WATERVILLE -- Freedom of the press and national-security interests can sometimes clash.

Just ask journalist Philip Taubman.

He wrestled with one of the whoppers in this category as an editor with the New York Times.

On Sunday night at Colby College, he revealed why he and his newspaper colleagues chose to defy a president and publish a story that exposed a government-spying program that violated surveillance laws.

"It was the story I think sometimes," Taubman told a packed auditorium, "that started a thousand controversies."

Taubman's lecture, entitled "Treason or Patriotism? When the Press Publishes National Security Secrets," inaugurated the Lovejoy Journalists-in-Residence program at Colby.

That program will bring five esteemed journalists to the college over the next year to lecture, teach and meet informally with students on issues and concerns related to journalism.

Taubman made clear that decisions in journalism are not always clear-cut.

And certainly that was the case regarding a Bush administration program that permitted the National Security Agency to monitor the conversations of American citizens through wiretapping technologies.

Taubman said this program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, that requires a court order to conduct domestic wiretapping.

But government officials, he said, insisted that the program was justified in the interests of national security, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Treason or patriotism?

That was the debate at the New York Times, Taubman explained.

"I'm actually here to tell you," he said, "the events I lived through actually lived up to that description."

Taubman stressed that he and other decision makers at the Times gave painstaking consideration to both sides of the debate.

And despite the protests of the two reporters who uncovered the program, Taubman said the Times chose to hold the story for more than a year.

Taubman said the newspaper did so out of a genuine concern that exposing the illegal spying would compromise national security.

The Times also was influenced, he said, by the fact that many respected law-enforcement and political leaders at the national level supported the program.

And finally, he said, Times editors felt that more reporting was needed to gain a better grasp of the initiative.

That reporting effort took place and, by December 2005, Taubman and other top editors at the Times realized that holding the story was wrong.

The newspaper needed to reveal what its government was doing.

And the Times did so, he said, despite a meeting with President Bush in the Oval Office in which Bush made the case for continued silence.

Taubman was among the journalists who attended that meeting.

"We defied a direct personal appeal by the president of the United States when we published it," he said of the article.

The story earned the Times a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Colin Hickey -- 861-9205

chickey@centralmaine.com