ON AUGUST 8, 1970, at the home of her brother in the New York City suburbs, Patricia Marx married Daniel Ellsberg. After the ceremony, the newlyweds climbed into a helicopter and flew to the city for the night. The next day they headed to Hawaii for their honeymoon.
Whatever would happen from this point on, they were in it together.
Back home in California a few weeks later, Ellsberg arranged a meeting with Henry Kissinger at Nixon’s beachfront home in San Clemente. As Ellsberg pulled up to the tall gate surrounding the estate, a voice from a speaker atop the guardhouse directed him to a parking spot. He was then led to a small waiting area that reminded him of a dentist’s reception room. The president smiled down at him from large color photos on the walls. He sat for a long time.
August 8, 1970: Daniel and Patricia after their wedding ceremony, about to leave by helicopter for their honeymoon.
When the meeting finally began, Kissinger immediately started lecturing about tensions in the Middle East. “I’m afraid that that situation may blow up,” he said.
Ellsberg cut in. He’d come to talk about Vietnam. “I think that may blow up.”
Kissinger drummed his fingers on the table. “I do not want to discuss our policy,” he told Ellsberg. “Let us turn to another subject.”
For Ellsberg, there was no other subject. Hoping there was still some way to influence the White House’s Vietnam policy, Ellsberg asked Kissinger if he’d heard about the secret McNamara study.
Yes, Kissinger said, he knew of it.
“Have you read it?” asked Ellsberg.
“No, should I?”
“I very strongly think that you should.”
“But do we really have anything to learn from this study?” Kissinger asked.
Ellsberg felt his heart sink. Were Nixon and Kissinger really unwilling to learn from the failure of four presidents before them?
“Well, I certainly do think so,” Ellsberg continued. “It is twenty years of history and there’s a great deal to be learned from it.”
“But after all,” Kissinger said, “we make decisions very differently now.”
“Cambodia didn’t seem all that different.”
Kissinger shifted in his chair. “You must understand,” he said, “Cambodia was undertaken for very complicated reasons.”
Too gloomy to guard his words, Ellsberg shot back, “Henry, there hasn’t been a rotten decision in this area for twenty years which wasn’t undertaken for very complicated reasons.”
As he drove home, Ellsberg knew he had just burned his bridges to the president’s inner circle. “That wasn’t the way you talked to a high official,” he later said, “if you wanted to get another visit to his office.”
* * *
Dan and Patricia moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Ellsberg’s new job at MIT. They still wondered when the FBI was going to come calling. In fact, the investigation had cooled. Agents suspected Carol Cummings’s stepmother’s accusations were true, but could find no solid evidence.
The Ellsbergs furnished their new living room with a white couch and wicker chairs with colorful cushions. They stacked boxes of records by the stereo, and hung photos from their travels on the walls. Ellsberg set up his typewriter on a table and, much to the irritation of downstairs neighbors, pounded away late into the night.
He was supposed to be working on a book about Vietnam, but was far more focused on figuring out what to do with the Pentagon Papers. Senator Fulbright was still refusing to give him a straight answer. It was not a good sign, Ellsberg figured, that Norvil Jones was urging Ellsberg to find some other way to make the papers public.
Back in Washington in January 1971, Ellsberg had better luck with Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. McGovern, an outspoken war opponent, told Ellsberg he’d be willing to go public with the study.
“I want to do it,” McGovern said. “I will do it.” He just needed a little time to think. “I’ll call you in a week,” he told Ellsberg.
Ellsberg left the papers with McGovern’s staff and flew home to tell Patricia the good news. McGovern called a week later.
“I’m sorry,” the senator said. “I can’t do it.”
“I understand.”
And Ellsberg did understand. McGovern wanted to run for president in 1972. Releasing classified documents would not exactly help him convince Americans he’d make a good commander in chief.
“At this point,” recalled Ellsberg, “it was looking as though Congress was closed off.”
Tony Russo, only half jokingly, suggested they hire a helicopter and shower the papers on Capitol Hill.
Patricia was a bit more practical. “These senators don’t seem to think it’s worth the risk,” she said. “Why are you so sure that they’re wrong?”
“I can’t be sure about that,” Ellsberg said. “The problem is, I’m the only one who’s read these documents. They haven’t. So I can’t go by their judgment. I have to rely on my own.”
They agreed—it was time for her to read the papers. He went through the files, picking out key memos and cables. She carried them into the bedroom and shut the door. Aside from Pentagon typists, she realized, she was the first woman to read these documents.
She came out of the bedroom an hour later. Her eyes were wet.
“These have to be exposed,” she told him. “You’ve got to do it.”
* * *
Later in January, Henry Kissinger came to MIT to give a talk. As he walked into the conference room he saw Daniel Ellsberg. They shook hands.
Kissinger then gave his usual lecture about how the Vietnam War was a “tragedy,” but not one for which the Nixon Administration could be blamed.
If that was the case, a student asked, why was the war still going on?
“You’re questioning me as if our policy was to stay in Vietnam,” Kissinger replied. “But our policy is to get out of Vietnam.” American troops were leaving Vietnam, he explained. American casualties were down.
Ellsberg could not let that go. He stood.
“You failed to mention Indochinese casualties, or refugees, or bombing tonnages, which in fact are trending up,” he said. “By your omission, you are telling the American people that they need not and ought not care about impact on the Indochinese people.”
The room was absolutely silent.
“So I have one question for you,” Ellsberg continued. “What is your best estimate of the number of Indochinese that we will kill, pursuing your policy in the next twelve months?”
For a moment Kissinger was too stunned to respond.
“You are accusing us of a racist policy,” he finally said.
“Race is not the issue here,” Ellsberg pressed on. “How many human beings will we kill under your policy in the next twelve months?”
“What are your alternatives?”
“Do you have an estimate or not?” Ellsberg demanded.
There was a long, tense silence. The student who had introduced Kissinger stood.
“Well, it’s been a long evening, and I think we’ve had enough questions now,” he said. “Perhaps we should let Dr. Kissinger go back to Washington.”
* * *
Richard Nixon was hardly the first president to do it.
In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt hid a microphone in a lamp on his desk in the Oval Office, and another in a telephone. Every president since had secretly recorded some of his White House conversations.
“You know, boys, it’s a good thing when you’re talking to someone you don’t trust to get a record made of it,” President Eisenhower once advised a group of aides, including Vice President Richard Nixon.
Kennedy kept Eisenhower’s system, flicking a switch under his desk to activate mics concealed around the room. Johnson taped thousands of phone calls. Nixon liked the idea of having a precise record of everything that was said in his office. He asked Bob Haldeman about setting up the kind of system Kennedy had used.
“Mr. President, you’ll never remember to turn it on,” Haldeman said, “and when you do want it you’re always going to be shouting—afterwards, when it’s too late—that no one turned it on.”
So they decided to hide voice-activated devices around the Oval Office, and under the table in the Cabinet Room. Everything was wired to recording machines in the basement. Over the next two and a half years, the tape machines picked up nearly four thousand hours of meetings and phone conversations—including an excellent record of the president’s imminent showdown with Daniel Ellsberg.
But at the time, even the existence of the recording system was secret. When it first went into operation in February, Haldeman asked Nixon if he wanted an aide to type up transcripts of the recordings.
New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
“Absolutely not,” Nixon said. “No one is ever going to hear those tapes but you and me.”
* * *
In early March, Ellsberg traveled again to Washington, D.C. After another frustrating day on Capitol Hill, he called his friend Neil Sheehan, a Washington-based New York Times reporter he’d known in Vietnam. Ellsberg asked if he could come over and stay the night. Sure, Sheehan said.
Thirty-five, with round glasses and thick black hair, Sheehan was a veteran reporter with what one colleague called “bulldog tenacity” and “an almost perfect nose for news.” He had come away from Vietnam sick to death of being lied to by American officials. He was about to be offered the chance to expose those lies on the front page of a newspaper read all over the world.
When Ellsberg arrived, Sheehan could see he was upset. They went into the den. Sheehan got out some sheets for the sofa.
Ellsberg didn’t use the bed. He and Sheehan talked all night.