MARINA BRADLEE HAD NEVER SEEN so many people come to her parents’ house. On the morning of June 17, the ten-year-old girl sat at a lemonade stand in front of the family’s Georgetown home, watching men and women jump out of cabs and run past her to the front door. Many carried typewriters. One carried a heavy-looking box.
Ben Bradlee led Bagdikian—the one with the box—into the living room. It was already crowded with Washington Post staff members. As reporters went through the documents, racing to write stories for the next day’s paper, the staff had the same argument that had taken place at the Times. The lawyers advised against publication. The Post was facing certain legal action by Nixon, and possibly fines that could cripple the company. The final decision lay with the publisher, Katherine Graham.
“Okay,” she said after hearing both sides, “go ahead.”
With the deadline for the next day’s paper looming, Bagdikian grabbed the articles the reporters had typed up and jumped on the back of a copy editor’s motorcycle. He clung tight to the copy editor as they wove through Washington traffic to the Post building.
* * *
Early that evening, Nixon, Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman sat in armchairs in the Oval Office, yellow legal pads on their knees. They were now convinced the leak had come from Daniel Ellsberg.
“Curse that son of a bitch,” Kissinger began. “I know him well.”
Nixon sounded surprised. “You know him?”
“Well. First of all he’s—”
Haldeman cut in: “He’s nuts, isn’t he?”
“He’s nuts,” Kissinger agreed.
Nixon asked, “Why did they have him in the Defense Department?”
“Well, Mr. President, he’s a funny guy.”
“Right,” Nixon said, decidedly unamused.
“He’s a funny kid,” Kissinger tried to explain. “He’s a genius. He’s the brightest student I’ve ever had.” Clearly worried his past association with Ellsberg would make him suspect in Nixon’s eyes, Kissinger launched into a bizarre attack. “He was a hard-liner. He went—he volunteered for service in Vietnam. He was so nuts that he’d drive around all over Vietnam with a carbine when it was guerrilla-infested, and he’d shoot at—he’d shoot at peasants in the fields.”
“He’s a born killer,” Ehrlichman added.
Nixon said, “Go ahead.”
“Then—well, he’s always been a little unbalanced—and just totally wild,” Kissinger continued. He described their last meeting, at the lecture at MIT. “He then started up and heckled me and accused me of being a murderer.”
Nixon wanted to know how such an unstable character had gotten hold of McNamara’s study in the first place. Kissinger guessed there must have been a copy at the Rand offices in California.
“By the end of the meeting,” Haldeman remembered, “Nixon was as angry as his foreign affairs chief. The thought that an alleged weirdo was blatantly challenging the president infuriated him.”
Later, in the hall, Nixon spoke with Charles Colson.
“I want him exposed, Chuck,” Nixon said of Ellsberg, wagging his finger. “I don’t care how you do it. But get it done. We’re going to let the country know what kind of a hero Mr. Ellsberg is.”
* * *
The next shot was fired by the Washington Post.
“DOCUMENTS REVEAL U.S. EFFORT IN ’54 TO DELAY VIET ELECTION” declared the paper’s headline on Friday, June 18. Beneath was an article detailing how the United States, under President Eisenhower, had secretly worked to undermine elections that were supposed to unite North and South Vietnam. The proof, as the headline charged, was in the documents.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Ben Bradlee got a call from Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist. Rehnquist warned Bradlee to cease publishing the Pentagon Papers.
“I’m sure you will understand that I must respectfully decline,” Bradlee said.
After dark, as the Post presses pumped out a second day of Pentagon Papers stories, Ben Bagdikian carried one of the boxes he’d brought back from Boston to his car. The first box he’d left at Bradlee’s place. This second one, which also contained a nearly complete copy of the Pentagon Papers, he put in the trunk. Ellsberg had given him specific instructions as to what to do with it.
Bagdikian drove to the Mayflower Hotel and parked on the street. He didn’t have to wait long before a car pulled up behind him. A man stepped out. Bagdikian recognized Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, an outspoken Vietnam War opponent. Bagdikian opened his trunk and silently handed Gravel the box.
* * *
In New York, Judge Gurfein got to his office early the next morning. The previous day’s hearing had lasted late into the night. Now he was ready to write his decision—in favor of the New York Times.
“The security of the nation is not at the ramparts alone,” the judge wrote in a passage that has been quoted ever since. “Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”
Gurfein announced the ruling early that afternoon. But in spite of the victory, the Times could not resume printing the Pentagon Papers because the Justice Department immediately appealed, and the injunction remained in place while the case moved to the higher court.
In Washington later that day, a judge barred the Washington Post from printing any more Pentagon Papers stories until the court could rule on the government’s case against the paper.
Once again, Daniel Ellsberg was going to need a new plan.
* * *
After leaving Bagdikian’s motel room, Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg had checked into a different motel under false names. From there, a team of friends, many of them students, helped arrange a series of hiding spots at apartments around town. While the FBI conducted a massive nationwide hunt, the Ellsbergs moved by night from place to place. Friends brought them clean clothes and toiletries. They never left Boston.
“I tried to stay one step ahead of the Justice Department’s injunctions,” Ellsberg recalled. That meant relying on friends to somehow get the Pentagon Papers to another newspaper. But it was dangerous to contact anyone Ellsberg knew, because the FBI was tapping many of their phones. One day while they were in hiding, Daniel and Patricia watched from the window while “Mr. Boston” went out to a pay phone to call one of Ellsberg’s friends in Los Angeles. Only minutes after Mr. Boston hung up, four police cars sped up and screeched to a stop outside the phone booth.
Dan and Patricia ducked below the window as the cops looked around. Mr. Boston—whose true identity Ellsberg has never revealed—was long gone.
Most of the time underground was a lot less exciting. The Ellsbergs spent long days alone, reading newspapers and watching television. The search for the fugitive leaker now dominated the news—reporters even showed up at Ellsberg’s father’s house in Detroit. Harry Ellsberg, an eighty-two-year-old Nixon supporter, backed his son 100 percent.
“Daniel gave up everything to devote himself to ending that foolish slaughter,” Harry said of the Vietnam War. “He might be saving some boys they’d have sent there otherwise.”
* * *
“The whereabouts of Daniel Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, remained a mystery yesterday,” reported the Boston Globe on June 20.
Globe writer Tom Oliphant hated to leave town in the midst of such a major story. Especially since he knew Ellsberg, and was hoping to be the next reporter to get his hands on the Pentagon Papers. But Oliphant had long since scheduled a visit to his parents in San Diego; he had to go.
Almost as soon as he got to his parents’ place, the phone rang. The caller identified himself as a friend of Ellsberg’s.
In a series of calls from a phone booth at the beach, Oliphant arranged a stealthy meeting between a Globe reporter and one of Ellsberg’s people on the streets of Boston. The reporter returned to the Globe offices with seventeen hundred pages in a plastic bag. After writing up a series of stories, the staff locked the documents in the trunk of a car in an unlit parking lot.
On Tuesday, June 22, the Boston Globe stunned the nation by becoming the third newspaper to print the now-notorious Pentagon Papers.
The headline read: “SECRET PENTAGON DOCUMENTS BARE JFK ROLE IN VIETNAM WAR.” Another article, by Tom Oliphant, contained a message from the country’s most famous fugitive. “Ellsberg said he wanted his two children, who live in this state with his first wife, to know that he is well and thinking of them,” reported Oliphant. “He also said he wanted his father, Harry Ellsberg, who lives in a Detroit suburb, to know that he is deeply grateful for the expressions of support.”
Only hours after the Globe hit the streets that morning, editor Thomas Winship got a call from John Mitchell.
June 22, 1971. Editor Tom Winship holds the day’s edition of the Boston Globe. The Globe was the third newspaper to publish material from the Pentagon Papers.
“Well, Tom,” said the attorney general, “I see you’re in the act too.”
“If you want to call it that. We did print this morning.”
Mitchell asked if the Globe would voluntarily stop publishing.
“No,” Winship said, “I don’t think we can.”
The court quickly blocked the Globe from further publication of the classified documents. But Ellsberg and his friends had been busy. Sections of the Pentagon Papers were in the hands of newspapers all over the country.
* * *
Unable to find the Ellsbergs, the FBI turned up the heat on known associates. Later that Tuesday morning, Tony Russo pulled into the driveway of his apartment building. As he opened his car door, another car skidded to a stop behind him, blocking the exit. Two agents jumped out and ran to Russo. One handed him a subpoena, ordering him to show up in court the next morning.
“I showed up at the courthouse,” Russo later reported, “with my toothbrush in my pocket, ready to go to jail, because I was sure of one thing: I was not going to cooperate with the inquisitors.”
Russo was going to need that toothbrush. Brought before a grand jury that was considering criminal charges against Daniel Ellsberg, Russo absolutely refused to give evidence, even when offered immunity in exchange. The judge declared Russo in contempt of court and sent him to jail.
The FBI also delivered a subpoena to Lynda Sinay’s door.
“For what?” she asked the agents.
“We think you know.”
She knew. Threatened with prison, she told the grand jury of her role in copying the Pentagon Papers.
When the FBI visited Carol Cummings, she told them she had no idea where her ex-husband was. She reluctantly agreed to testify, telling the grand jury what she knew of Ellsberg’s activities.
“Where is Dan?” reporters called out when Cummings got back to her house.
“I haven’t heard from him in some time,” she said.
Cummings ran inside, but press vans remained camped out at the end of her driveway. Reporters called nonstop, asking for comments. After dark, she led Robert and Mary out the back door. They climbed over a fence and hid in a friend’s house.
* * *
On Wednesday, June 23, CBS News vice president Gordon Manning got a call from “Mr. Boston.” Manning, who was in charge of Walter Cronkite’s nightly broadcast, was offered access to Daniel Ellsberg. If interested, Manning was to come to the Harvard campus that night and stand in front of the library.
Manning was confused by the cloak-and-dagger directions, but couldn’t pass up a chance to get Ellsberg on Cronkite’s show. That morning, the Pentagon Papers had popped up in the Midwest, on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times. The story was just getting bigger and bigger.
Manning was outside the library that night. He heard a rustle in the nearby bushes. A young, bearded man jumped out and said, “Follow me at a quick pace.”
They walked to the street. The young man opened the door of a parked car.
“Jump in.”
They got in the car. The driver steered what seemed like a circular route through dark streets.
“What’s going on?” Manning asked. “I thought we were going to see Ellsberg.”
“Well, people are always following us.”
The driver pulled to the curb very near where they’d begun.
The young man said, “Jump out and go up to the third floor.”
Manning climbed the stairs and knocked. The door opened. There were a few young people inside. A few boxes. And Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg. Manning was struck by the intensity of Dan’s expression.
“I always remember those eyes burning a hole in you,” he later said.
At one o’clock in the morning, Manning left the apartment with six stacks of paper, tied together with string. A light rain was falling as he started back toward his hotel.
A police car rolled up and came to a stop.
“Having a walk in the rain?” the officer asked through his open window. “You’ve got heavy bundles there.”
“Yeah, but I’m young.”
“Hey, get in. It’s going to rain hard.”
Manning sat in the front seat with the Pentagon Papers on his lap. The policeman dropped him off at his hotel.