Michael Ellsberg

From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg

Chapter 29: Going Underground

[Previous chapter on Daniel’s relations with Neil Sheehan]

On Monday evening, June 14, 1971, we went to a dinner party at the house of Peter Edelman and Marian Wright Edelman. It was jammed with people sitting on the floor and sofas with plates in their laps, and there were two topics of conversation: What the Pentagon Papers were revealing, and who had given them to the New York Times.  Patricia and I listened without contributing much. Jim Vorenberg was eating, on the floor, in one corner of the room. Our eyes didn’t meet.

Tuesday morning the third installment appeared. Attorney General John Mitchell sent a letter to the New York Times  asking it to suspend publication and to hand over its copy of the study. The Times  declined, and that afternoon the Justice Department filed a demand, the first in our country’s history, for an injunction in federal district court in New York. The judge granted a temporary restraining order while he considered the injunction. For the first time since the Revolution, the presses of an American newspaper were Stopped from printing a scheduled story by federal court order. The First Amendment, saying “Congress shall pass no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” had always been held above all to forbid “prior restraint” of newspaper or book publication by federal or state government, including courts and the executive branch. The Nixon Justice Department was making a pioneering experiment, asking federal courts to violate or ignore the Constitution or in effect to abrogate the First Amendment. It was the boldest assertion during the cold war that “national security” overrode the constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights.

From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, 
Chapter 26: To the New York Times

[Here’s a link directly to the most relevant section below]

On February 28, 1971, I was in Washington on a Sunday night to take part in a panel the next day at the National War College. I had dinner with Dick Barnet, Mark Raskin, and Ralph Stavins of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank. They were working on a book analyzing U.S. involvement in Vietnam in relation to war crimes. As background for their research I had actually given them parts of the Pentagon study, including my own draft of the 1961 decisions, and they had followed my efforts to get it out through Congress.

When they pressed me now on how I was doing, I told them about striking out with Fulbright and McGovern. They said that they thought it was very important that I get it out. They wanted their book out by June, and they were counting on being able to refer to the documentation in the study.

They told me I ought to take it to the New York Times,  the same thing Fulbright and McGovern had mentioned. I had always thought of this choice as a backup, though it seemed unlikely that a newspaper would do more than publish some excerpts. But at this point it was looking as though Congress was closed off. Among newspapers, the Times  was the obvious choice. It was the only journal of record, the only paper that printed long accounts, such as speeches and press conferences, in their entirety. No other paper would do that. Only the Times  might publish the entire study, and it had the prestige to carry it through.

They asked me if I knew anybody at the Times. I told them I knew Neil Sheehan from Vietnam. I didn’t mention that I had also given him top secret leaks in 1968. For that very reason I had tended to stay away from him in recent years. But now all the signs seemed to be pointing me in his direction.

From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, Chapter 25: Congress

In late December 1970 I had what turned out to be my next-to-last talk with Senator Fulbright, in his office, about what to do with the Pentagon Papers. He now had nearly everything I had, including NSSM-r and my notes on the Ponturo study of Tonkin Gulf. Norvil Jones had made it clear that there would be no public hearings on the war of the sort he’d envisioned back in May, during the Cambodian invasion. The public concern just wasn’t there anymore, nor was there support for such hearings on the Foreign Relations Committee itself. The war had scarcely been an issue in the November congressional elections. Fulbright himself didn’t disagree with my own urgent concern, after the failed Son Tay raid to rescue American prisoners of war, and the renewed bombing of North Vietnam, that the war would soon be getting larger, but he didn’t see much possibility of mobilizing opposition in Congress until that happened.

As for the Pentagon Papers, Fulbright seemed sympathetic to my desire to find some way, apart from immediate hearings, to bring them to bear on the continuing war. He mentioned a number of ways in which it would still be possible to get the papers out with relatively little damage to me, though that wasn’t my major concern. He raised the possibility of issuing a subpoena to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird for the papers. He didn’t have to limit himself, he said, to requesting them from Laird, as he had done several times so far. He could demand them.

At this point Norvil revealed what I take it had been his real worry from the beginning. He thought that the committee, even if it got the papers from Laird by request or subpoena, couldn’t put them out to the public on its own, without administration approval. Even more, the chairman couldn’t do it on his own because he and the committee were supposed to safeguard for the Senate as a whole classified material, which they got all the time and for which they had storage facilities. If Fulbright leaked the papers or went ahead and distributed or published them, he could be charged with having jeopardized the ability to get classified material from the executive, not only for the committee or himself but for the entire Senate. Jones also mentioned that the committee members, and in particular its staff members, were often accused of leaking. It was easy for me to guess that Jones himself didn’t want to be accused of this. He had often shown great concern that I not reveal to anyone that I had given the papers to Fulbright.

Fulbright told me that he had asked Laird several times now for the study, but it seemed unlikely that he was going to get it. It was becoming clear to me that Jones was not going to encourage Fulbright to stick his neck out by releasing or using what I’d given him. Fulbright himself said to me, “Isn’t it after all only history?” I said, well, yes, but it seemed to me quite important history. It was also a history that wasn’t over yet. He said, “But does it really matter? Is there much in there that we don’t know?” He asked if I would give him an example of a revelation that would make a big splash.