ON THE MORNING of September 30, 1969, the phone in Tony Russo’s apartment began ringing. He lifted the receiver, said hello.
“I want to come over and talk to you about what we’ve been discussing,” said the man on the other end. “I’ve made a decision.”
Russo recognized the voice of Daniel Ellsberg. He knew exactly what Ellsberg was referring to. It was not a subject to discuss over the phone.
Thirty-two, with shaggy sideburns and frizzy hair to his shoulders, Tony Russo did not look much like an establishment insider. And he wasn’t, not anymore. Until the beginning of 1969, Russo had been an analyst at Rand, with an office across the hall from Ellsberg’s. The two had had long talks about Vietnam. Russo was the more outspoken war critic, and it had gotten him fired. His boss cited “budgetary problems” for the dismissal, but the reality was that Rand often worked directly for the Pentagon, and Rand bosses were reluctant to offend their employers.
Anthony Russo
“I wasn’t sorry to leave,” Russo later said of his abrupt exit. Like Ellsberg, he’d set out to change government policy from within. Like Ellsberg, he was ready to try another approach. They had remained friends, talking over dinner and on walks on the beach. During one conversation, Ellsberg had mentioned the McNamara study he had in his safe.
“Dan,” Russo said, “you should leak that to the press.”
Ellsberg had not seemed ready to make that leap.
Now there was a knock on the door. Russo let Ellsberg in.
“You know the study I told you about a couple of weeks ago?” Ellsberg began. “I’m going to put it out.”
“Great!” Russo said. “Let’s do it.”
The document was enormous, Ellsberg explained. It would take time to make photocopies, and the work obviously couldn’t be done in a public copy shop.
“Can you get ahold of a Xerox machine?” he asked.
Russo smiled. “I’ve got the very place.”
* * *
The next day, like every day, security guards checked the ID badges of everyone coming and going from Rand headquarters. Guards with binoculars kept watch from the roof. Just a block to the west, waves crashed on the wide, sandy beach beside the Santa Monica pier.
Inside, Ellsberg sat in his office, waiting for his co-workers to leave.
After dark, when the surrounding offices were empty, he opened his safe. He looked over the thick blue binders, each stamped “Top Secret.” It was far too much material to take out unnoticed. He fit what he could into his leather briefcase and walked into the hall.
When he got to the downstairs lobby, he saw two guards at the security desk in front of the glass doors to the parking lot. The guards did not normally check employees’ briefcases. But they did sometimes.
Ellsberg walked toward the guards. The lobby was decorated with World War II posters reminding citizens of the importance of secrecy in times of war.
“Loose Lips Sink Ships,” warned one.
“What You See Here, What You Say Here, Let It Be Here, Let It Stay Here.”
With his free hand, Ellsberg waved to the guards and he walked past.
“Good night, Dan,” they both said.
* * *
Ellsberg parked outside Russo’s apartment building. Inside, Russo introduced Ellsberg to Lynda Sinay, a woman in her twenties. Sinay, who was Russo’s girlfriend, explained that she ran a small advertising agency. She had a Xerox machine they could use after business hours.
“I wanted to help,” she would later say. “I never imagined the consequences would be so grave.”
They drove together to Sinay’s office, which was on the second floor of a small building, above a flower shop. She unlocked the office door and showed Russo and Ellsberg which key to use to disarm her burglar alarm, confessing with a laugh she could never remember if you were supposed to turn the key to the left or the right.
Sinay gave the men a quick tour, then showed them the large Xerox machine next to the reception area. Ellsberg pulled out one of the blue binders and opened the metal tabs holding the pages. He set the first sheet facedown on the glass and pressed “Copy.” The machine’s bright green light flashed in his eyes.
Photocopy machines were a lot slower in 1969—each sheet had to be set on the glass by hand, and it took several seconds to copy a single page. Ellsberg had wanted to make four copies of each page, but quickly realized this would take forever. He decided to settle for two. He worked the machine and Russo carried the copies to Sinay’s desk, where he collated the pages into neat stacks.
A loud knock on the glass door broke Ellsberg’s focus.
He looked up. Two policemen stood outside the office door. One held the nightstick he’d just used to rap the glass.
Trying to make it look casual, Ellsberg dropped a blank piece of paper over the “Top Secret” stamps on the page he’d been about to copy. He went to the door.
“What’s the problem, officers?” Ellsberg asked.
“Your alarm has gone off.”
“Lynda, there are some people here to see you!” Ellsberg called out, hoping this would alert Russo in time.
The police walked into Sinay’s office. Ellsberg followed. He shot a glance at Russo’s stacks of papers. They were covered.
“Hi, Lynda,” one of the officers said. “You’ve done it again, huh?”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m hopeless with that damned key.”
“Oh, no problem,” the policeman said. “You’ve got to get a lesson on that thing.”
“I will, I will.”
The cops waved, and left. Ellsberg and Russo looked at each other. Then they got back to work.
* * *
Russo and Sinay headed home after midnight. Ellsberg worked until dawn.
At five thirty in the morning, he carefully put the originals back in the binders, and carried everything out to his car. He was eager to get the study back into his safe, but he couldn’t go yet—he never showed up at Rand this early. It would look unusual to the guards. So he went to a restaurant and lingered over breakfast.
At eight o’clock, he strolled through the Rand lobby and up to his office. He locked the binders in his safe and drove home. It was a gorgeous morning, with clear blue skies. Too keyed up to sleep, Ellsberg pulled on his bathing suit, ran down the beach, and dove into the surf. He let a powerful wave lift and carry him toward shore, then swam back out.
Bodysurfing in the Pacific was one of his absolute favorite things on earth. How many more times would he get to do it?
“In a month or so I might be behind bars,” he told himself, “probably for the rest of my life.”
* * *
Three days later, Daniel Ellsberg and his son Robert carried plates of barbequed chicken to an outdoor picnic table. This roadside restaurant had been a favorite of theirs for years. But today they were not there for fun.
Ellsberg had spent the last three nights at the copy machine at Sinay’s office, and knew he had weeks of sleepless nights ahead. He had been trying not to dwell on the likely consequences of what he was doing, but was tormented by the image of his children coming to visit him in prison. “Within a couple of weeks I would lose the chance to talk to my children face-to-face, ever again, except through glass,” he worried. “They would read right away, and hear on television, that their father was a traitor.”
Mary was just ten, maybe too young to understand, Ellsberg thought. But Robert was nearly fourteen, and the thought of the boy being sent to this never-ending war in Vietnam was one of Ellsberg’s main motivations. He wanted his son to know what he was doing, and why. Over lunch, he told Robert about the McNamara study, and what it revealed. He explained why he looked so tired.
Robert did not seem shocked. At his father’s suggestion, he’d been reading Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” and about the life of Gandhi, the leader of India’s nonviolent independence movement. He agreed that there were times when a person seeking justice might need to take action that could land him in jail.
Ellsberg asked his son if he’d like to help photocopy the Pentagon Papers.
Robert said yes. “I had a sense,” he later said, “of being included in something very secret and important.”
* * *
They drove to Sinay’s office. Lynda was there, working at her desk, but the rest of the staff was off for the weekend. Ellsberg showed Robert the system he’d worked out: after each copy was made, the “Top Secret” stamps at the top and bottom of the page had to be cut off with scissors. Then the shortened sheet was copied again, producing a full-sized page with blank white space where the “Top Secret” stamps had been. It was a tedious process, but Ellsberg wasn’t sure what he was going to do with this report, or how long he’d be carrying it around. The clean copies would be safer to handle.
Robert made the copies. Ellsberg sat on the floor, cutting off the tops and bottoms of the pages.
The police knocked on the door. Three of them this time. Robert let them in.
“Your alarm’s gone off again,” one of the cops told Ellsberg.
“Sorry,” he said from his spot on the floor, surrounded by thin strips of paper stamped “Top Secret.” “I’ve got to figure out how to do that.”
The police looked around. A woman at a desk, a man on the floor with scissors, a teenage kid at a Xerox machine. Some kind of family craft project?
“Okay,” one of the cops said on his way out, “be more careful.”
Ellsberg dropped his son off at home later that evening.
“I learned how to work a Xerox today,” Robert announced to his mother.
“Oh, did you, dear? That’s nice.”
“Yes,” he said. “Daddy was copying all these top secret documents.”