So this is dubiously canon but it is something that went through Lucas' mind, and also I like to challenge the monolith narratives of the EU and current canon.
So basically, Lucas and his secretary Carol Titelman wrote an entire 30 page notebook of backstory and lore details for the main characters during the weeks immediately after the release of the original movie. This includes a LOT of backstory details for Leia, as well as an explanation of the events leading up to the movie that dovetails shockingly well with what eventually ended up in Rogue One. But tantalizingly for our purposes, here's the entry on the destruction of Alderaan:
So first of all yes, younger brothers. Odd that never came up later (I think it might be a holdover from the Princess Leia in the original rough draft). Second of all, the intriguing notion that Bail just was running around doing so much that the two of them had barely managed to make contact outside of the plan itself.
I wanna also mention that the finished film has context clues suggesting that Bail was not mourning Leia but taking actual proactive steps.
First of all, that "senate" they informed? Also gets dissolved like Russian parliament, presumably at the same session. And by the description we get, those are probably a whole lot of bureaucratic bootlickers that the "Oops the Tantive just kind of exploded and everybody is dead now, sorry" is meant to satiate.
Bail is not one of those. He's one of the reasons the Senate got dissolved, so that the people that actually ask questions have one less place to get in the way. He's also not an idiot.
"Gosh, my daughter is sent on a retrieval mission to an Imperial black site and suddenly her ship turns up destroyed?"
But they wouldn't just do that. He knows she was being pursued, he knows that it was by Imperials, and he knows that this cover story probably means one thing; she's a prisoner.
And considering the original film doesn't do anything to suggest that the white-helmeted guards aren't just the Alderaan royal guard, I think we're supposed to believe that Bail was trying to get ahead of it all. Whether or not you believe he went back to Alderaan (the revised version of Ryder Windham's novelization also suggests this narrative; that his first reaction to hearing the cover story was to go rally the Alderaanians to war), I think you can reasonably assume he was going to try and mount a rescue mission before the (absolutely inexplicable) destruction of Alderaan happens.
I also have the evidence from the actual shooting script:
Not "When we heard about your ship", Alderaan.
So yeah, my point about this is basically A. Bail in his original conception is probably meant to be a badass political maneuverer and where Leia gets her stonefacedness, I fail to believe he would just take a bullshit cover story at face value B. the politics were there from the beginning and Andor has probably done the best job since this first movie of actually making it dramatic (as opposed to, you know, just not bothering)
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