THE NEXT DAY, in the newsroom of the New York Times Washington bureau, Sheehan asked his boss, Robert Phelps, to step out to the lobby for a private conversation. Standing in front of the elevators, Sheehan explained that a source had offered to give him a copy of a secret government study about Vietnam.
“You better go to Scotty Reston,” Phelps said, referring to James “Scotty” Reston, a top editor in the New York offices. “We can’t get into something like this without knowing what it involves.”
He told Reston about the Pentagon Papers.
Reston said, “You have my permission to proceed, young man.”
* * *
“You’ve been talking about making more copies of those papers for months,” Patricia Ellsberg told her husband when he returned from Washington. “You’d better get off your ass and do it.”
She was right. After giving a complete set to Fulbright, Ellsberg had just one copy of some sections, two of others. He’d put off making more copies because the process was so stressful. But now, for what they were planning to do, they would need extra copies.
He pulled out the boxes and spent several nights going through the papers, looking for “Top Secret” stamps he’d missed the first time through. Patricia carried stacks of papers to all-night copy shops near Harvard, different shops on different nights, always glancing nervously over her shoulder before entering. They spent several sleepless nights making the copies, sorting the papers into boxes, and stashing them with friends all over Boston.
Ellsberg was glad to have help, though working with his wife only raised the stakes higher. “As soon as I got together with Patricia, got engaged and married, what I had to lose grew very much worse,” he later said. “The feeling of losing Patricia—that was really like death.”
* * *
On March 12, a Friday, Patricia Ellsberg unlocked the door of her brother Spencer’s Boston apartment. She walked in, followed by her husband and Neil Sheehan. Spencer was away for the weekend.
Sheehan had flown to Boston to get a look at the secret study Ellsberg had offered him. He could see that both Daniel and Patricia were exhausted, and thought Dan seemed particularly fretful. Probably worried about being arrested, Sheehan figured, and feeling guilty about betraying his friends at both Rand and the Pentagon.
Sheehan was nervous too. He had, almost within grasp, the story of a lifetime.
Ellsberg retrieved a file from a hiding place in the apartment and brought it to Sheehan. Sheehan’s eyes widened as he started to flip through the pages. He asked to make a copy of his own.
No, Ellsberg said. First he wanted to be assured the Times was really going to run with the story.
Sheehan said he’d need some time with the study before knowing. Ellsberg handed Sheehan a key to Spencer’s apartment, saying he could stay and read, but must not remove any documents.
After two days with the Pentagon Papers, Sheehan returned to D.C. and showed his notes to Max Frankel, the Times’s Washington bureau chief.
“If this is the quality of most of the thing,” Frankel said, “it’s a gold mine.”
* * *
Henry Kissinger continued to meet with Le Duc Tho in the Paris apartment. The sessions consisted mainly of the North Vietnamese negotiator lecturing Kissinger about the need to replace the American “puppets” in South Vietnam.
To the American public, the president insisted Vietnamization was working. The slow pace of withdrawal was necessary, he explained, because American forces needed to stay long enough to ensure an “honorable” end to the war.
A March 19 conversation in the Oval Office revealed a different reason for prolonging the Vietnam War.
“Well, we’ve got to get enough time to get out,” Kissinger told Nixon. “We have to make sure that they don’t knock the whole place over,” he said, referring to the Communists. “We can’t have it knocked over, to put it brutally, before the election.”
Nixon said, “That’s right.”
The presidential election of 1972 was more than a year and a half away.
* * *
That same day, March 19, a man representing himself as “Mr. Johnson, of the Control Data Corporation” checked into the Treadway Motor Inn in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After dropping off his bags, the guest stepped out to a pay phone on the street and called his wife. He told her to come to the motel, and to check in as Mrs. Johnson.
Neil Sheehan hung up the phone. He went to his room to wait for his wife, Susan Sheehan, a writer for The New Yorker magazine. When she arrived, they went together to Spencer Marx’s apartment, carrying empty shopping bags. When they left the apartment, their shopping bags were full.
Sheehan knew the Ellsbergs were away for the weekend. He figured this was his chance to make his own set of copies of the Pentagon Papers.
Neil and Susan carried the bags to a local copy shop and handed the papers to a man behind the counter. The guy looked through the pages. He asked about the Top Secret markings on a few of the pages—Ellsberg never did catch all of them. Sheehan flashed his White House press pass. He explained that the documents had been declassified.
The job took all weekend. First the copy machine broke down and Sheehan had to haul everything to another shop. Then, late Saturday night, he ran out of money. In desperation, he called the Times Boston bureau chief, asking him to hurry to the copy shop with six hundred dollars in cash. Sheehan wouldn’t say what the money was for.
The Boston editor called Gene Roberts, his boss in New York, for guidance. Roberts called Max Frankel in Washington.
“What the hell is going on in New England?” Roberts demanded.
“Please relax,” Frankel said. “I can’t tell you about it on the phone, but in any case it’s a Foreign Desk matter.”
“Foreign Desk! Hell, it’s up in New England!”
“I’m sorry, Gene, I can’t talk about what Neil is doing,” Frankel said. “Just let him have the money.”
Sheehan got the cash. He finished the job, replaced the originals before Ellsberg knew they were missing, and flew with his wife to New York, lugging five bulging bags. Did he feel any guilt about this deception? No, he later explained, because the Pentagon Papers did not really belong to Daniel Ellsberg. “They belonged to the people of America and of Indochina, who had paid for them with their blood.”
* * *
On April 7, 1971, Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg celebrated Dan’s fortieth birthday with friends at their Cambridge apartment.
He had no idea what was going on at the New York Times.
Ellsberg called Sheehan many times that month. Sheehan said his editors still couldn’t make up their minds whether to run with the Pentagon Papers. Meanwhile, Sheehan said, he’d been assigned to cover other stories.
None of that was true. The fact was, Sheehan didn’t trust Ellsberg to keep his mouth shut. Any leak at that point would ruin Sheehan’s chances of breaking what James Reston was now calling “the greatest story of the century.”
* * *
“Have you heard about the papers we have?” Times managing editor Abe Rosenthal asked James Goodale, the paper’s thirty-seven-year-old general counsel.
Goodale said he had.
“Would you like to come to a meeting we are having tomorrow to discuss them?”
“Yes, of course,” said Goodale. As the paper’s in-house lawyer, it would be his job to advise the editors about the possible legal fallout from publishing classified documents.
The next day, he joined about ten editors and executives in James Reston’s office. Most sat on chairs and couches; a few found spots on the carpet. The space was cluttered with piles of papers and stacks of magazines. While Reston sat at his desk, puffing on a pipe, Sheehan told the group of the origin of the Pentagon Papers, and of how the study clearly documented government lies about the war. He referred to the person from whom he’d gotten the secret study only as “my source.”
No one asked Sheehan to name his confidential source, but Reston did want assurance the source could be trusted.
He’s the real deal, Sheehan promised. “Now that we have the documents,” he said, “you can read them and see for yourselves.”
Max Frankel asked the group to consider the risks of publishing classified documents in a time of war. Was the story important enough to justify defying the government? Was it worth facing legal action?
All agreed that it was. They turned to the lawyer.
James Goodale cautioned that if they published the Pentagon Papers, Nixon would likely come after them using the Espionage Act. Passed in 1917, this law states that anyone who “willfully communicates or transmits” documents related to national defense to others who are not authorized to see them can be fined and/or sent to prison.
The law was designed to prevent information that could harm the United States from reaching an enemy. That wasn’t the Times’s intention, argued Goodale. The intention was to inform the public of a story it had every right to know. Besides, he added, the most important relevant law was the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But that was just his view. Once the case went to court, anything could happen.
“Everyone has to remember, be quiet!” Goodale advised as they stood to leave. “Because everyone in this room may have participated in a felony.”