WALTER CRONKITE WALKED into the lobby of the Commander Hotel in Boston. The most watched news broadcaster in America was trying not to attract attention. He succeeded for about two seconds.
“Mr. Cronkite!” the hotel manager called, striding up. “What can I do for you?”
Cronkite explained that he just needed to make a quick call from the basement pay phone. Absurd, the manager protested, Cronkite should use the private phone in his office. Cronkite politely declined.
Gordon Manning had passed on instructions from Ellsberg’s crew—Cronkite was to go to the hotel basement and wait by the phone booth near the men’s room. He did as he was told. “It was just incredibly awkward,” he later said. “People were coming up for my autograph.”
“I don’t know why you won’t wait in my office, Mr. Cronkite,” the manager said. “I’ll get you out of this crowd.”
Cronkite again declined. He paced in front of the bathroom, growing increasingly annoyed. He was about to leave when a young man walked up and nodded to the broadcaster. Cronkite followed the man to a beat-up car idling outside the hotel.
After driving a circuitous route, they parked outside a small, gray house in Cambridge. Cronkite went in and was relieved to see Manning inside. Daniel Ellsberg was there, in the only tailor-made suit he owned. They began setting up to film.
* * *
That night, NBC and ABC news reported that there were still no clues as to the whereabouts of Daniel Ellsberg. At the exact same time, on CBS, Walter Cronkite opened his show with a bang.
“During the controversy, a single name has been mentioned most prominently as the possible source of the Times’s documents,” Cronkite told the nation. “Daniel Ellsberg, a former State Department and Pentagon planner, and of late something of a phantom figure, agreed today to be interviewed at a secret location.”
The show cut to the living room of the gray house. Ellsberg sat with Cronkite, speaking with calm conviction.
“It must be painful for the American people now to read these Papers,” Ellsberg said. “What these studies tell me is we must remember this is a self-governing country. We are the government.”
Cronkite asked what Ellsberg thought was the most important lesson Americans should take from the Pentagon Papers.
June 23, 1971. Daniel Ellsberg appears on CBS News with Walter Cronkite, his first public statement since publication of the Pentagon Papers.
“I think the lesson,” Ellsberg answered, “is that the people of this country can’t afford to let the president run the country by himself.”
* * *
On Thursday, June 24, the dam burst. The Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press, and eight other papers around the country published parts of the Pentagon Papers.
Nixon and Mitchell decided not to haul everyone into court. Mitchell claimed it was because these papers had not printed classified material—obviously untrue, since the entire McNamara report was classified. In reality, thanks to Ellsberg’s network, the Pentagon Papers were too widely dispersed to get back.
It was a busy day in court. The New York Court of Appeals ruled against the New York Times. Hours later, the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Washington Post. The Post could now publish the Pentagon Papers; the Times could not. It was a legal mess that could only be settled in the Supreme Court. The justices voted to hear the case right away.
In Los Angeles, a grand jury indicted Daniel Ellsberg on three felony counts, including theft and unauthorized possession of classified documents, and violation of the Espionage Act. An arrest warrant was issued. Ellsberg had just become the first person in American history to face criminal charges for leaking government secrets to the press.
From a new hiding place, he spoke by phone to Charlie Nesson, a lawyer he’d hired before going underground. Nesson advised his client to surrender to authorities.
“I can’t do that,” Ellsberg said. “I still have some more copies of the papers to distribute.”
“How long will it take you to get rid of the rest of the papers?” asked Nesson.
“A couple of days.”
They agreed that Ellsberg would turn himself in on Monday morning. He spent the next few days arranging the delivery of his remaining batches of documents. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was next to publish the Papers. Then the Christian Science Monitor, then Newsday.
A pressman holds a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, containing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg loved every minute of it. “After the last two glorious weeks of open and successful defiance,” he later said, “I wasn’t in a mood to jump when the authorities told me to.”
* * *
In Washington, on the morning of June 26, James Goodale, Alexander Bickel, and the rest of the Times’s legal team tried to ignore the television cameras and shouted questions of reporters as they walked from their hotel to the Supreme Court building. About fifteen hundred people were lined up at the foot of the building’s white marble steps, hoping to get one of fewer than two hundred seats available to the public.
The lawyers walked past the crowd, up the steps, between the majestic white columns—and into the sudden silence of the courthouse. “It was like going from Yankee Stadium into a mausoleum,” recalled Goodale.
In the courtroom the nine Supreme Court Justices, wearing long black robes, sat behind a raised table. Lawyers for both sides made their presentations, and were grilled by the justices. The session lasted about two hours. The justices gave little indication of which way they were leaning, though Justice Thurgood Marshall offered a clue in an exchange with Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, who was handling the government’s case. Marshall expressed worry that if the Court ruled in favor of the government, it would become easier for the government to silence the media in the future.
“Wouldn’t we then—the federal courts—be a censorship board?” Marshall asked.
“Mr. Justice,” Griswold replied, “I don’t know what the alternative is.”
“The First Amendment might be,” retorted Marshall.
Goodale and Bickel left court feeling pretty good.
* * *
On Monday morning, Daniel Ellsberg put on his good suit. Charlie Nesson met the Ellsbergs at their final hideout. All three got in a taxi and drove toward downtown Boston.
News of their imminent arrival leaked out, and the streets in front of the courthouse were jammed with reporters and cheering crowds. Daniel and Patricia got out of the cab and worked their way through the mob. They were quickly surrounded by cameras and microphones.
“I think I’ve done a good job as a citizen,” Ellsberg told the press. “I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American people. I took this action on my initiative, and I am prepared for the consequences.” His only regret, he said, was that he hadn’t acted sooner.
June 28, 1971. Daniel Ellsberg with his wife, Patricia, outside the federal courthouse in Boston, where he was arraigned on charges relating to the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
“This has been for me an act of hope and trust,” he continued. “Hope that the truth will free us of this war. Trust that informed Americans will direct their public servants to stop lying and to stop the killing and dying.”
As Ellsberg turned toward the policemen waiting for him at the top of the courthouse steps, a reporter shouted: “Do you have any concern about the possibility of going to prison for this?”
Ellsberg said, “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”