ON JUNE 29, IN WASHINGTON, D.C., Senator Mike Gravel got an enema. He put on a back brace and attached a pouch to his leg to catch his own urine. Once he started talking, Gravel figured, he would not be able to stop for at least thirty hours.
That night the senator called a special session of his Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds—just about the least prestigious subcommittee in the Senate. He opened the session with a crack of his gavel at nine forty-five.
He was the only senator in the room.
“I have in my possession the Pentagon Papers,” Gravel declared. “To not make them public would be a dereliction of duty and morality.”
Gravel began reading the pile of documents he’d gotten from Ellsberg via the midnight exchange with Ben Bagdikian. A stenographer sat taking it all down. Now, no matter how the Supreme Court ruled, the entire Pentagon Papers would be in the Congressional Record, available to anyone.
A few tourists wandered in. Gravel continued reading. Reporters got word of the weird hearing and showed up with cameras. Gravel continued reading. Antiwar activists came and cheered him on.
Early in the morning, reading a graphic description of combat wounds suffered by American soldiers, Gravel began to cry. He plowed on for several minutes, tears streaming down his face. Finally, exhausted and emotionally drained, he had to stop.
“Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies,” he said, “because of a public policy this government and all of its branches continue to support.” He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “I am overpowered with the fact that at this very moment, we are killing people in Vietnam with our tax dollars.”
Senator Gravel asked for the unanimous consent of all subcommittee members to insert the rest of the Pentagon Papers into the public record. There were no objections.
* * *
Later that day, on the other side of First Street, the Supreme Court announced a 6–3 ruling in favor of the New York Times and the Washington Post. “In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do,” wrote Justice Hugo Black.
The newsrooms of the Times and the Post burst into cheers.
“Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America,” Henry Kissinger told the president and other top aides in the Oval Office. “He must be stopped at all costs.”
June 30, 1971. Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katherine Graham reading the Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the Post and other papers to publish material from the Pentagon Papers. The Post was the second newspaper to publish material leaked from the Pentagon Papers.
Less than an hour after losing in the Supreme Court, Nixon’s team moved on to the next battle.
“We’ve got to get him,” insisted Kissinger.
“We’ve got to get him,” Nixon repeated. And they couldn’t wait for some jury to do the job; who knew how that would turn out? “Don’t worry about his trial,” the president instructed. “Just get everything out. Try him in the press.”
To John Mitchell, he said, “We want to destroy him in the press. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” said the attorney general.
“These fellows have all put themselves above the law,” Nixon said, “and by God we’re going to go after them.”
The discussion of next steps continued the following morning.
“I really need a son of a bitch,” Nixon told his inner circle, “who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably. Do you see what I mean? And I’ll direct him myself.”
The way to play it, Nixon instructed, was to hire someone to dig up dirt on Ellsberg, and leak it to the press. Destroying Ellsberg in public would silence him—and other potential whistle-blowers. Nixon made it perfectly clear that staying within the confines of the law was not a priority.
“I want somebody just as tough as I am for a change,” he explained. “Do you think, for Chrissakes, that the New York Times is worried about all the legal niceties? Those sons of bitches are killing me … We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?”
“It’s got to be a guy you can really trust,” Haldeman cautioned, “because it’s got to be—” Nixon finished the sentence: “Run from the White House without being caught.”
* * *
Daniel Ellsberg was booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and released on $50,000 bail. For the first time in two weeks, he and Patricia went home.
“Thanks to the drama of Nixon’s injunctions and their defiance by a large part of the press in America,” Ellsberg later said, “there had been more attention to the contents of the Papers than I could ever have dreamed.” More attention to him too. In the weeks after Ellsberg’s arrest, reporters waited outside his apartment. They photographed him and Patricia coming and going. On July 13, he appeared on the nationally broadcast Dick Cavett Show.
“Mr. Ellsberg has been hailed as a hero by a lot of people,” Cavett told the audience, “condemned as a traitor by others.”
Ellsberg was recognized in restaurants and stopped on the street for his autograph. At a Broadway theater, after the lights had dimmed, a voice came over the loudspeaker: “We’ve just been informed that Daniel Ellsberg is in the audience.”
The entire audience stood and clapped.
“It was a tremendous boost to my antiwar activity,” Ellsberg said of his sudden fame. “It gave me a platform.”
At his desk at home, he stacked the thousands of letters he’d received since his arrest. Some of his favorites were tacked to a bulletin board.
“You have done a great duty to our country,” said one.
Another declared: “As far as I am concerned you are the hero of the Vietnam War, and that if more people would do the things that had to be done such as you did, the world would be a better place.”
There was plenty of hate mail too, even death threats. The backlash that really bothered Ellsberg came from his former co-workers. “I was typhoid Mary,” he later said. “I was a leper, with a bell around my neck.”
One former Rand colleague summed up the sentiment there: “Hang him from the highest tree in town.”
“I hope they hang the son of a bitch,” another told Rand boss Harry Rowen. Rowen’s career at Rand was ruined. He was forced to leave.
Lyndon Johnson, from his ranch in Texas, called the leak of the Pentagon Papers “close to treason.” Senator Barry Goldwater called Ellsberg a second Benedict Arnold.
Patricia Ellsberg felt the wrath of her father. “Absolutely apoplectic,” was how she described Louis Marx’s reaction. “And just ranting and raving. He admired Nixon, he was very anti-communist. So he just thought it was a betrayal of the country.”
“Dad, I love you,” she told him, “and I don’t want this to come between us. But if you insist on talking about my husband in this way, I don’t want to see you.”
* * *
Four days after Ellsberg’s appearance on Dick Cavett, White House aide Egil Krogh sat on the patio of President Nixon’s San Clemente home. The sun was warm and the view of the Pacific was beautiful. Just beyond the whitecaps cruised a Navy destroyer, keeping watch on the president’s compound.
Krogh was hoping to have some downtime that afternoon, but John Ehrlichman’s secretary found him and told him Ehrlichman wanted to see him as soon as was convenient. In other words, immediately.
Krogh walked into his boss’s office. Ehrlichman closed the door. Krogh sat. Ehrlichman handed him a file labeled “Pentagon Papers.” It was stuffed with newspaper clippings about the secret documents and the man who had leaked them.
“As I read,” Krogh recalled, “Ehrlichman told me that the assignment he was about to give me had been deemed of the highest national security importance by the president. He emphasized that the president was as angry about the leak of the Pentagon Papers as he had ever seen him on any issue.”
July 1971 memo to top domestic advisor John Ehrlichman from Counsel Charles Colson describing the White House’s investigation of Daniel Ellsberg and the involvement of Gordon Liddy (misspelled here) and Howard Hunt.
Nixon, Ehrlichman explained, was dissatisfied with the FBI’s investigation of Daniel Ellsberg. He wanted his own team on the job. Krogh was to head the so-called Special Investigations Unit, working in partnership with David Young of Henry Kissinger’s staff. Progress reports were to go to Ehrlichman, who would keep Nixon informed.
That night, in his hotel room, Krogh began to plan. Though overwhelmed by the responsibility being placed on his shoulders, he felt absolutely committed to the president. As he later said, “I certainly wasn’t in the habit of questioning the orders or wisdom of my superiors.”