“I WENT BALLISTIC,” Carol Cummings later said of her reaction to hearing about her ex-husband’s night work. “I privately felt that he must have had a psychotic break.”
She picked up the phone and called Ellsberg.
“I need to talk to you right away about these documents.”
“Don’t do it on the phone.”
“Well, I need to talk to you,” she said. “This is very serious.”
They agreed to meet at a Chinese restaurant. They’d been getting along better since Ellsberg returned from Vietnam. “This tore it,” he lamented.
At dinner he tried to explain what he and Robert were doing, and why.
“Listen, I don’t know what you’re copying,” she interrupted. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear about it.” She was against the war too; that wasn’t the point. The point, she insisted, was simple: “You do not take children along to commit felonies.”
Ellsberg said he wouldn’t involve Robert again. Carol felt slightly reassured. She could see that he was determined and, in her view, reckless. But clearly not out of his mind.
After dinner, Ellsberg drove to Rand and got another batch of documents from his safe.
* * *
A week later, on October 15, Richard Nixon sat in the White House watching football on television while thousands of protestors circled the building.
October 15, 1969. Demonstrators circle the White House at the end of a nationwide day of protests against the war in Vietnam.
“Don’t get rattled,” Nixon jotted on a notepad. “Don’t waver—don’t react.”
After a brief lull at the start of Nixon’s presidency, the war protests had been growing lately. This was the biggest one yet. In cities and towns all over the country, more than two million people gathered for marches and demonstrations. Church bells tolled for the dead, over forty thousand and counting.
The note on his pad notwithstanding, Nixon was rattled.
At that very moment, down the hall, speechwriters were working on the speech the president would read to announce Operation Duck Hook, the “savage blow” he and Kissinger hoped would shove North Vietnam into making some concessions. But Nixon was having second thoughts.
“I knew that after all the protests,” he later wrote, “American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war.”
Duck Hook was shelved—for the time being. The protestors had no idea what a major impact they’d had.
* * *
In Los Angeles, Ellsberg was invited to speak on a local television show. He took Robert and Mary along to watch. On the way home, he stopped at Lynda Sinay’s office. He told Mary that he and Robert were going to run inside to pick up some papers, but that she should wait in the car. She said she didn’t want to sit there alone. All three went inside.
Ellsberg had intended to just grab copies he’d made earlier, but since they were there he decided to get a little work done. Remembering the promise to his wife, he asked Mary to sit on a couch in a room away from the copy machine. As before, he cut while Robert worked the Xerox—Robert was already involved anyway, Ellsberg figured.
Mary got bored.
“It was obvious that something secret was going on,” she later said. “I knew it had to do with ending the war and that it was dangerous.”
She got up from the couch and went to see what her brother and father were doing. Ellsberg gave her a pair of scissors. They sat on the floor together, cutting “Top Secret” stamps off the copies.
“I asked her that night not to tell her mother what we had done,” Ellsberg recalled. Only in retrospect would he realize how unfair it was to Mary to put her in the middle of a dispute between her parents.
The copying continued through October. Russo, who helped out many nights, devised the time-saving innovation of taping two strips of cardboard to the glass of the Xerox machine. When they laid a sheet of the study on the glass, the cardboard covered the “Top Secret” stamps, but not the text on the page.
“Instant declassification,” Ellsberg joked.
* * *
On November 2, Ellsberg peaked out the window of his Malibu beach house, looking toward the road. He was waiting for a cab. He was waiting for Patricia Marx.
They had continued talking by phone since her visit earlier in the year. He wanted them to give it another try, and she had agreed to fly out from New York City for a weeklong visit. She’d be at his place any minute.
The phone rang. An important antiwar organizer introduced himself and asked Ellsberg to fly to Washington, D.C., right away for a strategy meeting. Ellsberg had the phone to his ear, listening, when Patricia knocked. He opened the door and gestured for her to come in.
He watched Patricia carry her bag into his house. He told the guy on the phone he’d come, and hung up.
“It was a touchy situation,” he recalled. “This was to have been the longest Patricia and I had been together in three years.”
But he didn’t want to miss the meeting in D.C. And the trip would give him an opportunity to take his next step—to tell Senator William Fulbright about McNamara’s secret study, and offer him a copy.
He told Patricia he had to fly to Washington. It felt a little like when he’d left suddenly for Vietnam. Only this time, he asked her to come. She never even unpacked.
Something about Ellsberg had changed, Marx sensed. “He had the same dedication, but it was infused with a compassion, and a humanity,” she later said. “And we were able to love each other then.”
In the morning they drove to the airport. The first thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers were hidden under the clothes in Ellsberg’s suitcase.
* * *
That evening, hoping to counter the massive protests of October 15, President Nixon spoke to the nation about the war in Vietnam.
“Let us all understand that the question before us is not whether some Americans are for peace and some are against peace,” he said. “The great question is: How can we win America’s peace?”
He reviewed the attempts he’d made to negotiate with North Vietnam, and blamed the North for the continuation of the war. His strategy from this point on, he said, would be to gradually turn over the fighting to South Vietnam—a policy he called Vietnamization. There was no timetable for American withdrawal. That, he said, would depend upon progress on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
“And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support,” he concluded. “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”
Nixon was thrilled by the public’s positive response. His approval rating rose. “I had the public support I needed,” he later explained, “to continue a policy of waging war in Vietnam and negotiating for peace in Paris until we could bring the war to an honorable and successful conclusion.”
The Vietnam War would go on.
* * *
A briefcase in each hand, Ellsberg walked into Senator Fulbright’s office and sat on the sofa. The curtains were drawn, the large space lit dimly by lamps.
The senator and a top aide, Norvil Jones, listened to Ellsberg describe what he had in the briefcases and why he thought the papers should be made public. He spoke quickly, gesturing with his hands. “He was articulate,” recalled Jones, “but nervous.”
Fulbright was immediately intrigued. By this time he knew he’d been lied to about the Tonkin Gulf incident, and probably a lot of other things. He told Ellsberg to give the material to Jones. They’d read it right away, the senator said, and set up a public hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—a dramatic setting in which to unveil the Pentagon Papers to the American people.
Jones led the way to his office, and Ellsberg opened his briefcases and stacked the papers on the desk. Jones locked them in his office safe.
Before heading home, Ellsberg told Patricia Marx about the Pentagon Papers. She was worried about the risk he was taking, but supported his decision to expose the study.
“Now we were agreeing totally,” she later said of their views on Vietnam.
Back in California, on the beach in Malibu, he proposed to her for a third time. She told him she needed some time to think about it. “She still wasn’t sure I was so reliable,” Ellsberg recalled. In early 1970, she said yes.
When Marx told her father, he warned her about the man she’d chosen. “He’s a troublemaker,” Louis Marx told his daughter.
But she already knew that.