post's role and its motives in the three great First Amendment issues of our day, it is essential to understand the adversary relationship between newspapers and government, generally, and the adversary relationship between this newspaper and this government in particular.

Newspapers exist to serve the interests of the governed, not the governors, in the words of Justice Hugo Black. It is the conflict of these interests that produces the adversary relationship that is one of the hallmarks and strengths of a democracy. The first distinctive example of the adversary relationship between the Nixon administration and The Washington Post came during the litigation on the Pentagon Papers. It came from Richard Kleindienst, then Deputy Attorney General to Kenneth Clawson, then a reporter for the Post, now a leader in President Nixon's White House attack group. The occasion was a bit of social drinking at Kleindienst's house after an evening of culture at Wolf Trap Farm.

Did Mrs. Graham fully understand, Kleindienst wanted to know from Clawson, the law involving ownership of television stations? Specifically, the law that prevented convicted felons from owning broadcast properties? If we persisted in publishing the Pentagon Papers, the deputy attorney general went on, and if we refused to turn them over to the Justice Department, we were laying ourselves wide open to criminal prosecution (as distinct from the civil suit then in progress to prevent us from publishing the papers) under the Espionage Act.

He personally was in favor of prosecuting The Post, he continued, and conviction would force us to get rid of our broadcast properties. This conversation was duly reported to the editors by Clawson, and it sounded then--as now--a little like blackmail.

The next hints were anonymous, but plentiful...reports from friends to take it easy; "they" were out to get us. Then, a "high White House official" was quoted in Time magazine to the effect that "the name of the game (in the White House) is who can screw the Post the most." (A "high Time official" later identified to me the White House source of this vulgar little gem as Mr. William Safire, then a special assistant to President Nixon, now a columnist for The New York Times.)

In November 1972, President Nixon gave an exclusive interview to The Washington Post's competition, The Washington Star-News--an interview which contained not a single word about either Watergate or the war in Vietnam, incidentally. The interview was privately but pointedly advertised as "punishment" of The Post.

In December 1972, the White House put up an extraordinary, if petty, barrier against The Post and its exercise of freedom of the press. For 28 days a Post reporter was banned from covering all White House social functions. If the action was extraordinary, the target was more so. Dorothy McCardle, the widow of a journalist who served as assistant secretary of state under John Foster Dulles, had been a journalist for 48 of her 67 years in Philadelphia and Washington. In all that time, she had been universally loved for her kindness and admired for her ability. Her exile could be interpreted only as government interference and punishment.

Thus concretized on the public record lies the documentation of a systematic, covert corruption of the free reporting that is essential to freedom of the press. If the mind could any longer be boggled, surely this picture of a government plotting in secret to "tear down the institution," "to pound the magazines and the networks," to threaten the media with anti-trust prosecutions and IRS investigations to "change their views," to "plant" columns, to "generate...(and even write) a massive outpouring of letters" where no public impulse to do so existed, to "needle" a publisher, to "pester" a newspaper, to threaten networks with legislation abridging their freedom, to think of firing or discrediting a journalist, surely such cheap and undemocratic actions must boggle the most cynical mind.