Drama Behind the Docudrama ‘Top Secret’ : Radio: First Amendment issues are given a new relevance by the Gulf conflict in this play about the Pentagon Papers airing Thursday on KCRW.

For eight frustrating years, Leroy Aarons and Geoffrey Cowan had tried to get a theater company to mount a production of their docudrama, “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers.”

Several small troupes had expressed interest in the play, which re-enacts the 1971 clashes inside the Washington Post and the courts over the publication of the “top secret” Vietnam War documents. But none chose to produce it.

Then, the Persian Gulf War hit.

Suddenly, the two novice playwrights found themselves sitting at a long table in a rehearsal room last week in Santa Monica with a company of actors hastily brought together to do the play. And this time, it was no provincial troupe.

“Roy and I waited a long time for someone to do this play,” an elated Cowan told the group, which included Ed Asner, Marsha Mason, James Whitmore, Howard Hesseman, Ed Begley Jr., Robert Foxworth, Hector Elizondo, Nan Martin and Gerrit Graham. “But in all these years, we never dreamed we could have this kind of cast.”

Or, he added later, this kind of huge, potential audience.

“Top Secret” will be performed by this cast as a radio play, to be broadcast live Thursday night on KCRW-FM (89.9) and, via satellite, on public stations in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego and Nashville. Several other public-radio stations are planning to tape the live feed for later broadcast.

The program will begin at 8 p.m. on KCRW and will end with a discussion on press freedoms by a panel that will include at least two of the people depicted in the play, Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and reporter George Wilson.

The play grew out of Cowan’s role as an instructor in communications and mass media law at UCLA. “For many years I had been using the Pentagon Papers as a case study of the conflict between national security and the First Amendment,” Cowan, 48, said a few days after the rehearsal.

Cowan is also a lawyer and has long been involved in local politics. He was formerly the state chairman of Common Cause and in 1989 was appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to head a citizen’s panel that crafted a controversial code of ethics for city politicians.

“The case involving the Pentagon Papers was the only time the Supreme Court ever addressed the issue of national security and the press,” Cowan said. “The decision had an effect, later, on Watergate and Iran-Contra issues.”

The Pentagon Papers was a lengthy study, commissioned in 1966 by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. It contained several explosive revelations about lies and deceits that had been orchestrated for press and public consumption.

In 1971, the papers were leaked first to the New York Times and then to the Washington Post and other newspapers, which rushed excerpts into print. The government tried and ultimately failed to stop publication of more excerpts for reasons of national security.

Cowan’s interest in the Pentagon Papers case was not purely scholarly. He is also a producer--last year he oversaw a short-lived television revival of the “Quiz Kids” game show that his father, Louis Cowan, had created for radio.

“I thought the fight over the Pentagon Papers in the courts and the newspapers might make a great drama,” he said.

He obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, transcripts of closed hearings conducted in the case. To get the newspaper side of the drama, he contacted Aarons, whom he had met in the early 1970s when Aarons was the Washington Post bureau chief in Los Angeles.

“I knew most of the people involved and I was fascinated by the project,” said Aarons, 57, who left the Post in 1976 and later became senior vice president for news at the Oakland Tribune. He began doing research for Cowan.

Several reporters and editors were interviewed to get details on what had occured on June 17, 1971, the day the newspaper received the Pentagon Papers. The action mostly took place at Bradlee’s home, where three top reporters were installed in the den to pore through the 2-million-word document and prepare a story about it. In the meantime, a debate raged in the living room among top Post officials on whether to print the story. To do so, lawyers warned, meant possible criminal charges as serious as treason.

But by the time the project had reached the writing stage, in the spring of 1983, Aarons had grown discontented with just doing research. “I got so excited that I went to Geoff and said I would like to get involved in the writing,” he said.

Almost from the beginning, they decided to fictionalize part of the story in order to enhance the drama and make it more manageable. One character that they eventually cut out of the first act was a young copy aide who took notes on what happened in Bradlee’s house. It was Kitty Kelley, who went on to write highly revealing, best-selling biographies of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor. “She gave us her notes,” Cowan said, “and they were a help.”

Act II, which takes place during one court session, was actually drawn from several hearings.

“In the docudrama form, there are always things that are fictionalized,” said Cowan, who cited “Mississippi Burning,” “Inherit the Wind” and “Cry Freedom” as examples of dramas that partly fictionalized real-life events.

“Most of the theater people who read the first draft of the play urged that we do even less ‘docu’ and more drama,” Aarons said. Indeed, Aarons and Cowan wrote a second, highly fictionalized version of the play, complete with several romantic relationships between some of the characters.

That version, in which all the character names were fictionalized, got a reading at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West Los Angeles, a company that has put on several prestigious productions. But in the end, the group decided against staging it.

About a year ago, Cowan got a call from local theater producer Susan Loewenberg, who was researching landmark Bill of Rights court cases for a proposed series of radio and television plays. Cowan mentioned that he and Aarons had written “Top Secret” and she asked to see it.

“I really liked it and I said to him at the time that it might be more appropriate as a radio play than for the theater,” said Loewenberg, who had been producing radio plays for KCRW since 1987.

She kept “Top Secret” in mind for her proposed Bill of Rights series until about a month ago, when the air war against Iraq was raging. “Like a lot of people, I was wondering how much truth there was to what the government was telling us through the press,” she said. “That’s when I thought of the play.”

Cowan and Aarons quickly agreed to let her do the play for no fee and Loewenberg rounded up some of her regular group of actors, who work for the Equity minimum reading fee of $25. Broadway veteran Tom Moore, who regularly directs episodes of “L.A. Law,” agreed to direct.

“It all happened so quickly,” Aarons said, shaking his head.

Aarons has a reputation in the journalism business for being a tough, highly opinionated editor. But when the first rehearsal was over, he was uncharacteristically subdued. He sat alone at the table, watching the actors leave.

“I am kind of dazzled by all this,” he said, “so I don’t think my critical faculties are at their strongest. Just the fact that the play is going to be done and by this group is a little hard to take all in.

“This is the group that’s got what it takes to make this play, and that time in history, come alive.”