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.
***
On Tuesday, March 2, I was back in McGovern’s office. He told me that though he knew he’d said he wouldn’t discuss it with anyone else, he had decided he had to have legal advice, so he had gone to his close friend Gaylord Nelson, who was a lawyer. I kept a poker face as I heard this, but I could see where it was heading. I asked, “Did you mention my name?”
“I wasn’t going to, I didn’t say who had given me the material. But strangely enough, when I mentioned that it was a former official, Gaylord asked, ‘Was it Dan Ellsberg?’ So I said yes.”
So much for the vows of silence the week before. I asked if Nelson had mentioned that he had met with me, and he said no, just that Gaylord said he, McGovern, was a presidential candidate and just couldn’t do a thing like this. “He felt very strongly about it, and he convinced me.”
I didn’t argue. I wished him well on his campaign and left his office with no hard feelings. I really did understand. It was funny to hear that he had received his advice from Gaylord Nelson. I didn’t think the advice was payback for my parting shot to Nelson; it was consistent with what I’d heard from him earlier in our conversation. The truth was, I thought, McGovern would have heard the same advice eventually from almost anyone he asked. I couldn’t even say it was wrong. I didn’t want to derail his campaign, which was obviously a very important medium for opposing the war. In some other year McGovern would have been the most promising member of Congress for my purposes, as his own first reaction had indicated. But it was plausible that if it was going to be a senator to deal with this year, it would have to be one who wasn’t running for president. I had Senator Mathias in mind, and Senator Mike Gravel, who had replaced Senator Gruening and written me a letter congratulating me on my New York Review of Books article. I went over to Mathias’s Senate office that same day.
Mathias and I hadn’t talked for almost a year, since our plane ride back from St. Louis to a capital city filled with tear gas during the Cambodian invasion. But we’d both formed a good impression of each other during that trip, from our speeches and our talk on the plane, and we started our conversation that afternoon on a tone of mutual trust. Very quickly he was telling me in confidence that he was ready, as a Republican senator, to lead a movement against the war.
“That was the way Joe McCarthy had to be brought down,” Mathias said. It had to be from the right, or rather, from the center, by another senator, and it had to be a senator from his own party, Senator Flanders. That was the way it had to be done. That’s what we need now, on the war. And I’m ready to do it.”
I was impressed, and I congratulated Mathias on his resolve. To take on an incumbent president from one’s own party on any issue—an ongoing war, to boot—took guts. Senator Goodell had just been drummed out of that party and, in the midterm election the previous fall, lost his seat for his challenge to the White House on the war. Mathias was proposing to step into those shoes.
Well, I had something that might help him. After I’d told him about the study and what might be done with it, his response was that the historical study I was describing wasn’t challenging enough to do the job. (I feared that myself of course by 1971).
“That’s history. It’s the Democrats. I need revelations about Nixon’s policy Don’t you have anything on Nixon directly?”
I did, as it happened. Not as much as I wanted, but better than nothing. I told him about the options paper and NSSM-1. I explained that the NSC documents I had didn’t prove the case, but they did foreshadow Nixon’s secret strategy, by showing interest in invasion of Cambodia from the very beginning of the administration and by showing that the White House had been warned at the outset of the limits of Vietnamization and the need for prolonged U.S. ground troops and indefinite U.S. air support.
Mathias was excited. He wanted the documents I was describing right away. Even if they didn’t prove anything definitively, the drama of revealing them would lay down a challenge to the White House and open the debate on a strong note. I went through the usual discussion of the legal implications for me and my willingness to go to jail on this—if anything, NSSM-1, as a relatively current document from the incumbent administration rather than “history,” seemed more certain to provoke a prosecution—and at this point, exactly like McGovern, he brought out the Constitution and read me the same passage: He could not be questioned. So the administration would not learn the source of his documents from him.
I hadn’t brought a copy of either the options or NSSM-1 with me to Washington, but I remembered that I had given a copy to Norvil Jones for Fulbright. At the end of our discussion, I went over to the Foreign Relations Committee and told Jones that I needed to retrieve it. It was in a large manila envelope in a safe; Jones gave it to me. I took it right back to Mathias’s office and handed it over to him and his assistant. It was a fairly bulky package, about five hundred pages. Mathias glanced through it and was very enthusiastic and appreciative. He said he and his aide would read through it and decide how to proceed. I repeated my offer of the Pentagon Papers as well, but he didn’t even want to deal with them. They weren’t as relevant; what I was now handing him was just along the lines of what he needed.
However, over the next couple of months I called Mathias’s aide twice, to hear what was happening. He said they were still strategizing and laying the foundations for the campaign. It sounded good, but after my experience with Fulbright and McGovern, my hopes were not high.
***
In the late evening of Tuesday, March 2. 1971, after my afternoon talk with Mathias, I called Neil Sheehan at his home in Washington, D.C., and asked him if he could put me up for the night. He said he had a den in the basement with a sofa bed I could use. When I came over, he showed me downstairs, and I helped him make the bed up with blankets and sheets. But I didn’t use it until dawn. We talked all night.
We started on an article he had just written on war crimes for the New York Times Book Review. But what came through was his passionate involvement with the war, his feeling that it had been a terrible mistake and a waste of lives on both sides, his intense desire to see it over. I hadn’t run into this kind of urgency among journalists before, except for David Halberstam, or in many people outside the active antiwar movement. Sheehan’s very readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes, and that the war itself might be a crime, already stamped him as having one foot in that movement.
Before the night was over, I had described to him the McNamara study, and told him that I had it, all of it. 1 told him of giving it to Fulbright, and where that stood, and that McGovern had agreed to use it, then changed his mind. (I didn’t mention that Mathias had rejected it just that afternoon in favor of NSSM-I) He was eager to see the study. He couldn’t promise that the Times would use it, but if it was all that I said it was, he believed it would. I said I would show it to him in Cambridge, and we made a date for him to come up.
A week earlier, back in Cambridge, I had received a call from a reporter on the Boston Globe, Tom Oliphant. My article in the New York Review of Books had caught his attention, and he asked to come over for an interview. I went over my analysis of Nixon’s strategy and my concerns about where the policy was heading. I described to Oliphant how Nixon’s secret threats fitted into a pattern of failed threats and escalations that had lasted over twenty years, and I told him—what I hadn’t mentioned in the article or anywhere else—of the secret study of that whole period I had worked on and later read in its entirety. I’d never mentioned this to a reporter before, and I didn’t intend to say much about it in this conversation. I didn’t, of course, say that I’d copied it or had access to it. I just wanted to indicate that my warnings about the war were based on more than intuition. Oliphant seemed struck by a comment I made that the other two people who had read this whole history had drawn much the same policy conclusions from it as I had. He asked me who they were, and I told him Gelb and Halperin (since both of them were now out of the government). This exchange took only five or ten minutes out of a discussion that lasted well over an hour, and I didn’t think much about it till I saw his story the following Sunday, five days after talking to Sheehan.
The headline on Oliphant’s story on March 7, 1971, was: ONLY 3 HAVE READ SECRET INDOCHINA REPORT; ALL URGE SWIFT PULLOUT. In his lead he described the secret review of the history of the war ordered by McNamara and said, “Several individuals in the government at the time read parts of it, but as far as can be determined, only three men read every word of it. Significantly, every one of them today is of the opinion that the United States should withdraw from Indochina unilaterally and swiftly. Moreover, every one of them, before deciding to leave government service . . . held sensitive jobs during the formative months of the Nixon Administration.”
After talking to me in Cambridge, Oliphant had gone to Washington to interview Halperin and Gelb. In the article he described their jobs under Nixon in 1969 and said that the following year, after the invasion of Cambodia, they had coauthored “a widely quoted article for the Washington Post, entitled ‘Only a Timetable Can Extricate Nixon.’” He added: “Last month . . . [Halperin] signed on to run the ‘peace office’ at Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby established by John Gardner, which two weeks ago announced its intention to join the fight for a unilateral withdrawal from Indochina.” He quoted Halperin as telling him, “I think the President is not getting out. I think the present policy runs grave risks of further escalation, and I think it’s splitting the country apart. Read that recent State of the World message. It’s all there. I believe the President. He means what he says, namely, that we’re not getting out.”
Oliphant quoted me as saying that the study had had “an enormous effect” on my views. When I had started working on it, “I viewed the war as a well-intentioned effort, reasonable, though in retrospect, mistaken. But it soon became completely clear that American [decisions] were really a series of desperate gambles actually perceived as such by those who made them at the time.”
“Looking back on his involvement,” Oliphant wrote of me, “he said quietly during an interview, ‘I was participating in a criminal conspiracy to wage aggressive war.”‘ He ended his piece with my comment on Nixon’s current strategy: “‘In my opinion, it is a criminal policy.”‘
When I read this article, I suspected that it might draw the attention of the White House. Sure enough, Oliphant told me that the day it appeared Kissinger had called the Washington office of the Globe with inquiries about the article. Oddly, he had wanted to emphasize that Dan Ellsberg had never been a member of the NSC staff (the article didn’t say I was). I also realized that it was the first time, as far as I knew, that the McNamara study had been mentioned in print. (It turned out later there had been two brief references to it earlier—one by Lloyd Shearer—but this was the first article on it.) It presented me with something of a crisis.
I’d discussed the study with Kissinger the previous August at San Clemente. He could quickly infer that if I were describing it in public now, along with my interpretation of its bearing on Nixon’s secret policy, I might be about to release it myself, if by any chance I still possessed a copy after leaving Rand. The same applied to the FBI, which for some reason hadn’t sought to interview me after approaching Carol a year ago. I didn’t know then that a year earlier the FBI had discussed with Rand a report that I had copied the study and given it to Fulbright and Goodell; I still don’t know whether the FBI had informed
Kissinger in 1970 of this report or its discussions with Harry Rowen. But even without knowing this, I guessed that this story would be a red flag both to the White House and to the FBI. That meant that my apartment might be visited any minute by the FBI, with a search warrant or perhaps without one. For a year and a half my greatest fear had been that the FBI would swoop down and collect all my copies of the papers before they had been released by the Senate or elsewhere. Now, thanks to this article, that might happen within days.
I’d made at most three copies of large parts of the study, only two of some parts. After giving a complete set to Fulbright, I had just one or two copies left. I no longer had access to a private Xerox machine. I had put off, again and again, making more copies at a commercial shop because I had a feeling that the day I did it might be a day or two before the FBI turned up. I was afraid that a stray remaining top secret marking or a casual reading of the documents might result in a call to the police from the copy shop.
I showed the article to Patricia and told her what might be coming shortly. She said, more pungently than usual for her, “You’ve been talking about making more copies of those papers for months; now you’d better get off your ass and do it.” She offered to help. We went immediately to her younger brother Spencer’s apartment, where I’d stored the box of papers. It was going to be a job just to put them in order. I pulled out a section to leaf through. Just as I’d found in New York, on one of the first pages I looked at I found a top secret mark that had escaped my “instant declassification” techniques. There was nothing to do but go through every page once again, seven thousand of them.
Patricia took them over to a copying service in Harvard Square while I kept at it. It took all night and into the next morning. If there was a need to do this at all, it had to be done fast, before the FBI reacted to the article or to the White House or to a call from a copying service.
Big commercial machines were faster than the ones I’d used, but not nearly as fast as they are today, and multiple copies of thousands of pages took time. We needed to spread the work around to get it done quickly. Fortunately there were a number of shops near the square, and several of them stayed open all night. It was exhausting work. We would take turns lying down for an hour in the bedroom while the other kept going through the pages and occasionally scissoring. Every hour or two Patricia would take a load of papers over to one or another of the copy shops or go to pick up the copies.
The premise of this immediate effort was that the FBI, which I knew had known of my copying for a whole year, might well be triggered into tight surveillance of me by the Oliphant story. Catching us in the very act of copying would be a coup for its case. This possibility kept it interesting for Patricia to pick up the copies. Each time she came back to a shop there was the chance that the FBI would be waiting in the back room. By this time we had probably taken care of the markings or nearly all of them, but a lot of the content was unusual enough to attract the notice of anyone who bothered to read it. There were many references to plans and recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Special National Intelligence Estimates by the CIA. What if somebody happened to read a little of what he was copying and got nervous about it? That was really why I’d hung back so long from having extra copies made. The top secret markings alone I could take care of, but there was no way to assure that documents with headings like these wouldn’t ring an alarm bell for someone who took a look at it. So the pickups involved a good deal of suspense for Patricia.
Once we had our copies back, sorted them out, and put them in order in separate boxes, I had to find places to store them. One box went to my brother in New York. Others went to friends’ attics or basements in the area; almost none of them was told what was in the box, just that they were papers I needed stored.
***
When Neil Sheehan came back to see me in Cambridge on March 12, I was sleepless from the nights spent making extra copies. Oliphant’s article had significantly heightened my sense of anxiety—from the fear not of going to jail but of losing control of my copies before they could be released.
I took Neil over to Spencer’s apartment, where I was storing copies, and showed him into the study. He had taken a room at a motel off Harvard Square. He could see at once, leafing through the pages, that the papers lived up to my description. To promote them to the Times, he said, he had to go through most of them, which would obviously take time. He asked to make a copy, but I didn’t want that to happen—not yet.
There were two key considerations in my mind. On the one hand, I was determined, one way or another, that a large mass of the documents themselves should become available to the public. I was skeptical about whether the Times would be willing to do that. At the same time, I was afraid that if the papers went to the Times before the management had made any commitment or even had developed an inclination to publish them, someone is there would inform the FBI, or the bureau would somehow get wind of it and come after my other copies.
If the newspaper was (1) committed to publishing and (2) planning to publish large sections of the study, with actual documents, then the loss of my other copies (and my own indictment) would be no great problem as far as I was concerned. But if it was not the case that both these conditions obtained, then the loss of the other copies, and surveillance of me by the police, would mean that the game would be over as far as publication outside Congress was concerned. The longer the documents were there, without a decision, the more people would learn about them and see them, and the bigger the chance that one of them would inform the government. The upshot of these calculations was that I didn’t want any large amount of these papers to go to the Times Building unless and until someone high up there had decided the newspaper was ready to publish, and to publish large quantities of them.
I was counting on Neil to serve as the Times’s representative on this. I was ready to let him see the documents as much as he wanted and to take notes. But I wouldn’t let him make a copy to take back to the newspaper.
It seemed obvious that he couldn’t give me a commitment on this right away, as he pointed out. He would have to give his editors a good picture of what there was, and there would have to be high-level discussions of what it meant for the Times. Moreover, I told him, I knew that a guarantee could never be absolute. On something like this, I understood that however surely they promised and actually intended to carry it out, they could always change their minds at the last moment. That was a risk I would accept at the point I gave them the papers.
I told him, “When I let you copy these and take them off, I’ll be resigned to the fact that I’ve lost any control over them. That copy is out of my hands. For practical purposes, they’ll be yours [i.e., the Times’s], to do with as you choose. I can’t affect that; that’s the way I’ll look at it. I couldn’t keep you from printing, in whatever form, and I couldn’t make you print. So my giving you a copy will be my agreement to letting the Times have them and print them, as it chooses. In effect, it will mean giving my OK in advance to whatever you do.”
I knew I couldn’t make “conditions” in the sense of written, contractual guarantees that could be enforced by any sanctions. But on two points, before I agreed to giving the Times a copy of the study, I wanted assurances as strong as I could get: first, that the paper did intend to publish something; second, that it would be a “big story,” with a great deal of space allotted to it—that it would not be just a single day’s story, large or small, but a multi-part project that could do justice to the text and documents, pages and pages of print. In a later meeting Neil assured me that if the Times did go ahead and print, it would be as “big” as I could want. He even went beyond that to assure me that it would print the documents verbatim. I hadn’t made that a condition on the same level as the others, but he knew it was something I wanted very much, and he agreed with me. I also asked that the Times give “serious consideration” to publishing the entire study eventually through a book-publishing arrangement.
We didn’t talk about protecting me as the source. I took it for granted that it would do that, up to a point, and 1 didn’t ask for any special measures if it came to the paper’s facing legal pressures. I didn’t want credit either as a source or as a participant in the study, but I didn’t make any requests on how the Times handled that. I assumed that the government would know, or assume, that I was the source. But I told Neil what I had told the senators: that I didn’t want to taunt the government into prosecuting me if otherwise they were inclined not to prosecute, whether for political or legal reasons.
Neil’s response to all this was entirely to reassure me about the Times as the best channel for this information—which he obviously thought must be delivered to the American people—and the likelihood, though not certainty, that he would convince his bosses of this. Meanwhile he had to read through the material and take notes. After a while we left him to it. I couldn’t stand over him the whole time. I told him I was counting on him not to go against my wishes, not to take the material over to the square and get it copied. I told Patricia that I really didn’t think he would do it after that. It was a chance I would just have to take. We dropped in on him frequently, and he was always tired but increasingly excited and enthusiastic. He continued to press for the need to copy volumes to convince his editors, but he seemed to accept my limiting him to a few sample pages. After a couple of days he left, with the understanding that he would return soon for a longer stay.
When he did, he brought back the news that his editors were definitely interested, but that – unsurprisingly—there was a lot of debate, uncertainty, and qualms about the project. They needed to know more about the content. That still wasn’t good enough to make me willing to hand over the whole study or even volumes of it. He settled down to read more, take more notes, and prepare himself better to sell them on it. His own attitude wasn’t in question. He never complained about the length or the dry parts. Neil’s obsession with the war was on a par with mine, and for such a person—above all, for a journalist who knew he had been lied to but, like all his colleagues, could never have dreamed just how much—this material was endlessly fascinating.
By the time Neil left again, he was more committed than ever to convincing his bosses that this story deserved unique play, but in several telephone calls from New York over the next few weeks the word he gave me was not very encouraging. They were having trouble deciding and not moving very fast toward a resolution. He still hoped, and in fact expected, that they would eventually move to publish it, but it wasn’t clear how long it might take before they got really serious about it. Neil himself, he told me, had been assigned to work on other stories. (All this turned out to be false.)
In April he called to say that although his editors were still dallying on a decision and he was working on another project, he wanted to keep working on the study in preparation for their eventual decision to use it. He would have to work nights and weekends on it, and he could do that only if he had a copy in New York. Was I ready to let him have one? By this time the continuing escalation of the war had made me feel even more pressed to get the papers out. I had become increasingly doubtful of getting anywhere with Congress. I didn’t count on the Times going ahead, after this much delay, but I didn’t have much of an alternative, and by this time I was ready to take a bigger risk. On that basis, I said yes.
In agreeing to hand over a copy, even in the absence of any assurances that the Times planned to run the story, I was aware, as presumably Neil was, that I was signaling my trust in him to use the material as he saw fit. It was my consent for the Times to publish at its discretion. But in fact, as I learned later, he did not need my consent, or my copy for that matter. What I did not know, what he chose not to tell me, was that the Times had already rented several suites in the New York Hilton, where a team was working over the Pentagon Papers on a crash basis, writing commentaries and selecting parts of the text and documents for inclusion. They had had a full copy of what I had shown to Neil for more than a month.
Parts of this story came out over the next two years (though major parts remain obscure or puzzling to me to this day). Near the end of my trial, on belated discovery, we got the contents of Howard Hunt’s White House safe, which included a chronology by Hunt indicating that Neil and Susan Sheehan in March had checked in under assumed names at hotels in Cambridge and had taken thousands of pages, eventually the entire study, to local copying establishments in Medford and Boston.
One weekend, when he knew I would be out of town with Patricia, Neil had come secretly to Cambridge and used a key to Spencer’s apartment that I had given him. He removed the whole study, and he and his wife took it to a copy shop in Medford.
Meanwhile, unaware of these behind-the-scenes developments, I proceeded with my efforts to raise awareness of Nixon’s policies, while seeking out any promising avenues for getting the papers out.
From Chapter 28: Approaching June 13
Although the Laos invasion had ended in a debacle, Nixon showed no signs of scaling down his objectives or his strategy, which I felt pointed toward still further escalation. In fact there had been disquieting talk of expanding the ground war into North Vietnam in connection with that invasion. Prime Minister Ky had openly called for it. I’d been con- cerned about the prospects and pace of escalation ever since the Son Tay raid in November; the Laos invasion hadn’t surprised me. I was hoping the release of the papers might lend momentum to the McGovern-Hatfield bill in the Senate cutting off U.S. funding for the war. The approach to the Times didn’t seem to be catching hold.
I’d heard Pete McCloskey speak against the war on a couple of occasions and had been very impressed by him. He had a very quiet way of speaking, which underscored the unusually powerful and uncompromising things he was saying. He was an especially valuable member of an antiwar panel because he gave it a bipartisan nature; he was one of the few Republicans willing to criticize a president of his own party. He even spoke of intending to challenge Nixon for the nomination on the issue of the war if it was still going on in 1972.
After we both spoke at a panel at Princeton, I asked to see him privately. It seemed hard to arrange a time. He was just about to fly back to his district in California, and he suggested that I go with him. It would give us several hours together. It seems strange, in retrospect, that I would take a cross-country flight at my own expense just for this opportunity, but that was what I did. I brought a full briefcase with me and handed him several volumes of the Pentagon Papers to read when we were on the plane.
He agreed fully with the importance of getting the study out. He said he would do it on the floor of the House, if necessary. But first he felt he owed it to his committee to try to get it officially. I told him that Defense Secretary Laird had several times refused to give it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he thought he had at least to go through the motions of trying to get it through channels. I gave him the rest of what I had brought, for him to read in California.
When he got back to Washington, he did get his committee chairman to request the study, and he mentioned the study in testimony before the Senate committee, leading Fulbright to complain in open session at his inability to get it and to request it once again from Laird. McCloskey told me that he wasn’t really expecting to get it, but that he had to give the administration some time to respond.
It looked as though I would need a lawyer soon. 1 made an appointment for the last week in May 1971 to see Jim Vorenberg, who was teaching at the Harvard Law School. Patricia knew him slightly because he had been a Harvard Law classmate and friend of her brother-in-law’s. We both went over to his large house in Cambridge in the evening and started with small talk about her sister and brother-in-law. Patricia and I were in easy chairs facing him, in a corner of the living room. I told him my background and of my work on the McNamara study, which I described in some detail. I explained how the history related to Nixon’s policy as I understood it, why it was important for Congress and the public to know it, what I had done so far, and what was in progress. But I hadn’t gotten very far in that last part before he suddenly held up his hand and said, “I have to stop you right now. I’m afraid I can’t take part in this discussion any further.”
“Pardon me?”
“You seem to be describing plans to commit a crime. I don’t want to hear any more about it. As a lawyer I can’t be a party to it.”
The top of my head blew off. I got up out of my chair and said in a low, tense voice, getting faster as I went along, looking down at him: “I’ve been talking to you about seven thousand pages of documentation of crimes: war crimes, crimes against the peace, mass murder. Twenty years of crime under four presidents. And every one of those presidents had a Harvard professor at his side, telling him how to do it and how to get away with it. Thank you, good night.”
I decided to turn to someone else I had met briefly a year earlier, Leonard Boudin, who was also in Cambridge that year, as a guest lecturer at Harvard Law. We had been introduced by the radical lawyer Peter Weiss, who had said flatly, “Leonard Boudin is the most distinguished constitutional lawyer in the country.” He had argued, and won, many civil liberties cases before the Supreme Court. I called him the day after I had talked to his colleague at the law school. We talked in the basement office of the house he was renting in Cambridge. I liked him very much. He heard me out, and at the end he said, “You know, I’m not a hero or a martyr. I’m a lawyer. But I’ve represented people like that. I’ll be happy to represent you.”
***
Soon after this I read in the newspaper that Senator Mike Gravel was planning to filibuster the bill extending the draft when it came up in June. He didn’t yet have any colleagues willing to join him, but he was willing to do it alone. As I said, that was a kind of litmus test of senatorial initiative, as I had come to see it. Southern senators almost routinely, reflexively filibustered civil rights bills, alone, if necessary, yet not one filibuster had ever been conducted against the war. Gaylord Nelson had brushed aside my suggestion, and Senators Harold Hughes and Charles Goodell had told me they would consider it only if they could round up others to join them, as was unlikely.
With only one or two speakers, not only was it certain to fail, but it would look obviously futile and grandstanding, absurd. “And, Dan,” Goodell explained to me, “that is the one thing you cannot afford to do in this chamber: look ridiculous, be a laughingstock.” So here was a new senator, perhaps less socialized in the ways of the Senate, willing to stand up alone and look silly. And on a good issue to protest. What could these old and middle-aged men be thinking of, raising their hands when the draft required their positive assent to be extended, to send more young men to this war in its seventh year?
I’d heard nothing for several weeks from Neil Sheehan about the possibility that the Times might bring out the papers, and before that, only vague optimism on his part. Senator Mathias hadn’t decided yet when or how he would use the copy of NSSM-1 I’d given him. Gravel sounded like the best bet in the near future. I thought I might have to fly to Washington with a set of the papers to give him on Monday. In preparation for that, I got a set from Spencer’s apartment. It was the first time since we’d made copies that I had allowed a set to be in our own apartment at to Hilliard Street.
Saturday night, June 12, we had a date with Howard and Roz Zinn to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the University Theater on Harvard Square. I’d seen it twice before; it was one of my favorite films. That morning I got a phone call from Tony Austin, an editor of the New York Times. He had come up to Cambridge sometime during the previous fall to interview me for a book he was writing on the Tonkin Gulf incidents and their aftermath. He had impressed me with his energy, insight, and determination to solve the mystery of the “second attack” on August 4. On this last point I told him that I doubted if he could fully succeed in dispelling all uncertainty Despite my skepticism I had decided to help him by giving him what I had. I described the McNamara study to him, and without telling him that I had a copy of the entire study, I had let him read an excerpt from it, the volume on the Tonkin Gulf incidents. To my astonishment, he was eventually able to provide conclusive evidence that dispelled any remaining possibility that the North Vietnamese had launched a second attack on our destroyers on August 4. Had he published this in the Times I thought it would certainly deserve a Pulitzer Prize. But he had wanted to save his conclusions for his book The President’s War.
Now on the phone Austin was almost in tears. He said in despair, “Dan, my book is ruined! It’s coming out in a couple of weeks, but my book is sunk. It’s a disaster!”
I told him I didn’t see how that could be. What had happened?
He said, “That study you showed me part of, the Times has the whole study, including that part; they’re starting to bring it out today. The building is shut down tight. They’re checking everybody who wants to come in or out. They’re afraid the FBI will come after them before they can print. They’re expecting an injunction.”
I said that was very interesting. I said I guessed it was a good thing the Times was bringing out the study. But why would that ruin his book? After all, all it would have on the Tonkin Gulf was the volume I’d shown him. He’d gone far beyond that even before his big discovery. If the newspaper printed the whole study, it would raise interest in the history of the war and specifically in the subject of his own book. It would raise questions about the Tonkin Gulf that only he could answer. Maybe the timing was perfect for him.
I was speaking soothingly, trying to reassure him, but he was distraught. He was sure that the Times’s series on the whole war would outweigh his narrow book and smother any attention it might have gotten. I asked him casually if he knew how the Times had gotten hold of the study, but he didn’t. I said, well, let’s hope for the best and see how it comes out, and he hung up.
My heart was pounding. I dialed Neil’s number at the Times. While I waited for him to answer, I was thinking: So they’re worried about an injunction, are they? They’re expecting the FBI any moment, and Neil hasn’t mentioned that to me ; he hasn’t given me any warning over the last week or the last month or, for Christ’s sake, this morning! When was he going to tell me? And I had a full copy in my living room at this moment, for the first time in months!
Neil didn’t answer his phone. Half an hour later, after giving Patricia the news, I called him again. No answer. I called his desk at the paper and left word for him to phone me. I didn’t hear from him that day (or the next).
I had to get the documents out of our apartment. I called the Zinns, who had been planning to come by our apartment later to join us for the movie, and asked if we could come by their place in Newton instead. I took the papers in a box in the trunk of our car. They weren’t the ideal people to avoid attracting the attention of the FBI. Howard had been in charge of managing antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan’s movements underground while he was eluding the FBI for months (so from that practical point of view he was an ideal person to hide something from them), and it could be assumed that his phone was tapped, even if he wasn’t under regular surveillance. However, I didn’t know whom else to turn to that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I had given Howard a large section of the study already, to read as a historian; he’d kept it in his office at Boston University. As I expected, they said yes immediately. Howard helped me bring up the box from the car.
We drove back to Harvard Square for the movie. The Zinns had never seen Butch Cassidy before. It held up for all of us. Afterward we bought ice cream cones at Brigham’s and went back to our apartment. Finally Howard and Roz went home before it was time for the early edition of the Sunday New York Times to arrive at the subway kiosk below the square. Around midnight Patricia and I went over to the square and bought a couple of copies. We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good.
[Previous Chapter, on Daniel’s efforts to release the Pentagon Papers to Congress]