WITH TALL, WHITE WALLS and arches at the entryway, La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution looked like an old Spanish mission. It sat on the desert of west Texas, barren mountains rising behind.
Behind the imposing facade, the building looked like what it was—a prison. In a concrete courtyard patrolled by armed guards, Daniel Ellsberg sat talking with Randy Kehler, the anti-war activist whose words had so inspired him. Kehler was now serving two years at La Tuna for resisting the draft.
After exchanging personal news and talking about the war, Ellsberg asked about prison life. How was the food? Do they let you exercise? Is there anything decent to read? Kehler knew nothing of the unfolding Pentagon Papers drama, but got the sense there was something more than concern for a friend behind the questions. He wondered if Ellsberg might be expecting to spend some time in jail.
Daniel Ellsberg with Randy Kehler, before the publication of the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times.
When visiting time ended, Ellsberg asked one last question, the significance of which would hit Kehler a few weeks later.
“Do you have a subscription to the New York Times?”
“No.”
“Would you like one?”
“Sure,” Kehler said, “that would be great.”
* * *
A poll taken in the spring of 1971 revealed that 71 percent of Americans believed that U.S. intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake. Over 70 percent wanted all American troops home by the end of the year.
Even some veterans began publicly criticizing the president. On April 22, twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry became the first Vietnam combat vet to testify before Congress against the war. Some saw this as a kind of betrayal of other men in uniform. In Kerry’s view, it was the government that was guilty of betraying the troops. More than six thousand Americans had been killed in Vietnam in 1970; another twenty-four hundred would die in 1971. And for what? Why was the pace of Nixon’s Vietnamization so agonizingly slow?
Vietnam war veteran and future Secretary of State John Kerry with Daniel Ellsberg, 1971
“Each day,” Kerry charged, “someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, ‘the first president to lose a war.’ We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
* * *
That same day, at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, there was a knock on the door of room 1106. Neil Sheehan opened the door. Fellow Times reporter Hedrick Smith stood in the hall.
“Man, am I glad to see you,” Sheehan said.
Smith stepped into what looked like some kind of makeshift war room. The three-room suite was crammed with desks, chairs, typewriters, file cabinets, and three large safes. The bosses had decided the Pentagon Papers were too hot to handle in the Timesbuilding, so Sheehan had moved his operation to the Hilton.
Through the end of April and into May, a team of sixteen editors, reporters, and secretaries worked twelve-plus-hour days going through the thousands of pages Sheehan had brought back from Boston. Sheehan and Smith worked in adjoining rooms, each reading documents and typing stories as fast as he could. When one found something particularly interesting, he’d run into the other’s room shouting, “Look at this, look at this!”
Rough drafts of articles and scrap paper with notes were carried back to the Times building and put through the basement shredder.
Meanwhile, in the fourteenth floor boardroom of the New York Times, publisher Arthur Sulzberger listened to arguments against publication from Lord, Day & Lord, the prestigious law firm that had represented the Times since the late 1800s. The paper would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, warned Louis Loeb, one of the firm’s partners. The editors would wind up in jail. What’s more, he insisted, making the Pentagon Papers public was just plain wrong. The government had deemed the information secret, and it was not up to any individual or newspaper to blow the whistle.
“It’s a matter of patriotism,” Loeb insisted.
* * *
Though Daniel Ellsberg did not know what was happening in New York, he suspected he may soon need legal representation. He and Patricia went to see a Harvard Law professor she knew. In the lawyer’s living room, Ellsberg described what was in the McNamara study and what he’d done with the documents thus far.
“I have to stop you right now,” the professor cut in, holding his hand in the air. “I’m afraid I can’t take part in this discussion any further.”
“Pardon me?”
“You seem to be describing plans to commit a crime. I don’t want to hear any more about it. As a lawyer I can’t be a party to it.”
Ellsberg jumped out of his easy chair. “I’ve been talking to you about seven thousand pages of documentation of crimes,” he growled. “Twenty years of crime under four presidents.”
The lawyer was unmoved.
Ellsberg was going to need a different lawyer.
* * *
On the morning of Saturday, June 12, Daniel Ellsberg got a call from Tony Austin, a New York Times editor he knew casually. Ellsberg had once mentioned the McNamara study to Austin, and even shown him a few pages.
“That study you showed me part of, the Times has the whole study,” Austin now told Ellsberg. “They’re starting to bring it out today. The building is shut down tight. They’re checking everybody who wants to come in or out. They’re afraid the FBI will come after them before they can print.”
Ellsberg was shocked. He had heard nothing from Neil Sheehan.
“Are you sure?” he finally asked.
Austin was sure. The presses would start rolling in a few hours.
“Well, I’m glad you told me,” Ellsberg said.
Heart hammering, he dialed Sheehan’s desk at the Times. The phone rang once, twice, three times. “He hasn’t given me any warning over the last week or the last month, or, for Christ’s sake, this morning!” Ellsberg thought as the rings echoed in his ear. “When was he going to tell me?”
Someone in the newsroom picked up and took a message.
Ellsberg dialed Tony Russo’s L.A. apartment. No answer.
Patricia came home, and he told her what was going on. They had a complete copy of the Pentagon Papers in the apartment and agreed they’d better find a hiding place. Ellsberg called his friend Howard Zinn, a Boston University professor and antiwar activist. Zinn told Ellsberg to bring the box right over.
* * *
Abe Rosenthal, the New York Times managing editor, sat at his desk in the newsroom with his head in his hands.
“Let it be four thirty,” he chanted. “Just let it be four thirty.”
Four thirty was the so-called “magic hour”—after that point, no more changes could be made to the next day’s paper. At four thirty, all the copy would go to the composing room, where the text was set into lead type for the printing presses in the basement. At six, the massive presses would roar into action, rolling out 200,000 copies of the Times every hour.
Sulzberger, after all the back and forth, had approved publication of Sheehan’s stories.
But until four thirty, anything could happen.
Rosenthal got up and paced in the vast newsroom. Typewriters clacked as reporters worked on stories, but two-thirds of the desks were empty. Saturday afternoon was usually slow.
* * *
Richard Nixon peeked out the White House window, checking the weather again. It was still overcast, still drizzling.
Nixon’s older daughter, Tricia, was getting married that afternoon, and she had her heart set on an outdoor ceremony in the Rose Garden. The skies above Washington were not cooperating. The forecast called for clouds and intermittent rain all day. Pat Nixon, their younger daughter Julie, and the entire White House staff were trying to convince Tricia to move the event inside.
“I would prefer to have it in the Rose Garden as we planned,” Tricia told her father.
“Then that’s the way we’ll do it,” he said.
Nixon got on the phone to an Air Force meteorologist and was told there’d likely be a clearing between four thirty and four forty-five. He announced that the wedding would start promptly at four thirty. The rain stopped, exactly as predicted, and ushers ran outside and pulled plastic covers off four hundred chairs on the lawn. The guests moved quickly to their seats. Moments later, as a band played, Nixon and his daughter, both beaming, walked arm-in-arm down the White House steps and into the Rose Garden. Guests thought the president looked happier and more relaxed than they had seen him in years.
Later, during the indoor reception, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler got a message from a reporter at the New York Daily News. The reporter didn’t know details, but he’d gotten wind that something big was about to break in tomorrow’s New York Times, something about Vietnam. Ziegler didn’t think it sounded like a big deal.
* * *
Most of the staff from room 1106 in the New York Hilton went to the Times building to watch the first copies roll off the press. Sheehan stayed at his typewriter in the hotel suite, banging out stories for later in the week.
A little after six thirty that evening, a copyboy walked in with a stack of papers. He dropped a few copies on Sheehan’s desk. Sheehan jumped up and yelped with joy.
When word came that 100,000 copies had been printed—too late to turn back—Sheehan picked up the phone to call Ellsberg. “I owe him this!” he shouted as he dialed.
There was no answer.
* * *
The Ellsbergs were at a restaurant with Howard Zinn and his wife, Roz. Ellsberg was annoyed he hadn’t heard from Sheehan, but his mood lifted as the evening went on. The important thing was that the Pentagon Papers were about to hit the street.
After dinner they went to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie Ellsberg had seen several times and loved. Then they got ice cream, and were strolling in Harvard Square, licking cones, when several stout men in suits blocked their path. One raised his hand in an aggressive “stop” signal.
The Ellsbergs and Zinns stood on the sidewalk, holding their ice cream.
The man with the raised hand demanded, in an accent that sounded Latin American, “How do we get to the Combat Zone?”
It took a moment to process the question. The Combat Zone was a nearby strip club.
* * *
In New York City, Neil Sheehan and a few Times colleagues crowded around a table in a small Italian restaurant.
“Well, what have we learned from all this?” asked Robert Phelps.
“I’ve learned,” said Hedrick Smith, “that never again will I trust any source in the government.”
They all lifted their glasses of Chianti in a toast to Smith’s statement.
* * *
Late that night, after the guests had left, Richard Nixon sat upstairs with Pat and Julie. The television networks were broadcasting highlights from the wedding. The president watched himself walking down the aisle with Tricia.
“Well, at least I’m standing pretty straight,” he joked.
Always worried how he’d look on television, Nixon did not like watching himself. This was an exception. “It had been a wonderful day,” he later wrote. “It was a day that all of us will always remember, because all of us were beautifully, and simply, happy.”
* * *
Just after midnight, Dan and Patricia Ellsberg walked to a subway station near their apartment. They ran down the stairs to a kiosk that sold the early edition of Sunday’s New York Times. They came up holding several copies, staring at the front page.
In the top left corner was a photo of the president arm-in-arm with his daughter, under the headline: “TRICIA NIXON TAKES VOWS IN GARDEN AT WHITE HOUSE.”
In the middle, spreading across three columns, was the headline: “VIETNAM ARCHIVE: PENTAGON STUDY TRACES 3 DECADES OF GROWING U.S. INVOLVEMENT.”
Hardly an eye-catching headline. But the story, under Neil Sheehan’s byline, was absolute dynamite.
A friend saw the Ellsbergs emerging from the station with a stack of papers.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Ellsberg smiled. “I may be going out of town for a while.”