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.
I got a call from Dunn Gifford, a friend of Neil Sheehan’s, whom I had met a month earlier. He had told me then that Neil had asked him, as a former naval intelligence officer, if publishing cables of the sort in the study might lead to compromising U.S. codes. He had said, correctly, no. In telling me this, he had also remarked cryptically that I should realize Neil would follow his own priorities as a journalist, not mine.
In his phone call Tuesday morning Gifford followed up his earlier warning by urging me strongly to give the papers to the Washington Post, now that the Times was enjoined from continuing publication. The idea hadn’t occurred to me, and my first reaction was to say, “I wouldn’t do that!” Already by Saturday night, when I saw the first installment in the Times, I had gotten over my irritation at Neil and the Times for keeping me in the dark the previous three months. When I saw how they were handling it and the impact they were achieving, I was nothing but happy over their treatment of the story, and I already felt a warm sense of obligation toward Neil and the Times, whatever distance they had decided to keep from me. It seemed almost certain that Neil or the Times, or both, would win a Pulitzer Prize, which would be well deserved. For me to give the study now to the Post might undercut that or force them to share the prize. Or the Times might lose its incentive to keep on with the publication, at the planned length, if parts were being published elsewhere.
Neil and I had never discussed exclusive rights to the story for the Times, but I had taken it for granted that the editors would demand that if they met my conditions for giving it to them, and that was fine with me. He may have been less than certain that I would abide by such an agreement. It seems that a major, perhaps crucial consideration pushing the Times toward publication, despite its lawyers’ reservations, was a concern, fueled in part by Neil, that otherwise I would go elsewhere and it would be scooped by the Post. Oddly, he was raising that likelihood by pretending for so long that the Times was still on the fence. But in fact I never considered telling another paper about it once I started talking with Neil, and I told Gifford I felt a loyalty to Neil by now, and I couldn’t compromise it by giving “their” scoop to the Post.
Gifford pointed out that what was at stake here was much larger than how much credit the Times or Neil got. He believed it was essential to keep the momentum going, to maintain a continuity of public interest in the contents of the papers. Who knew how long it would be before the Times could resume publication? We couldn’t even be sure that the injunction would be denied! This could be the end of the revelations, unless other newspapers were prepared to pick up the torch, in defiance of the justice Department and the administration.
His arguments were powerful. I had to think about them, though I continued to have a strong sense of uneasiness about crossing Neil and the Times. The commitment and risk that they had taken on in their decision to publish were now apparent. In view of the unprecedented injunction, the possibility that they would face criminal indictments no longer looked small. (In fact the Justice Department was making serious preparations for this, to follow my own trial, before very long.) They may not have treated me as a partner, but I admired their courage, and I felt grateful to them, as a citizen and an activist.
On the other hand, I had to take seriously Gifford’s warning that the whole process might stop for good unless I moved it forward. “Thanks precisely to the administration’s decision to treat the publication as a national crisis, justifying unprecedented efforts to censor the press, the contents of the Pentagon Papers were getting amazing attention. Newspaper readers had to assume that the history that the executive branch was so anxious to suppress was unusually worth their reading. I had always believed that the full impact of this story depended on the full sweep of the history being available. It wasn’t any one page or volume or individual revelation that was so dramatic; it was the tenacity and nature of the patterns of deceit and recklessness and cynicism that were ultimately stunning. For that to register on any one reader or the country as a whole, much more had to come out.
The first three installments in the Times had dealt with the Johnson administration, but a teaser in Tuesday’s paper had indicated that the next installment would focus on Eisenhower. I didn’t want the history course to be short-circuited just there. The more I thought about it, the more Gifford’s proposal appealed to me.
The Times considered printing Wednesday morning’s paper with dramatic pages of white space instead of the planned installment. White space by reason of government injunction would be a first in any American newspaper, and, one hoped, the last. But it ran other stories instead. There was plenty of news and analyses to fill the space, since the injunction itself triggered one of the greatest constitutional confrontations of the last two centuries. Television, which had almost entirely ignored the low-key first installment of the papers on Sunday, was now devoting at least the first fifteen minutes of the half hour nightly national program on each of the three major networks to the Pentagon Papers and the court cases.
Late Tuesday night someone called me from Newsweek to set up a meeting with a bunch of editors the next morning. I met for breakfast off Harvard Square with Lloyd Norman, the newsmagazine’s Pentagon correspondent, whom I’d known for years, and Joel Blocker, a senior editor. They started off by informing me that their cover story for next week would be the release of the Pentagon Papers and that they planned to name me as its source. I said, “I’m not going to comment on who the source may have been. But I’ll comment all you want on the contents of the papers and what I think they mean. I had access to the whole study, and I’ve read it all.”
Blocker said, “We’re convinced you’re the source, but we can’t go ahead unless you’re willing to confirm it.”
I said that I wasn’t going to speculate about that, but that I had no doubt, as someone who had worked on the study and who knew it well, that it was a good thing it was being published. The public needed and deserved to know everything that was in it. Likewise, Congress. In my opinion, every word of the study should be published in some fashion. There could be no harm to national security in that, only benefit. I should be happy to go into specifics of the contents, at any length they wanted.
The senior editor said, “Look, it comes down to this. There won’t be a cover story unless we have your confirmation on the source.”
“Too bad. You’re missing a big story on the contents of these papers if that’s true.”
We talked for more than three hours, ending up at my office at MIT In his account of the interview (appearing June 21), in which he said I “flatly refused to comment on whether he had, in fact, turned the classified papers over to the Times,” Blocker quoted me as saying: “I’m glad it’s out…. I wish it had been available to the Congress and the public two or three years ago. The documents show that Presidential assistants and other officials had virtually unlimited license to lie to the public. But now, those responsible for the escalation of the war will be held to account for the papers they signed.”
Blocker reported I had told them of my fruitless efforts to get high government officials like Henry Kissinger and Undersecretary of State John Irwin to read the study or at least the summaries and learn from them. With no hint from me, Newsweek had later interviewed John Holum, Senator McGovern’s legislative aide, and Pete McCloskey, both of whom said that I had offered them classified documents. According to Holum, “He said he’d make them public even if it meant he had to go to jail.” (This from the Senate office that had said it would never mention my name, in an issue appearing more than a week before I was indicted.) “On [Holum’s] advice, McGovern turned down the offer.”
But it wasn’t my opinions on the contents of the study or on the war that the Newsweek editors wanted to report, eager as I was to offer those. “Ellsberg, 40, proved to be an intense, almost a compulsive, talker. . . . With an insistence close to obsession, Ellsberg kept returning to the salutary effects of the documents’ publication. They were, he said, ‘the best we have—a good starting point for a real understanding of the war, the U.S. equivalent of the Nuremberg war-crimes documents.’ ”
They were unhappy as we parted. But I wasn’t tempted to give the confirmation that they wanted at this point. As yet there had been no indication that the Justice Department had decided to seek criminal indictments in addition to the injunction. I wasn’t surprised that Newsweek had been led to me as the probable source so quickly; the last line of its story on the interview was that I had said with a smile, “I am flattered to be suspected of having leaked it,” and I was sure that Justice was in little doubt by this point. But I was determined not to goad the administration into an unprecedented criminal prosecution by taunting it publicly, if it had any inhibitions about indicting me. A cover story would have been a good forum—God knows the Times hadn’t asked me my opinions about any- thing—but I didn’t think my contribution was essential. The thousands of pages of documents could speak for themselves if they got out. As it turned out, Newsweek did do a cover story, as I’d hoped, not on me but on “The Secret History of Vietnam” (June 28, 1971, appearing June 21).
As soon as Blocker and Norman left, I went to a pay phone and made arrangements through a friend to call Ben Bagdikian at the Washington Post. Bagdikian had left Rand to return to the Post as an editor the year before. I took it for granted he would be hunting for a way to get a piece of the papers; I guessed, correctly, that he would already suspect that I was the source and was probably trying to find me. But it wasn’t a call I could take at home. Through the intermediary, “Mr. Boston,” Ben got directions to call a number in Cambridge from a “secure phone.” It was a 617 number, and Ben read this message as coming from “Mr. Boston in Boston.” He figured it was a pseudonym and decided he’d better make the call. He went across the street to the Starlet Hilton and phoned from a coin telephone. Mr. Boston said he had a message from an old friend, but Ben would have to give the number of a pay phone where he could be reached. Ben gave the number of the phone next to his.
When I called Bagdikian a few minutes later, he recognized my voice. I asked him if the Post would print “the papers” if it could get them. He said yes. I asked if he could commit the Post. He said he would have to call back. We arranged that if he got assurance, he should make a reservation at a Boston or Cambridge hotel, call a different number with an answering machine, and leave the message where we could meet. He suggested the message “Mr. Medford from Providence [where he used to work] will wait for you at the hotel.” I told him to make the reservation quickly because most hotels were full for commencement week. He should bring a large suitcase.
Ben got the go-ahead from his managing editor, Ben Bradlee, who added, when Bagdikian called him from the airport, that if he got the goods and they weren’t in the next day’s newspaper, the Washington Post would have a new executive editor. Bagdikian checked into his Boston motel under the name Medford and, as he told me later, was dismayed when the clerk said he had a message for a Mr. Bagdikian, who was expected about the same time from Washington. Did that have anything to do with him? Apparently I had forgotten the cover name; I didn’t have my friend’s instincts. Ben identified himself, saying that he wrote under the name Medford. As he got to his room, he got a call from me to go to a Cambridge address to pick up the material and to tell the clerk to let some friends into his room while he was out.
When he came back in a taxi with one of two identical cardboard boxes he’d been shown in a Cambridge cellar, he found Patricia and me waiting for him in his motel room. I had meant for him to bring the second box as well; I had to call Cambridge, and before long someone delivered it to his room. Meanwhile we had been going through the first messy box of papers. It had nearly a full set of volumes, but they were out of sequence, and because of our several stages of “declassifying” with cardboard strips, scissors, and paper cutter, there were very few page numbers. Most of the numbers had coincided with a top secret marking that we’d removed. The second box, when it arrived, had the same contents. It reflected a condition I wanted to make on giving the material to him, which at first Bagdikian was very reluctant to accept. I wanted him to give the second box to Mike Gravel if the senator from Alaska was willing to use them. Ben’s sense of professionalism conflicted with his acting as any kind of intermediary to Congress. As a layman I wasn’t very sympathetic about that problem, under the unusual circumstances. The Post obviously wanted what I had to give it, and it seemed to me it could do me this favor. I couldn’t see any other way to get the papers to Washington quickly. Finally he agreed.
I had, as he recalls, two other conditions. The Post wouldn’t reveal my identity—that he took for granted—and it would not print the date-time groups or message numbers of any cables it reproduced. Already various people were charging that the Times publications had compromised secret codes. I was sure that wasn’t true, but I wasn’t sure that the government would admit that in court. We spent much of the night at the motel with him, cutting out footnotes with date-time groups and trying to sort out the various volumes. Patricia went home to get some rest while we kept working. Ben made reservations back to Washington, first-class reservations for “Mr. Medford and one.” He meant to take the suitcase with the papers on the seat next to him. Early the next morning we realized that the suitcase Ben had brought wasn’t nearly big enough. He decided he had to take them to Washington in the large cardboard boxes they came in, but we didn’t have string or tape to close up the second one. In the early morning he went down to the desk to get a piece of rope. The desk clerk couldn’t find any, but he suggested that Ben look outside where guests sometimes tied their dogs. He came back with six feet of rope from the fence next to the swimming pool. Ben packed up the box and left for the airport. I called Patricia and told her to come back and get me. I rested on one of the beds till she arrived.
Before we left the motel room, we turned on the TV to catch the local morning news. We saw our own porch at to Hilliard Street on the screen, with two men identified as FBI agents knocking on the door. The announcer explained that they were seeking to question Daniel Ellsberg for possible help in their investigation of the leak of the Pentagon Papers. After a few moments of knocking without an answer, the two men were photographed leaving. Patricia and I had a feeling they might not have gone very far. We hadn’t come expecting to spend the night, let alone a second one—we hadn’t brought so much as a toothbrush—but it didn’t seem a good time to go home. Nor did it seem a good idea to stay in a room checked out to Mr. Bagdikian of the Washington Post. We checked into a hotel on the Cambridge side of the Charles River under assumed names. The next morning we moved to another. For the next several days we moved through various motels in Cambridge. Later, hideouts in apartments and houses in Cambridge were found for us. It was twelve days before we got back to our apartment.
Watching the news on the morning of Thursday, June 17, we soon learned why the FBI had chosen that day to call on our apartment. Late the night before, while we were working away in the motel trying to put the papers in some sequence, a journalist named Sidney Zion had appeared on the Barry Gray talk show in New York and announced that he had discovered that I was the source to the Times of the Pentagon Papers. As I’d expected, both the White House and the FBI had already, on the basis of initial interviews, identified me as the prime suspect, but my FBI file reveals that it was Zion’s announcement that triggered instructions from Washington FBI headquarters to the Boston office to interview me immediately. The New York office was instructed to interview Zion. In both places, thanks to the publicity the night before, the FBI agents encountered hordes of press and cameramen staked out at the residences. Zion refused to say anything further and we weren’t found at home, since we’d spent the night with Bagdikian. But if Zion hadn’t made his announcement, there wouldn’t have been any TV cameras outside to Hilliard Street to record the visit of the FBI agents, and we wouldn’t have seen the scene on live television. Instead we would have been in the scene when the agents met us as we returned or found us there that afternoon. Things worked out extraordinarily well, though it wasn’t obvious right away that Zion had been particularly helpful.
***
The main secret to avoid being found by the FBI (in the 1970s) seemed to be: Don’t use your home or office phone. The people who helped us find places to stay and who distributed the papers for us communicated face-to-face or on randomly chosen payphones. Not one has ever been questioned by any official or grand jury or identified in the press from that day to this. (After thirty years of anonymity they all seem to want to keep it that way. I haven’t been able, yet, to persuade any of them to come out publicly or to let me express our gratitude to them by name.)
For thirteen days we were subject to what was described in the press as “the largest FBI manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping.” FBI agents were reported interviewing people in so many parts of the world that I began to suspect that some were abusing the opportunity to take junkets. We were in Cambridge the whole time, in five different locations, moving sometimes after one night. The arrangements were made by several key friends, who drew on their own friends among graduate students and others in the neighborhood. It’s notable that all these people cooperated in the face of widespread publicity that the FBI was hunting for me. In theory, they just wanted to question me, but it was clear that at any moment a warrant could be issued for my arrest, and our hosts could have been indicted for harboring a fugitive. It was a time in our country’s history when you could reach out to almost any young person and say, “I’m doing an action against the war. It may help, it may be important, but it could be dangerous for you. Can you help?” One friend told us later that she simply called acquaintances from antiwar rallies and other activities and told them, “I need your apartment for a few days. We’ll take good care of it. Please don’t ask me any questions.” No one asked, and no one turned her down. To this day I’ve never known their names.
On one occasion, “Mr. Boston” went downstairs and across the street to a phone booth on the corner, about fifty yards from the apartment building where we were staying that afternoon. He talked for about ten minutes to my friend Lloyd Shearer in Los Angeles, relaying some questions I had for Shearer, who was giving me advice on whom to deal with in the media. We happened to be looking out the front window when he left the booth and came back. Just as he entered the front door, perhaps twelve minutes from the time he placed the call, four police cars converged on the phone booth from two directions. Brakes screeched, and police jumped out with guns drawn, though the booth was now empty. Evidently Shearer’s line was tapped. We all dropped to the bare floor below the level of the windows, which had no curtains, as the police began looking up and down the street. When they left, we arranged to spend the night somewhere else.
Sometimes we stayed in one apartment for two or three days. Except when we moved, mostly at night, Patricia and I were alone together most of the time. Looking back, I realize it was the quietest, least stressful two weeks we were to have at a stretch for the next two years. There wasn’t much we had to do, except to decide which newspaper to deal with next and what parts of the study to give it. The actual arrangements all were handled by our helpers, since we couldn’t even use the phones or go out to use pay phones or do any errands. I told people where they could pick up documents to deliver, but they took it from there; generally they didn’t even tell me how they were doing it.
Our friend “Mr. Boston” turned out to be very talented at clandestine operations. When he had first contacted Ben Bagdikian for me, some of his arrangements for communicating or passing on the documents struck some editors as being more elaborate than necessary, but they worked. The FBI wasn’t able to intercept one transfer, as parts of the papers turned up in one spot after another across the country. It was also his idea to parcel out subsequent portions to one paper at a time. He recalls that my own first inclination, after the second injunction, was to dump the rest of it out to a number of papers at once, to make sure it all got out before I was stopped. He quickly persuaded me, from his own earlier experience working for a member of Congress, that it would be better to keep the story going by ap- proaching one at a time, which he undertook to arrange. He deferred to me to pick the next outlet each day, and he made the contact and arranged the handover.
What made all this somewhat easier was that no one had to do a lot of negotiating to get a newspaper to agree. Nearly every major paper wanted to get in on the action—impressively, given the unprecedented legal actions and evident fury of the administration—and not one we approached turned down the opportunity. After the Washington Post was enjoined, the Boston Globe was an obvious choice for the next recipient, not so much because it was our local paper as because it had been one of the first and strongest to oppose the war. That was also true of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which I thought had earned the right to invite an injunction. (It received one, along with the Globe.) As Sanford Ungar has noted, it may be a coincidence that the only four newspapers that were enjoined, out of twenty that printed sections of the papers, were all strong critics of the Nixon administration and skeptical about the war. Others I picked on more idiosyncratic grounds. The L.A. Times, which I thought had also done good reporting on the war, was my former hometown newspaper; the Knight chain of eleven newspapers included my father’s town of Detroit; and the Christian Science Monitor was my father’s main paper (he sent me subscriptions to it for many years).
Our friends brought us food and newspapers and toilet articles, shirts and underwear and socks. Patricia and I spent the days together reading the newspapers and watching the news on TV I remember in particular one program we watched on the last day of our quiet time together, Sunday, June 27, the day before I surrendered to arrest at the federal courthouse. General Maxwell Taylor was being interviewed by Martin Agronsky, in a program that had been taped earlier. He was describing his recommendations to President Kennedy in November 1961. He was telling Agronsky and the American public ten years later: “I did not recommend combat forces. I stressed we would bring in engineer forces, logistic forces, that could work on logistics and help in the very serious flood problem in 1961. So this was not a combat force…. I did not recommend anything other than three battalions of infantry. Pardon me, three battalions of engineers.”
A decade had passed since his actual recommendations, and the president to whom he had given them was dead. I recall thinking two things as I listened to him: The president’s men think they have a license to lie that never expires, and “Watch what you say, General. Your cables are coming out any day now.”
Two days after this interview was aired, the Supreme Court lifted the injunctions, and the Times resumed publication the next day with the Kennedy era. Among the documents it printed on Wednesday were Taylor’s eyes-only cables to the president in late October 1961, describing the immediate introduction of U.S. ground combat forces as “an essential action if we are to reverse the current downward trend of events…. In fact, I do not believe that our program to save South Vietnam will succeed without it,” and describing the “engineer” role as a cover story that would not long be plausible.
An exactly contradictory impression of Taylor’s recommendation had been given at the time, in 1961, and had persisted for years. A decade of deception ended on the eve of my arraignment. If this history still mattered enough to be lied about, it mattered enough to be worth revealing, even at a personal price.
Time magazine got word to me through Charlie Nesson, a Harvard law professor who had agreed to join our legal team, that it was going to do a cover story on me but needed to spend time with me for interviews. Derek Shearer, working with us, discussed this with his father, Lloyd, who urged me strongly not to do it. He said the daily press reporters would be furious if I gave an exclusive like that, especially to Time, which they looked down on (the managing editor at Time, Henry Grunwald, had consistently muzzled and overruled his reporters on the war; several had resigned). They would look on me as just seeking personal publicity. I should continue to try to keep the focus on the war and the contents of the papers, not on me. I sent word to Time that an interview would be impossible; I didn’t have time for it. It continued to press. It said it couldn’t do a cover without an interview; it had a rule about that. I said, too bad then. It offered me three pages to say whatever I wanted, with no editing, as part of the piece. That was tempting, and I felt a little guilty about turning down the chance. But I knew it really would take my attention away from what we were doing, and I should stay focused on what was happening. In the end Time did the story anyway. It was the first cover it had done without a personal interview, I was told, since the one on Adolf Hitler in 1943. At the last minute the editors got through to me with just one question. Were my eyes brown or blue? We told them blue. That was all they asked. It did make a difference, though. Later someone from Time gave me an earlier proof copy of the issue with my portrait on the cover, with brown eyes.
Time had gotten photographs of me (not in color) from my father in Detroit, as had Life. He had boxes of photos of me. A number of them showed me in Vietnam, mainly when I was in Rach Kien, wearing field gear and carrying a Swedish K submachine gun. Life had a big picture of me lying in a rice paddy with the K to my shoulder. Another showed me in my Marine blues. I used to think that those pictures from Dad probably helped me out, discouraging the White House from pressing the notion that I was unpatriotic. Instead it had to fall back on the spin that I was erratic, flaky, a little nuts, as shown by my radical change; though this raised the question of why I had been trusted so long with so many secrets and consulted at high levels, and by Republicans as well as Democrats. Even sympathetic stories exploited the drama of the supposed extremity of my shift in views. The headline in Life was FROM HAWK TO VIOLENT DOVE. I thought the adjective for my present state was interesting, since it was for the previous period that its pictures showed me carrying a machine gun.
Dad’s testimony about me in Detroit was very helpful too. I read it in AP dispatches and saw him a couple of times on television. It warmed my heart. He was after all a Republican. My radical brother couldn’t stand to talk with him about politics. Dad (who was eighty-two years old) had voted for Richard Nixon twice. Yet when he was interviewed about me, he wasn’t just sympathetic; he was eloquent in total support of what he assumed I was doing. When he was interviewed by the Detroit News, he said, “Daniel gave up everything to devote himself to ending that foolish slaughter…. If he did give them that report, and if the government accuses him of some crime … well, he might be saving some boys they’d have sent there otherwise.” The article went on: “Ellsberg said his son ‘gives me so damn many things to read about the war that we don’t waste time talking about it when we’re together. We know where we stand-and it’s in the same corner.”‘
I hadn’t given him any clue to what I was planning or doing and no warning (I didn’t have any myself) about what was about to happen. I wasn’t able to call him while I was hiding. But in other interviews he laid out the issues as well as I could have written the words for him. Really, better. He spoke of the Constitution and the role of free speech in our democracy; the terrible, hopeless, wrongful war; the men who had been lied to death by the deceit of our presidents; the lives I was trying to save. It was thrilling for me to hear this from him. A week after we went underground, at my request Tom Oliphant conveyed the message, in his story about me in the Globe, that “he wanted his father Harry Ellsberg … to know that he is deeply grateful for the expressions of support he made to the press last week.” Where had all this come from? He told me later, “It was from you. I started out supporting the war, but your letters from Vietnam opened my eyes.”
What was happening in the country was astonishing, unprecedented. A newspaper industry that for thirty years and more had been living happily—when it came to foreign policy and defense matters—on government handouts was suddenly in widespread revolt. One paper after another was clamoring for its chance, not just to get a piece of a story but to step across the line into radical civil disobedience. There had never been an injunction that had stopped the presses before in our history. Before the Supreme Court ruled, there had been four, and there could just as easily have been twenty.
Every paper that published after the initial temporary restraining order against the Times was defying a solemn White House and Justice Department proclamation that they were causing irreparable harm to national security. The people and institutions doing this were justly known as pillars of the establishment. For any one of them to contemplate challenging to this degree in action the urgent judgment of the president and commander in chief in wartime would have been in the most literal sense unthinkable, before it happened. Reading about it and watching on TV in our various hideouts, I thought it was marvelous. They were going through the same process I had, learning the need to think for themselves, to use their own judgments about what was right for them to do in a crisis, discovering their own readiness to risk recrimination and face heavy penalties when they had to. I felt an obligation, while this situation lasted, to spread that opportunity as widely as I could. That meant that television networks too should have the chance to join the mutiny.
The TV news programs were already devoting half and more of their nightly news programs to the confrontation with the government, but that reporting didn’t put them in the position of the press that was actually publishing the papers. The networks so far were just reporting on a revolt, not participating in it. But now that their counterparts in the press had risen to the challenge of showing some real courage, I thought the national networks should be given the opportunity to stand with them.
We started with NBC because I’d seen a picture of its president, Julian Goodman, on its nightly news, supporting the Times’s publication of the secret study. One of our friends got through to the high executive levels at NBC with a message of congratulations from me to Goodman, and my offer to help him join the Times by releasing a large so far unpublished segment of the Pentagon Papers on his own network. Within half an hour Goodman had turned this down. ABC declined even faster, immediately on hearing the offer. But CBS showed real interest, over a matter of days.
The decision was finally negative, but that was made only reluctantly after a full day of soul-searching by the highest brass. A major consideration was that CBS was just at that moment involved in a legal confrontation over its documentary on military public relations, The Selling of the Pentagon. A congressional committee had recommended that CBS be charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over its outtakes (film that was not used in the final version) to an investigation. The House of Representatives was just about to vote on the recommendation, and Frank Stanton of CBS and most of his subordinates thought that it would prejudice that vote, and would be taking on too much at one time, to defy the Pentagon’s classification policy in the same week. I could understand that, and I respected the fact that in contrast with the other two networks, CBS had really wrestled with the issue. For that reason, a few days later, when all three networks, through intermediaries, were asking to interview me while I was underground, I found it easy to pick CBS.
I hoped it would choose as the interviewer Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for the evening news, described as “the most trusted man in America.” It was Cronkite who, on his return from Vietnam just after the Tet offensive in 1968, had said to his audience that we were mired in a “stalemate,” using the word the White House had dreaded for a year. President Johnson, watching that, said to an associate, “I’ve lost Middle America.” Weeks later he withdrew from the presidential campaign.
In the late afternoon of June 23, Cronkite and his crew arrived at a large house in Cambridge, where I was waiting for him. Parts of the interview were shown on the early evening news, with a late, half-hour version from ten-thirty to eleven that same night. In the body of the interview I had an opportunity to present at some length to a prime-time national audience an understanding of Nixon’s secret strategy and how it resembled what I had done in the Pentagon in 1964.
Some of the passages, including the opening and end of the program:
Cronkite [opening]: During the controversy, a single name has been mentioned most prominently as the possible source of the Times’ documents. 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, but he refused to discuss his role, if any, in the release of the documents. I asked him what he considers the most important revelations to date from the Pentagon documents.
Ellsberg: I think the lesson is that the people of this country can’t afford to let the President run the country by himself, even foreign affairs, any more than domestic affairs, without the help of the Congress, without the help of the public….
Cronkite: Isn’t this correcting of this problem of public information more in the character of the leaders in Washington than it is in anything that can be legislated? . . .
Ellsberg: I would disagree with that. It seems to me that the “leaders”—by whom, I think, you’re referring to the executive officials, the Executive Branch of government—have fostered an impression that I think the rest of us have been too willing to accept over the last generation, and that is that the Executive Branch is the government, and that indeed they are leaders in a sense that may not be entirely healthy, if we’re to still think of ourselves as a democracy. I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson’s reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that. What these studies tell me is we must remember this is a self-governing country. We are the government. And in terms of institutions, the Constitution provides for separation of powers, for Congress, for the courts, informally for the press, protected by the First Amendment…. I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions. . . .
Cronkite: How was [this study] kept a secret from the White House?
Ellsberg: The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those.
Cronkite: The documentation being somewhat incomplete, “flawed history” is what some have said of it.
Ellsberg: It’s a start. It’s a beginning toward history. I would say it’s an essential beginning, but it’s only a beginning…. In the seven thousand pages of this study, I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among the Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever. And the documents simply reflect the internal concerns of our officials. That says nothing more nor less than that our officials never did concern themselves with the effect of our policies on the Vietnamese.
Cronkite: How would you describe the men who do not have the same emotional reaction to reading this, to knowing these, being privy to these secrets, as you? Are they cold? Are they heartless? Are they villainous?
Ellsberg: The usual assumption, of course, the usual description of them is that they are among the most decent and respectable and responsible men that our society has to offer. It’s a very plausible judgment, in terms of their background. And yet, having read the history, and I think others will join this, I can’t help but feel that their decency, their humane feelings, are to be judged in part by the decisions they brought themselves to make, the reasons for which they did them, and the consequences. I’m not going to judge them. The evidence is here.
I’m sure this story is more painful for many people at this moment than for me, because of course it is familiar to me, having read it several times, but it must be painful for the American people now to read these papers-and there’s a lot more to come-and to discover that the men to whom they gave so much respect and trust, as well as power, regarded them as contemptuously as they regarded our Vietnamese allies.
Cronkite: What about the immediate effect [of these revelations] on the war as of these days in June, 1971?
Ellsberg: Yes, the war is going on…. I hope the Senate will go much further. I hope that they discover that their responsibilities to their citizens, the citizens of this country and to the voters, do go beyond getting reelected, and that they’re men, they’re free men who can accept the responsibility of ending this war.
My father had a favorite line from the Bible, which I used to hear a great deal when I was a kid: “The truth shall make you free.” And I hope that the truth that’s out now-it’s out in the press, it’s out in homes, where it should be, where voters can discuss it—it’s out of the safes, and there is no way, no way to get it back into the safes—I hope that truth will free us of this war. I hope that we will put this war behind us … in such a way that the history of the next 20 years will read nothing like the history of the last 20 years.
***
In its brief before the District of Columbia Circuit Court on Tuesday, June 22, the Washington Post in effect acknowledged the legal impact of the of forts of our underground team to keep spreading the papers around. “The newspaper also warned the appellate court that ‘the government’s efforts will ultimately prove futile’; with more and more newspapers breaking the story, ‘one thing is certain: public revelation of the contents will soon become available to the American public.’ ” The “certainty” of this of course depended on our network’s not being penetrated by the FBI and rolled up and on the supply of copies’ holding out. All the releases were coming directly or indirectly from us. The timing and urgency of Patricia’s pressure to make those copies had serendipitously proved to be indispensable, though no one had foreseen these particular circumstances that made them so valuable.
A Nixon appointee, Judge Roger Robb, raised the issue of further disclosures in other newspapers, wondering if the government was “asking us to ride herd on a swarm of bees.” He was presumably referring to the newspapers, but “a swarm of bees” was a nice description of our pickup team of clandestine operators.
On Thursday, June 24, the metaphor of a swarm of bees was overtaken by that of the breaking of a dam. Across the country the eleven papers of the Knight chain—Detroit, Miami, Tallahassee, Akron, Boca Raton, and two each in Philadelphia, Charlotte, and Macon—came out simultaneously with new revelations, along with the Los Angeles Times. On that day the New York Times appealed to the Supreme Court to review the Second Circuit decision in favor of the government. Among other things, Alexander Bickel on behalf of the Times asked for an immediate hearing because “not only has the public’s right to know been infringed for over a week but the Times, which courageously initiated the publication of the documents, is being preempted by other newspapers.”
Presumably it was essentially for the same reason-the continued hemorrhaging of information from the papers in the face of its efforts-that the Justice Department seemed to give up on seeking further injunctions, for a space, after it got a restraint on the Boston Globe. No legal process was started against the Chicago Sun-Times, the L.A. Times, or any of the Knight papers, though in principle they all posed the same danger of immediate and irreparable damage to the nation that the government claimed in the earlier cases.
On Friday morning, June 25, five justices of the Supreme Court voted to take up the per cases of the Times and the Post on an emergency, expedited basis. They agreed to hear oral arguments the next day in an unprecedented Saturday morning session.
Four justices—Hugo Black, William Douglas, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall—had dissented from the decision to hear oral arguments, “saying they would have refused the cases, and immediately lifted all restraints against the Times and the Post.” To lift the injunctions, it was clear that at least one of the remaining justices remained to be persuaded. So for two reasons, I wanted to keep adding newspapers to the list of rebels: At worst, if the Court upheld the injunction shortly, I wanted as much as possible of the contents of the papers out on the streets before that happened. Furthermore, the wider the flood spread over the land, the more chance that one or more of the swing justices would be impressed, like Robb and the majority of the D.C. Circuit, that the issue of injunction had become moot. I wanted to provide the justices, as they deliberated, with even more evidence that the judicial system had already proved decisively incapable of preventing the free flow of this information (a job for which, under our First Amendment, it had never been intended or designed.)
The Justice Department of course had opposite motives. I doubt if it believed there was any way it could really stanch the flow, but evidently it thought it would help its argument before the Supreme Court if it underlined the view it had been pressing for almost two weeks of the urgency and gravity of the revelations by pursuing the source of them as a criminal. News stories indicated that the department was working hard to get an indictment and an arrest order out on me before the Supreme Court met on Saturday morning. The problem presumably was that no one from within any of the newspapers had testified (or ever did, so far as I know) that I had provided the Papers, nor had I yet announced this. As late as the Cronkite interview on the twenty-third, I declined to comment on my role, since there had still been no clear indication that the administration intended to prosecute. It had strong circumstantial evidence, in particular press statements by McGovern and McCloskey confirming that I had given the Papers to them and that I had asserted my readiness to go to jail to get the information out. But without a statement by me (or a journalist who had received the papers from me, this fell well short of demonstrating that I had provided the documents to the press.
On the copying, my former wife provided an affidavit on what the children and I had told her. Tony Russo refused to testify, but given a grant of immunity, and facing jail for contempt if she then refused, Lynda Sinay did provide testimony. With such evidence, U.S. Magistrate Venetta S. Tassopoulos issued a warrant for my arrest on Friday night, June 25. That was just in time for the Supreme Court justices to read about it in their Saturday morning papers.
When my lawyer Charlie Nesson got through to me with this, he told me I would have to present myself to an arresting officer immediately. I said, “I can’t do that. I still have some more copies of the papers to distribute.”
Charlie said I had no choice. “If you don’t turn yourself in, you’ll be a fugitive.”
“Too bad. I’m not finished.”
Charlie chewed that over and left to confer with Boudin. When he came back, he asked, “How long will it take you to get rid of the rest of the papers?”
“A couple of days.”
They called the Justice Department and tried out the idea, after checking it with me, that I would turn myself in immediately if Justice would guarantee that I would be released without bail over the weekend. As we expected, they did not get very far. Charlie called me and asked, “When can you come in?”
“Monday morning.”
Charlie called the U.S. attorney in Boston and told him that I would be surrendering on Monday morning, not till then. The attorney said, “You know he can’t do that.”
Charlie said, “Well, that’s what he’s going to do.”
There was a pause. The U.S. attorney said, “Oh, well, the FBI couldn’t find him by then anyway”
Charlie said to him, “You know, you’re talking over a tapped line.” That was the assumption my lawyers were going on, though they didn’t actually know it.
“You’re kidding.”
The Justice Department official said, “Oh, God,” and hung up.
Charlie relayed all this to me and said, “You’ve got two days.” I looked over what we had left and decided whom to ship it to. Of course I wasn’t really essential for that. I could very well have surrendered myself and left this to someone else, but I’d been on top of the process so far and I wanted to stay with it to the end. After working toward this action for twenty months, and after the last two glorious weeks of open and successful defiance, I wasn’t in a mood to jump when the authorities told me to. My attorneys were in a more awkward position, edging into an area of some legal jeopardy for themselves, but they shouldered this without complaint. They announced at a press conference in Boston, as the Supreme Court was hearing arguments in Washington, that I would surrender myself at the office of the U.S. attorney in Boston at 10:00 A.M. on Monday, June 28. They were vague about the reasons for the delay.
On Saturday I divided up the last of the copies we had pulled together, and over the weekend our team got them to the Christian Science Monitor and Newsday. By Sunday night the cupboard was bare. We got ready to surface the next morning. I didn’t know what would happen in terms of bail; these extra two days as a fugitive might not have disposed a judge to let me walk out of court. In the last of our borrowed rooms, we thought it might be our last night together for a while. But in face of the government’s desperate urging on Saturday that the Court continue to withhold this information from the American public, it seemed to me worthwhile to demonstrate, as the justices deliberated, the practical futility of their trying to do that, so long as there were newspapers willing to act as if they were free.
***
On Monday morning, June 28, Charlie Nesson came over to our last hideout to accompany us to the federal court for arraignment. He said to expect a lot of press there. I put on my best suit, which someone had smuggled out of our apartment. It was a wedding present from my brother-in-law, the only tailor-made suit I ever owned. I wore it throughout the trial. In those days, before Watergate, it seemed plausible that someone in a good suit and tie would look innocent to a jury.
Charlie passed on a tip from a reporter that the FBI was desperate to pick me up off the streets somehow before I reported to the courthouse. The bureau was embarrassed by its inability to find me over the last two weeks, while I was distributing the papers and appearing on national TV, and wanted last-minute vindication. I had been struck myself by its failure to find us or to intercept any of the copies of the Papers before they appeared. A couple of days later I asked my lawyer Leonard Boudin, “What is the FBI really good at?”
Leonard said: “Taking surrenders.”
From past experience, Boudin believed that the Justice Department was eager to present me to the cameras as a criminal in custody, in handcuffs, if not chains. I had no desire to be a willing participant in this drama. Charlie said I should expect a lot of police cars on the streets leading to the courthouse. He thought the government would be happy to nab me even if it was at the last minute, just before we got into Post Office Square. He had brought a taxi over to take us there. He got the driver to follow a very circuitous route along back streets. We went fairly far out of the way to cross the Charles on a little-used bridge.
That morning I had thought through a short statement I wanted to make to the press if I had the opportunity before I was arrested. It would be my first chance to take sole responsibility for the release of the Papers. So long as I was underground and not yet openly acknowledging myself as the source, I couldn’t corroborate what I assumed my former colleagues were telling the FBI in order to help get themselves off the hook. Now I wanted to start saying as convincingly and as often as I could that I had done this on my own responsibility and “alone,” so far as any other government insider, anyone with a clearance, was concerned. (Obviously, once I made my decision, I was far from alone when it came to crucial help from friends, family, and antiwar resisters.) That was the main point of what I wanted to say, but it would also be the first statement directly from me on my motives and hopes.
While we were driving our roundabout route, it occurred to me that Patricia ought to have a copy of what I wanted said, so that if I was arrested in the midst of making my statement or before I could start it, she could take over for me. In the backseat of the cab, with Patricia beside me, I wrote out my statement on some notepaper and gave her the pages. I told her that if the police got us before we arrived or took me away before I could say anything or before I was finished, she should step to the microphones and finish it for me.
Charlie was in the front seat with the driver, and all of us—including me, out of the corner of my eye as I was scribbling my notes—were watching for patrol cars and waiting to hear sirens. But the streets the cabbie chose were almost deserted, even on a Monday morning. Just as I finished writing and handed the pages to Patricia, the taxi turned a corner and stopped at the entrance to Post Office Square. It was jammed from one side to the other with people, some of them holding up signs of support for me. We got out of the cab, and a great cheer went up as the crowd pressed in around us.
At first glance the crowd seemed to be made up entirely of people we knew, none from my long stay in the government and Rand but from before and after that, especially from Boston and Cambridge and all over the East Coast. It was like a surprise birthday party, or This Is Your Life, or the near-death experiences that people report after a coma, when, walking through a tunnel toward a blue light, they encounter everyone they cared about in life.
At one end of the small square was the Post Office Building, with the federal court and the U.S. attorney’s office inside. I could see official-looking people, with police, standing on the steps. But they didn’t seem to be coming after me. They were acting like good sports. Evidently, since I had gotten this far without being handcuffed, they were ready to give up the game and let me come to them. They waited while we hugged friends, shook hands with supporters in the crowd, and became engulfed in a tide of press. There was the biggest array of reporters, press photographers, and TV cameras I’d ever seen. They were all around us; there was no front line to address. But I spoke into a tangle of microphones that was held up somehow to my face, and I gave my statement. Patricia, pushed close to me by the crowd, didn’t have to take over. I said:
In the fall of 1969 I took the responsibility, on my own initiative, of delivering to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the information in the so-called Pentagon Papers, including the studies of U.S. negotiations, which have not been revealed to any newspaper. Until that time these studies were accessible only to me and to a few dozen other individuals. By this spring—two invasions later—after some nine thousand more Americans and several hundred thousand Indochinese had died, I could only regret that I had not, at that same time, revealed this history to the American people through the newspapers. I have now done so: again, on my sole initiative.
All these acts contradicted the secrecy regulations and, even more, the in- formation practice of the Department of Defense. However, as a responsible citizen I felt I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I acted of course at my own jeopardy, and I am ready to answer to all the consequences of my decisions. That includes personal consequences to me and my family; whatever these may be, they cannot after all be more serious than the ones that I, along with millions of Americans, have gladly risked before in serving this country.
This has been for me an act of hope and of trust. 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 by Americans in Indochina.
At the end, as we made our way through the crowd toward the federal building, a reporter asked me, “How do you feel about going to prison?”
I said: “Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end the war?”
We walked up the steps where the officials were waiting. Some of them were smiling. They didn’t bother to put on cuffs; the moment for that picture had passed. They waved us inside, and the doors closed on the crowd cheering outside. The people were still waiting, and they cheered again as I came out two hours later, released on $50,000 bail without surety to await further arraignment and trial.
***
On Tuesday morning, June 29, while the Supreme Court was considering the Pentagon Papers cases, the Monitor published its own story based on the study, billed as the first in a series of three. I knew that Dad would be very happy to see his Christian Science paper, in effect, endorsing my action.
Tuesday night, June 29, Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska cast his whole vote, twice: first on the Senate floor, where he was the only senator to attempt a filibuster against the war and finally the only one to accept the Pentagon Papers from me and try to read them into the record; and second, later that night, in a hearing of the Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds of the Senate Public Works Committee that he had hastily called.
He had rushed up from the Senate gym on Friday, June 18, to take a phone call that his aide suspected was from me. (The Washington Post published its first story that morning and was clearly about to be enjoined.) Without introducing myself, I asked him from a pay phone whether he was serious about conducting a filibuster, and if he would like to use the Pentagon Papers for this purpose. He said yes to both questions firmly. On June 24, Ben
Bagdikian, despite his qualms as a journalist, carried out his promise to me to transfer the box with a second set of the papers to Gravel (from one car to another in front of the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue).
At 5:55 P.M. on Tuesday, June 29, Senator Gravel was blocked by a Republican parliamentary maneuver from launching a one-man filibuster in the Senate chamber that he meant to last till the draft expired thirty hours later on Wednesday midnight. He proceeded to use his whole influence, as no other senator had dared. He called a night hearing of the obscure subcommittee of which he was chairman and, as the only senator present, began reading the Pentagon Papers into the hearing record at 9:45 P.M. in front of television cameras. He inserted the rest of the papers that Bagdikian had conveyed to him into the record as he adjourned the one-man hearing at 1 A.M. Then, with the help of his staff, he distributed great bundles of previously unpublished top secret documents to a crowd of newsmen and to the Associated Press, which put them on its news wire across the country. He did this without the assurance of congressional immunity for these actions, and with a strong prospect (partly realized) of ostracism by his colleagues, with possible censure or loss of his seat. As the Supreme Court justices prepared to rule that morning, news bureaus all over Washington and elsewhere were readying stories based on the classified material the senator had handed out.
That same Wednesday morning, June 30, as the Monitor published its second installment, the Long Island afternoon paper Newsday published new revelations we had given it over the weekend. It became the last newspaper to risk Justice Department action, just as the Supreme Court that afternoon?by a 6-3 vote (both Potter Stewart and Byron White joining the majority)—voided all the injunctions on constitutional grounds and cleared further publication of the Pentagon Papers, which began the next day.