Berger phoned the paper's Washington bureau, then its New York office, on April 8, the night before the story was scheduled to run. Martin Baron, associate managing editor, took Berger's second call and consulted Adam Clymer, second in command at the Washington bureau, as well as foreign editor Andrew Rosenthal and managing editor Bill Keller in New York. Keller delivered the go-ahead. This wasn't a security argument. How much weight to give a high-level government request to hold back or kill a story is always a tricky question.
Journalists tend to resist government interference.
To Clymer, the editor in charge of the Pol Pot piece, the story had significant news value. We didn't know what impact the story would have. But we're not in charge of keeping the administration's secrets. But the senior administration official interviewed by cjr argues that the Times ought to have given more consideration to the story's impact. The mere possibility that the story may have contributed to the outcome makes it a case study.