Section 1 of 3 [00:00:00 - 00:14:05] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)

Al Letson: From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX this is Reveal, I'm Al Letson.

Robert Rosenthal: I was at a friend’s place...

Al Letson: I heard a laugh there, what's the laugh. What's going on at the friends?

Robert Rosenthal: It happens I was also high, I was smoking a joint.

Al Letson: That is our executive director at CIR, Mr. Robert Rosenthal. Now, everybody calls him 'Rosey'. He's talking to one of our reporters, Michael Corey. Rosey's like Clark Kent in our newsroom: mild-mannered, soft-spoken but you get him talking and you realize there is a whole other side of him, like a secret identity. Today, we're gonna tell you his origin story, that conveniently for us, intersects with history. You see, it's 1971, and Rosey is about six months into an entry-level job at The New York Times.

Robert Rosenthal: And the phone rings, and we don't pay it any attention, but then I hear his mother's voice saying "Robert" - she called me Robert - "Robert, it's for you." I'm going "Who knows I'm here? "

Al Letson: It was one of the top editors at the Times. He told Rosey "Don't come into the news room in the morning, go to room 1,111 of the Hilton Hotel."

Robert Rosenthal: "Don't tell anyone where you're going, and bring enough clothes for at least a month." And I was like "What?"

Al Letson: Rosey showed up the next day, and the Times had set up a whole mini-news room in the middle of this giant hotel, where they figured no one would notice them, if they were careful.

Robert Rosenthal: "You're going to be working on a really incredible story that is top-secret, it involves the U.S. government and it's going to be risky." I remember saying "Risky? Why risky?" Within a few hours, I was Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers and looking at things that said 'Top-Secret', 'For Your Eyes Only'.

Al Letson: The Pentagon Papers: a trove of classified documents on the Vietnam War. When The New York Times published them in 1971, it set off a chain reaction that helped bring down a president. It also marked a turning point in how many Americans saw their government. This was the moment when people learned that the government lied, and lied on a grand scale.

Back when Rosey was 22 years old, he had a front row seat.

Robert Rosenthal: That whole experience for me really shaped my career, in terms of taking risk and working with great people and understanding the power of the press. It was fun. It was really fun.

Al Letson: Rosey shares a particular bond with the government insider who leaked the papers: Daniel Ellsberg. The two guys spent more time than probably anyone else on earth secretly copying the Pentagon Papers, all 7,000 pages. Ellsberg and Rosey have known each other for a while, but they've never sat down and talked in detail about their experience. We went to Ellsberg's House.

Robert Rosenthal: Thank you for doing this

Daniel Ellsberg: I'm used to getting filmed here a lot, where they don't have such fancy sound equipment.

Al Letson: They ended up talking for hours. One of the things they remembered was how much work it was to just copy the documents. [It] Took Ellsberg a year.

Daniel Ellsberg: I got very jealous later, of these machines that go...[makes machine noise], and they collate.

Al Letson: Yeah, not that kind of copy machine. This is old school. Open the big, heavy cover, put one page in, close the cover, press start. Wait. Open cover, repeat, 7,000 times.

Daniel Ellsberg: Page by page. Finally it was just too slow, so I would put it in without putting the heavy cover on. Wondering what this was going to do to my eyes, possibly going to go blind, eventually.

Robert Rosenthal: I remember the green light, the green ray, thinking "Is this going to sterilize me?"

Daniel Ellsberg: Oh, so you had the same concern?

Robert Rosenthal: Yeah!

Al Letson: Before Edward Snowden showed us the NSA could spy on all of us; before Chelsea Manning exposed hundreds of thousands of secret, diplomatic cables, there was Daniel Ellsberg. He was the Grandfather, the O.G. - Original Gangsta - whistle-blower. History generally remembers Ellsberg as a hero; a champion of free speech. On the other hand, Snowden is in exile in Russia and Chelsea Manning is in a military prison.

What's the difference? Not as much as you might think.

At the time of the leak, all of the same things people say about Snowden and Manning now: "they're traitors", "they're threatening national security"... people said about Ellsberg too. He was charged with espionage, and he expected to go to prison. Somehow, he got away with leaking classified government documents. But this isn't just a history lesson. You can draw a straight line from the '70s to today; and the debate over government secrets, and what happens to people who expose them.

His Reveals: Michael Corey

Michael Corey: Most of us have at least heard of the Pentagon Papers. What I remember from High School is that they were about Vietnam, they got leaked to the press by some guy name Daniel Ellsberg, and it was a big deal. The Pentagon Papers were a thing and then Watergate happened.

But, if that's what you learned in school, then you missed the important part, and that includes me. I never learned it this way, but, without the Pentagon Papers, there might be no Watergate, and maybe no Nixon resignation. That's the story I'm going to tell today.

First off, who is this guy, Ellsberg?

Daniel Ellsberg: My early life was spent entirely playing the piano, because my mother's ambition for me was that I should become a concert pianist.

Michael Corey: That didn't happen. When Ellsberg was 15, his mother and sister were killed in a car crash. He and his father survived, but he wasn't destined to be a pianist.

Ellsberg didn't start out a radical. Like many young American's in the 1950's, he was deeply patriotic, he graduated from Harvard, did a fellowship in England, then in 1954, he ditched the pacifism of his Christian-Science parents and joined the military.

He didn't mess around. Ellsberg signed up with the Marines.

Daniel Ellsberg: I wanted to see if I was up to it. There was a Marine poster that said "Are you man enough to be a Marine?" And like a a lot of people, I wanted to find that out.

Michael Corey: Ellsberg was up to it. He even re-upped and served on a ship during the Suez Crisis. For a while, his life was basically the Marines, Harvard, the Marines, Harvard. Who does that? Finally, he got a PhD in what's called 'Decision Theory'. It's a dry-sounding corner of academia that asks "How should people make rational choices when confronted with uncertainty?" But, in 1958, this wasn't a theoretical question. It was a question about nuclear weapons. Specifically, the big scare of the time: intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Daniel Ellsberg: That was the period of the so-called "missile gap", where it was understood that the Soviets would have a large force of ICBM's before we did.

Michael Corey: By 1961, Ellsberg had started consulting for the Kennedy administration and was now directly involved in planning America's Nuclear War Strategy. In this era, that strategy was called "First-Strike", meaning we launch our nuclear weapons before the other guy does. Suddenly, instead of abstract research, Ellsberg was deeply engrossed in some of the nations greatest secrets.

He found that in nuclear war, there was plenty of uncertainty, like "How could the President decide quickly in an incoming attack was a false alarm?"

Daniel Ellsberg: If he waits too long, he won't have anything to respond with, so the incentive to get planes off the ground, in particular, and even perhaps to commit missiles is very strong, and yet there's a possibility of a false alarm. That could have meant a war being triggered by these alarms on either side.

Michael Corey: If that sounds like a movie you've seen, you're right.

Daniel Ellsberg: I went with my boss, Harry Rowen, to see Dr. Strangelove, in the afternoon in DC., because it was a working problem [inaudible 00:08:13]

Michael Corey: If you haven't seen Dr. Strangelove, after you finish listening to this episode, drop whatever you were going to do next and watch it. It's a comedy about nuclear war. Hilarious, right?

Dr. Strangelove: If we were to immediately launch an all-out and coordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases, we'd stand a damn good chance of catching them with their pants down.

Michael Corey: In this scene, a rogue commander has launched American planes carrying nuclear bombs and a general played by George C. Scott is arguing that maybe the President should let the planes drop them.

Dr. Strangelove: But it is necessary now to choose between two, admittedly regrettable, but never-the-less distinguishable, post-war environments. One, where you got 20 million people killed, and the other where you got 150 million people killed.

Dr. Strangelove President: You're talking about mass-murder, General, not war.

Dr. Strangelove: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, tops!

Daniel Ellsberg: I remember we came out of that movie, and we both said "that's a documentary." It was a documentary. Everything in that thing, aside from the laughs, everything could have happened just the way...as in the movie. For example, the way that they had no way to call the planes back, once they had given a "go" order.

Michael Corey: Ellsberg wondered if the joint chief-of-staff had ever even totaled up how many people would be killed if the U.S. carried out it's first-strike plan against the Soviet Union and China.

He asked. He figured he'd embarrass them, because there was no way they had done that. But, as he told me and Rosey, it turned out they had.

Daniel Ellsberg: So, that was a total of 600 million, which was 100 holocausts. This was from our first strike. Any fighting with Soviet troops, we carry out this attack first, right away, and kill 600 million people.

Michael Corey: You're 30 years old, you're getting access to documents that say 'Top-Secret, 'Eyes of the President Only', and you have this number in your head. At that moment, if you go back to that, what was your reaction?

Daniel Ellsberg: I remember my reaction very, very well. I thought "this is the most evil plan that has existed in the history of the human species. This is an evil piece of paper, it shouldn't exist."

Michael Corey: Ellsberg knew better than most people that this wasn't just a piece of paper. He knew because he wasn't the kind of analyst who stayed in his office. He had visited the airfields and actually touched one of the bombs.

Daniel Ellsberg: I had seen the planes on alert, ten-minute alert. I had felt one of the bombs, actually. I remember it happened to be lying there on a trolley, and it was warm from radioactivity.

Michael Corey: Ellsberg says he tried to push the Kennedy administration to make the war plan less rigid, but he didn't really get anywhere.

Daniel Ellsberg: I don't think I had any effect.

Michael Corey: If he couldn't get Washington's hand off the nuclear hair-trigger, then the only hope he saw was to keep any small conflict from escalating. It just so happened that there was a "small conflict" that was about to explode in Vietnam.

Richard Nixon: All we can do is help, we make it very clear, but I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw.

Al Letson: When we come back, we pick up the story of the Pentagon papers, next on Reveal, from the Center of Investigative Reporting, and PRX.

Rachel de Leon: This is Rachel de Leon from Reveal. A few weeks ago, you may have heard my story about how colleges pad athletic rosters to meet gender-equity requirements. I focused on UCLA, and found that basically it's numbers are way off. Like many other schools, it's counting male practice players as females. It also counts scores of phantom rowers who are never on the rowing team. This inflates the female athlete count and raises questions about whether the school truly complies with the law. My story could be done at other campuses too. If you want to find out if your school is inflating gender-equity numbers, you can check out a how-to-guide I put together. Just head over to our website: revealnews.org If you do your own investigating, we'd love to hear about it. You can let us know what you find by tweeting us. We're @reveal.

Al Letson: From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson.

On August 4th, 1964, panicked telegrams started pouring into the Pentagon. One of the people reading them was Daniel Ellsberg, focus of our show today. He's the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Those classified documents that revealed how the government lied to the American people and Congress about the Vietnam war.

Now, back in 1964, Ellsberg hadn't done that yet. He was a war analyst at the Pentagon. It was actually his first day on the job, and those telegram messages were coming from a Navy Captain off the coast of Vietnam in the Tonkin Gulf. The Captain said North Vietnamese PT boats; super-fast, armed with torpedoes, were firing at him.

That's what Ellsberg told reporter Michael Corey and our executive director, Robert 'Rosey' Rosenthal.

Daniel Ellsberg: One torpedo, four torpedoes, we're taking evasive action. Ten torpedoes, eventually twenty-two torpedoes had been fired. Then, after an hour and a half, a message comes through in effect saying 'Hold everything. An over-eager radar man has been mistaking the beat of our ships propeller against our wake as we take evasive action as torpedo reports.

Al Letson:

[00:02:00] All of this might have been nothing. There might not have been any torpedoes, but you...

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Section 2 of 3 [00:14:00 - 00:28:05] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)

Speaker 1: Might have been nothing. There might not have been any torpedoes but you wouldn't know it from what happened next. Reveal's Michael Corey picks up the story.

Michael Corey: That night President Lyndon Johnson went on TV to tell the nation that he had ordered air strikes and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, briefed reporters in a midnight press conference.

Robert McNamara: Earlier tonight the President told the nation, the United States would take appropriate action to respond to the unprovoked attacks on the US navel vessels by torpedo boats of North Vietnam. I can tell you that some of that action has already taken place. US navel air craft have already conducted air strikes against the North Vietnamese bases from which these PT boats have operated.

Michael Corey:

[00:15:00] By the time McNamara made that statement he had already had good reasons to question what had happened. It took him decades, but he would eventually acknowledge the whole attack had never happened in the first place, but on this night, if he had any doubts he wasn't showing them.

Robert McNamara: Furthermore, the United States has taken the precaution of moving substantial military reinforcements to South-East Asia from our Pacific bases. We are also sending reinforcements to the Western Pacific from bases in the United States.

Male Speaker: Does that mean ground forces are being put into Vietnam?

Robert McNamara: No, it does not. It means that we are reinforcing our forces there with such additional forces as we think maybe required and we have placed on alert for movement such forces as might be necessary.

Male Speaker 2: Could you repeat that first part about no coups in Vietnam?

Michael Corey: This right here, this was the tipping point that mired America in Vietnam.

Robert McNamara: Combat units have been moved into North Vietnam...

Male Speaker: South Vietnam.

Robert McNamara: I should say South Vietnam.

Michael Corey: [00:16:00] In response to the Tonkin Gulf Incident, Congress authorized the President to do whatever was necessary, order bombing raids, send ground troops. Within a year there were more than 200,000 American troops on the ground. Here's Rosey gain.

Robert Rosenthal: You see this sort of political escalation, and you're inside the Pentagon, and you are aware this is equivocal at best.

Daniel Ellsberg: Yeah, and that they're lying about it.

Robert Rosenthal: Did you ever think, then, "I'm trapped here. How do I get the truth out?" Did that begin the process?

Daniel Ellsberg: No, because not at all on that point.

Michael Corey: [00:17:00] What happened next changed Daniel Ellsberg in ways that would make him the person that would leak The Pentagon Papers. In 1965, Ellsberg was invited to go to Vietnam as part of a State Department study. Just going to Vietnam sets him apart from a lot of Pentagon colleagues, but this wasn't some junket. This was Ellsberg, the former Marine. He stayed in Vietnam for two years. He did some pretty crazy stuff. He drove around on back roads no one thought were safe. He went out on patrol with combat units. He got shelled, got caught in an ambush, and he learned that much of what war commanders were telling Washington was a lie. ...

The Pentagon was getting inflated body counts of how many soldiers we killed, and there were glowing reports complete with tables and charts, reporting statistics on patrols that never happened. ... Ellsberg also talked with the Vietnamese people; saw their fear, and rage. Thousands of civilians were dying, hundreds of thousands. American and South Vietnamese soldiers were burning villages, bombing towns, spraying Agent Orange, and stripping the jungle to dust and sticks. Ellsberg tasted the war and he came home convinced we were never going to win.

Daniel Ellsberg: [00:18:00] The people we were fighting were not going to give up. We weren't going to beat them. They were very good soldiers and they were fighting in their backyard.

Michael Corey: When Ellsberg got back to the United States it was 1967.

News Anchor: The stated purpose of the demonstration was to, again, stop the draft.

Protester: Yeah. [inaudible 00:18:08]

Michael Corey: The news media was full of protesters marching in the streets. ... Ellsberg didn't know it at the time, but ever Secretary of Defense McNamara had concluded Vietnam was a lost cause. McNamara had ordered a secret study about decision making in Vietnam. It was so secret even President Johnson didn't know it was happening. This study, which covered the entire history of the conflict going back to World War II, would later be called The Pentagon Papers. They were looking for researchers who had expertise in Vietnam. They asked Ellsberg to help write it. He didn't have to plan the war anymore. Now he could write about why it all went wrong.

[00:19:00]

Daniel Ellsberg: I was still thinking of this as something that we'd had a right to do and might be doing again somewhere. Obviously, we had not be successful, so the question was what could we learn from our past experience?

Michael Corey: While he worked on the study, Ellsberg was still seeing top secret communications about the war. One day in 1968 he saw a memo from Commanding General William Westmoreland that raised his deepest fears.

Daniel Ellsberg: I knew there was a possibility they're using nuclear weapons. It was being discussed in the White House. I also knew that Westmoreland was asking for a couple hundred thousand more men basically to invade North Vietnam, which would bring the Chinese in which would mean nuclear war.

Michael Corey: [00:20:00] Ellsberg showed the top secret memo to Senator Bobby Kennedy who was running for president. He didn't think he was out of bounds here. After all Kennedy had been attorney general for his brother JFK. Clearly, he had security clearances. A few days later, a story about the troop request showed up in The New York Times. Someone had leaked it. Ellsberg says it wasn't him and he doesn't know who it was, but the story blew up. Democrats in Congress started openly turning against Johnson's war escalation. This got Ellsberg thinking about the power of leaks. Could leaks slow down the war?

Daniel Ellsberg: My idea was one a day so that the President would know that somebody with very high access, which I had at that time, was leaking.

Michael Corey: He though that if Johnson did decide to escalate the war again, he probably wouldn't tell the American people how many troops he really wanted.

Daniel Ellsberg: That's what he had done for three years, at this point, lied every time about what he was actually sending. This time he would know that somebody who knew what he was doing was going to leak it. He couldn't do it secretly. That was my idea.

Michael Corey: Ellsberg had spent years in the inner circle of government secrets, but now the patriotic Cold Warrior went rogue.

[00:21:00]

Daniel Ellsberg: For the first time, now, I break my promise of, not my oath of office, but my contractual promises not to reveal secrets.

Michael Corey: That's important to understand. Secrecy was an article of faith to Ellsberg and everyone he worked with, but he decided, now, that secrecy wasn't his highest duty.

Daniel Ellsberg: Every member of Congress, every member of the armed services, every officer of the armed services, and every official in the Executive Branch takes the same oath. It's not an oath to their president. It's not even an oath to secrecy. It's an oath to defend and support the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Michael Corey: [00:22:00] In 1968, a full three years before The Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg staged his first real leak. He gave New York Times journalist, Neil Sheehan, a report claiming that the US had Vietcong and other communist troops on the run across the country. General Westmoreland had written this report for the White House at the end of the year. Problem is, it was totally wrong. Just a couple of weeks later, the communists suddenly attacked military command posts all over South Vietnam in the Tet Offensive. Not bad for a force that was supposedly all but defeated.

Daniel Ellsberg: I leaked Westmoreland's year-end report, top secret eyes only for the President, saying that we have indeed felled Vietnam of the Vietcong.

Michael Corey: Westmoreland was removed from command the next day. Leaking, it turned out, could work. Though Ellsberg was still running in elite national security circles, he started meeting anti-war activists, and even hanging out at peace rallies. He was leading a double life, peace activist and top secret military researcher.

Daniel Ellsberg: [00:23:00] You've asked what of my understand changed? In the summer of 1969, I read the earliest parts of The Pentagon Papers, which I had put off until last, on the assumption that they were least relevant. In a way, that part had the more effect on me than anything else because it made the efforts seem illegitimate from the start. ...

Michael Corey: [00:24:00] Here's more history I didn't learn in high school. I learned, and maybe you did too, that America got into Vietnam to stop communists in the North from taking over the democratic and independent South Vietnam. We were stopping aggression, right? Not exactly. Vietnam had been a French colony before World War II. Then in 1945, the Vietnamese declare independence. No North. No South. One country. That lasted for about two seconds. The French want their former colony back and ask the Americans for help, but the Americans weren't ready to do that. Colonialism is dying let it go, but then in 1949 China falls to the communists. Could Vietnam, just south of the boarder, be next? Suddenly, the US is ready to help the French, and start pouring in money and supplies.

Daniel Ellsberg: When I looked at that, and I read that history, and I said, "This isn't in the American ideals, so the spirit we're again, empire we're against, colonialism?"

Michael Corey: To Ellsberg, that meant the war was illegitimate from the beginning. He believed that Americans should never have been there. That meant all the people killed there, on both sides, were not causalities of war.

Daniel Ellsberg: The unjustified homicide seemed to me murder, and a process of murder that was still going on. I wasn't interested just in setting the record straight, or putting out history, or something. I was interested in educating people to the need to stop this war.

Michael Corey:

[00:25:00] Around the same time, Ellsberg learned something else that pushed him into action. The new President, Richard Nixon, wasn't actually going to deescalate the war. Nixon wanted leverage for peace talks. He decided a secret expansion of US bombing would be the way to get it. Ellsberg didn't know it at the time but Nixon was even considering a nuclear attack in Vietnam. Nixon talked about with his advisor, Henry Kissinger, in a real Dr. Strangelove moment that actually happened. This recording is from 1972 after The Pentagon Papers were leaked, but it gives you a sense of where Nixon's head was at. The tape is super scratchy but Ellsberg knows it by heart.

Richard Nixon: [inaudible 00:25:26]nuclear bomb. You got that, Henry?

Daniel Ellsberg: [inaudible 00:25:29]You know, old Henry? I would use a nuclear bomb. You got that Henry? Kissinger would say, "Well, Mr. President I think that would be just too much." "Too much, Henry? That's too big? I just want you to think big, for Christ's sake."

Richard Nixon: I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sake. ...

Michael Corey: [00:26:00] It occurred to Ellsberg that the files at his top secret safe at work, The Pentagon Papers, might be a weapon to use against the war. If he could get them to the public.

Daniel Ellsberg: I felt, I have here thousands of papers of documentation of murder. Maybe I can convince people that it is still going on. I asked my friend, Tony Russo, if he knew where there was a Xerox machine.

Michael Corey: Keep in mind, in 1970, a Xerox machine was high-end technology. It wasn't like everyone just had one. It turned out Tony's girlfriend did have one at her advertising agency.

Daniel Ellsberg: We started that night. I took the papers out from my safe and began copying them. I did that for most of the next year. ...

Michael Corey: [00:27:00] He didn't just copy the papers just once. He made a bunch of copies and handed them out to friends to hang on to in case he was ever arrested. He was also showing bits of the papers to historians, think tanks, and pretty soon, reporters. He called his own contact at The New York Times, Neil Sheehan, and told him what he had.

Daniel Ellsberg: I didn't think the Times would do it at this point. Neil Sheehan actually told me in the fall of '70, that he had been taken off Vietnam affairs.

Michael Corey: If Ellsberg could get him a full copy, Sheehan could keep looking into it on the side. Eventually, Sheehan persuaded him to hand over all 7000 pages.

Daniel Ellsberg: He kept telling me that. He says, "No they're not interested. This is back burning as far as they're concerned but I want to keep at it, so that eventually I'll be able to do something with it."

Michael Corey: It turns out the story was definitely not on the back burner. The New York Times was actually putting together a small secret team on The Pentagon Papers. ... That's where Rosey Rosenthal gets pulled back into the story. Remember, he was a 22 year old editorial assistant at the paper when he got that call from a Times editor.

[00:28:00]

Robert Rosenthal: He said, "I want you to come to Room 1111 at the Hilton Hotel tomorrow. Don't tell anybody where you're going..."

Section 2 of 3 [00:14:00 - 00:28:05]

Section 3 of 3 [00:28:00 - 00:52:54] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)

Robert Rosenthal: "[All 00:28:00] tomorrow. Don't tell anybody where you're going, and bring enough clothes for a month or more." Whew! I basically said, "Who is this?" He said, "I'm serious," because I had no idea ... It was a strange phone call.

Daniel Ellsberg: You stayed at the Hilton.

Robert Rosenthal: Yeah, we, I lived in ... I slept in a room with two huge filing cabinets that had thousand ... I slept with the Pentagon Papers.

Daniel Ellsberg: How many other people were doing what you were doing?

Robert Rosenthal: The whole team was probably, when, the time it got finished over twenty didn't ... It was a tremendous amount of pressure, and a sense that, any moment, the FBI could come in and grab everything and arrest everybody.

Michael Corey: [00:29:00] The Times decided to do more than just report about what was in the documents. They wanted people to be able to read the Pentagon Papers for themselves. Back then, the only way to get the documents to the public was to print them verbatim, and that's what the Times was planning to do. It would look like a wall of black test, almost no ads, for page after page after page. The New York Times was about to air out the dirty laundry of four presidents, and no one knew what would happen.

Robert Rosenthal: It was an amazingly elaborate process. They had to set up another room and built a room within the Times to set the type secretly. Actually, they didn't want any, the union people [who 00:29:23] ... They took foremen and managers to set the type secretly.

Michael Corey: Ellsberg didn't know any of this was happening until he got a call on a Saturday afternoon from a Times editor who wasn't on the project. Ellsberg had shown him part of the study, and the editor was planning on using some of it in a book.

Daniel Ellsberg: [00:30:00] He said, "Well, that study you told me about, they have the whole study now." I said, "Oh, really?" He said, "They're coming out with it in the ... The building is locked up. They have private police around here to check everybody who comes in and out, because they're afraid of an injunction." [Said 00:29:58], "Oh, really?"

Michael Corey: This was especially interesting news to Ellsberg because he happened to have a full copy of the papers in his apartment. He usually kept copies spread out in empty apartments with friends he could trust. If the FBI happened to stop by on this day, he'd be caught red-handed.

Daniel Ellsberg: I hang up the phone and I call Neil Sheehan. Neil is not available, so ...

Michael Corey: Do you know who you talked to?

Daniel Ellsberg: Hmm?

Michael Corey: Do you know who you talked to at the Times?

Daniel Ellsberg: No. No. I forget. You?

Michael Corey: Spoiler alert, it was Rosey.

Robert Rosenthal: I answered the phone at the foreign desk and it was about 4:00, maybe, on a Saturday afternoon.

Daniel Ellsberg: Yeah. Right.

Robert Rosenthal: The tension in the newsroom was incredible because of ...

Daniel Ellsberg: Coming out that night.

Robert Rosenthal: Paper was coming out, and the bulldog, the early edition, and we were worried, still, that the feds would come in and stop it. The presses were literally about to start rolling, and I answered the phone, and I hear the voice said, "Is Neil Sheehan there? I have to speak to him. It's urgent, urgent. I need him. Where is he?" You were intense on the phone. I didn't know who it was, but I said, "Who is this?" He said, "It's Daniel Ellsberg," and I said, "Well, hold on," and I put my hand over the phone, and I turned to two of the editors right there and I said, "It's some guy."

Daniel Ellsberg: Was Neil there?

Robert Rosenthal: No.

Daniel Ellsberg: No.

Robert Rosenthal: He was back at the Hilton. I said, "It's some guy who's really, sounds like he has to talk to Sheehan. He said his name is Daniel Ellsberg," and the two editors went white in the face, and they looked at each other, and one of them said, "It's the source."

Michael Corey: The editors waved their arms back at Rosey. "Get rid of the guy!"

Robert Rosenthal: I said, "I don't know, I'll tell him you called," I think I probably said, "I don't know where he is," and hung up.

Daniel Ellsberg: Okay, so Neil is not available, so I then picked up the phone and called Howard Zinn, who I was going to see that night to go see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the fourth time or something, for me, I'd given Howard about a thousand pages of it, and Noam Chomsky about a [thousand 00:31:49], as historians, for their interest. They were keeping it under their bed.

Michael Corey: This next part makes you wonder, "What was he thinking?"

[00:32:00]

Daniel Ellsberg: I said, "Howard, I've got to store some more stuff with you. The FBI may come any minute." I said, "Let me come by your place. I want to drop something off," so somebody else also had given me a lid of grass.

Michael Corey: A lid of grass. That's about an ounce of marijuana.

Daniel Ellsberg: I thought, "Okay, they're going to come any minute, here," so he took the lid of grass there, and I gave Howard the stuff, and then we smoked as much as we could, and threw, and flushed the rest down the toilet.

Michael Corey: Yeah, so while Ellsberg was dodging the FBI in a movie theater, baked and watching Butch Cassidy, the presses were rolling for the Sunday paper.

Al Letson: It's June 13, 1971, and just past midnight, the first edition hits the street. The team at The New York Times is huddled, wondering what comes next. At the White House, President Nixon will wake up to get a briefing he didn't expect.

[00:33:00]

Richard Nixon: Okay. Nothing else of interest in the world?

Alexander: Yes, sir, very significant, this goddamn New York Times exposé.

Al Letson: Next on Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting, and PRX.

Nathan Halverson: This is Nathan Halverson from Reveal. Last year on our show, I discovered how companies from the Middle East are pumping up dwindling water supplies in the Arizona desert and exporting it back to Saudi Arabia in the form of hay. Since then, seven graduate students at Arizona State University have picked up the trail. They produced a new documentary about the business of exporting water from the arid Southwest, and the angry reaction of locals who are seeing their water disappear overseas. You can watch the video and hear my original story on our website. Just go to revealnews.org.

[00:34:00]

Al Letson: From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. It's June 13th, 1971. A team of journalists has been working in secret out of hotel rooms for weeks. It's a Sunday morning, and the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, hits newsstands. Americans are about to learn much of what they've been told about the war is a lie. Reveal's Michael Corey takes it from there.

Michael Corey: At The New York Times, everyone was waiting for the hammer to drop. Robert "Rosey" Rosenthal remembers wondering: "Would the FBI swoop in and confiscate the documents? Will they all get arrested?"

Robert Rosenthal: Nothing happened that Sunday. I remember being in the Hilton with Sheehan and all the reporters, Sunday New York Times, and nothing was happening, and they were bummed. We were all bummed.

Michael Corey:

[00:35:00] You might expect that at the White House Nixon was blowing his stack over this. You'd be wrong. Thanks to all those secret recordings Nixon made, we know exactly what he was thinking. Here he is talking on the phone that Sunday to General Alexander Haig. Just a note: There's some salty language in some of these tapes.

Richard Nixon: Okay. Nothing else of interest in the world?

Alexander Haig: Yes, sir, very significant, this goddamn New York Times exposé. The most highly classified documents of the war.

Richard Nixon: Oh, that. I see.

Alexander Haig: That-

Richard Nixon: I didn't read the story, but you mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

Alexander Haig: This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I've ever seen.

Richard Nixon: Well, what's being done about it, then? I mean, I didn't ...

Alexander Haig: Well, I called-

Richard Nixon: Did we know this was coming out?

Alexander Haig: No, we did not, sir.

Richard Nixon: Now, I'd just start right at the top and fire some people. I mean, whatever department it came out of, I'd fire the top guy.

Alexander Haig: Yes, sir.

Michael Corey: No, he's not happy, but for Nixon, this is more than a little tame, and what he hears next is interesting.

Richard Nixon: [00:36:00] It's something, and it's a mixed bag. It's a tough attack on Kennedy, and it shows that the genesis of the war really occurred during '61.

Alexander Haig: Yeah. That's Clifford. Yeah, I see.

Richard Nixon: It's brutal on President Johnson. They're going to end up at a massive gut-fight in the Democratic Party on this thing.

Alexander Haig: Are they?

Michael Corey: See? Nixon kind of likes the idea that The New York Times is giving the Democrats trouble. This next call is from Monday morning after the Times ran another section of the Pentagon Papers. It's Nixon with one of his White House aides.

Richard Nixon: Hello.

Female: It's Mr. Ehrlichman calling you, sir.

Richard Nixon: Yeah. Okay.

Female: Here you are.

Ehrlichman: Thanks. Hello?

Richard Nixon: Yeah.

Ehrlichman: Mr. President, the Attorney General's called a couple times about these New York Times stories, and he's advised by his people that unless he puts the Times on notice, he's probably going to waive any right of prosecution against the newspaper, and he is calling now to see if he would approve his putting them on notice before their first edition for tomorrow comes out.

Richard Nixon: I realize there are negatives to this in terms of the vote on the Hill.

Ehrlichman: You mean, to prosecute the Times?

Richard Nixon: Right. Hell, I wouldn’t prosecute the Times. My view is to prosecute the goddamn pricks that gave it to them.

Ehrlichman: Yeah, if you can find out who that is.

Richard Nixon: Yeah, I know. I mean, could the Times be prosecuted?

Ehrlichman: Apparently so.

Richard Nixon: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Well, could he wait one more day? They have one more day after that. I don't know. I don't know.

Michael Corey: Next, Nixon calls Attorney General John Mitchell. Mitchell wants to put the Times on legal notice that they're violating the law by possessing or publishing the papers. Nixon finally agrees.

Richard Nixon: Well, look, as far as the Times is concerned, hell, they're our enemies. I think we just ought to do it, and anyway ...

Michael Corey: As Rosey told me, and Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, the Times was about to learn that they had the White House's full attention.

Robert Rosenthal: Monday stories came out, and it got some more attention, but it exploded when Attorney General John Mitchell asked the Times not to publish ...

Michael Corey: How did he ask the Times?

Robert Rosenthal: It was in a brief telegram, in those days, and I happened to be in the room where all the stuff came in, and it's a teletype machine, clack, clack, clack, clack, and it was a telex to Punch Sulzberger, a telegram, basically, requesting ceasing publication because of national security. That was on Monday, and if you go back and look at the [Thursday 00:38:24] ...

Daniel Ellsberg: You saw it? You're the one who saw it coming?

Robert Rosenthal: Yeah, I actually saw it. I ripped it off and ran ... I happened to be there, and I ran down to the foreign desk.

Michael Corey: This set off one of the fiercest debates that has probably ever happened inside a newsroom. Should the Times stop, or should they defy the Attorney General of the United States? They needed to consult with publisher Punch Sulzberger, but at that moment, he was on a plane to London.

Robert Rosenthal: All the editors went up to his office and kept the line open, and I was literally in the room because I had to hold the phone ...

Daniel Ellsberg: Which room? [Where was 00:38:59] ...

Robert Rosenthal: The publisher's office on the eleventh floor of the Times ...

Male: In [crosstalk 00:39:03]-

Robert Rosenthal: ... because they were waiting to see what he would do.

Daniel Ellsberg: You were actually there.

Robert Rosenthal: Yeah.

Daniel Ellsberg: Jesus.

Robert Rosenthal: In the room, and hearing this incredible discussion around what to do.

Daniel Ellsberg: Do you remember anything of the discussion?

Robert Rosenthal: What I recall was a very intense argument, and I kept sitting there going, "I can't believe I'm sitting here." I was twenty-two years old, and I'm listening ...

Daniel Ellsberg: Twenty-two?

Robert Rosenthal: Listening to everything, and it was hot, again, and intense.

Michael Corey: The editors and the paper's lawyers went back and forth. The Attorney General's note said they were violating the Espionage Act. That's serious stuff. Do we have the right to publish classified documents? What good is freedom of the press if we can't do this? Well, what good is freedom of the press if the FBI shuts us down? Are we going to take a financial hit? How much will it cost to fight this? What about our reputation? Is this worth it?

Robert Rosenthal: It's the only time I've ever seen a scene that was out of the movies, because they had to stop the ... It wasn't clear what would happen, so they literally stopped the presses.

Daniel Ellsberg: They did stop the presses.

Robert Rosenthal: Well, they hadn't started, but they delayed them.

Daniel Ellsberg: Yeah.

Michael Corey: The paper's London bureau chief, Tony Lewis, was on the other end from a phone booth at the airport, waiting to snag the publisher as soon as he got in, and that's where one of the most important decisions in the history of journalism got made, inside a phone booth at Heathrow.

Robert Rosenthal: They were waiting to ask the publisher what he wanted to do, and he ordered ... He said, "Let's publish."

Michael Corey: The editors crowded into an elevator with Rosey to go tell the newsroom. The Times top editor was Abe Rosenthal, who's no relation to Rosey Rosenthal, but Rosey's father, who was a prominent journalism professor, had actually gotten Abe his first newspaper job.

Robert Rosenthal: He's in the elevator, and he turns around and he looks at me, and he pokes me in the chest, and he goes, "Don't ever repeat a word you heard tonight to a living person, not even your father."

Daniel Ellsberg: Wow.

Robert Rosenthal: Then he came down into the newsroom, and it was quite dramatic, and he put his hand up and he said, "We're going to publish," and there was literally a cheer.

Michael Corey: On Tuesday, Attorney General John Mitchell was done asking. He went to court and got a temporary restraining order. The Times was now officially banned from publishing the papers until a judge could decide on the case. The Times announced they would abide by the temporary order and stopped publication, but Ellsberg, now very much a wanted man, wasn't done. Nothing in the temporary order said another newspaper couldn't publish the papers, so he leaked them again, this time to the Washington Post. The story led the evening news.

Male: Good evening. The dispute between the government and the press over publication of secret Pentagon documents on the Vietnam War has spread to a second newspaper. The Justice Department, late today, asked for a federal court order to stop the Washington Post from printing any more information from the documents. Here today is [crosstalk 00:42:01] decline [crosstalk 00:42:01] voluntarily from publication.

Michael Corey: Now the Post was sidelined, so Ellsberg gave a section to the Boston Globe. Another injunction. Next, they popped up in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Injunction. Then the LA Times, the [Night Papers 00:42:09], the Christian Science Monitor.

Male: The substance of the Pentagon Papers is virtually lost today in the legal process drama that is rapidly turning into a farce.

Michael Corey: The news media was now in full revolt. After enjoining four papers, the Justice Department couldn't keep up. A new one was popping up as soon as they stopped the last one. More than twenty newspapers eventually published portions of the Pentagon Papers, and once the Supreme Court ruled, the formerly top secret papers, which few had even known existed, were now very public.

Male: Good evening. The Supreme Court said no to the government and yes to the newspaper, voting six to three to let The New York Times and the Washington Post [print 00:42:49] the last of the Pentagon [Papers 00:42:49].

Male: The latest batch of Pentagon Papers shows how deeply the U.S. was involved in Vietnam even during the Eisenhower administration. For example, by 1958, Vietnam ...

Male: One possible way of dealing with all-out Chinese intervention, which was secretly discussed at the time, was with nuclear weapons.

Michael Corey: After the smoke cleared, Ellsberg figured he had failed.

Daniel Ellsberg: No impact on the war. The war went on. It was bigger the next year. The public knew more, and they were even more against the war, but they were already against the war, and that had no effect on Nixon. With the Pentagon Papers alone, nothing.

Michael Corey: That might have been it, except remember Nixon's initial reaction to the Pentagon Papers on that first day? How he liked that the leak might make trouble for the Democrats? That was not a fleeting thought. In that first week, while the Times was under the temporary injunction, Nixon takes this idea over the edge. He's trying to deflect as much of the heat as possible to former president Lyndon Johnson. He wants Johnson to hold a press conference about the Pentagon Papers. Johnson isn't interested, and Nixon is getting pretty steamed about it. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, has an idea.

H.R. Haldeman: You can maybe blackmail Johnson on this stuff.

Richard Nixon: What?

Michael Corey: Maybe they could blackmail Johnson.

H.R. Haldeman: You could blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing.

Richard Nixon: How?

Michael Corey: Haldeman explains that White House aide Tom Huston thinks there might be copies of classified files that would embarrass Johnson at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Richard Nixon: Now, you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it.

Male: Couldn't we go over ... Now, Brookings has no right to have classified documents.

Richard Nixon: I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.

Michael Corey: Did you catch that? Nixon says he wants Huston's plan implemented on a thievery basis. He's ordering his aides to commit a crime on tape by orchestrating a break-in at Brookings. As it turns out, the break-in Nixon asked for doesn't appear to have ever happened, but this sounds familiar, right? This started in motion a chain reaction.

Robert Rosenthal: That gave birth to ...

Daniel Ellsberg: To the [Plumbers 00:45:01]

Robert Rosenthal: ... the Plumbers.

Daniel Ellsberg: To find out what else I had and stop me from putting it out.

Michael Corey: If you don't remember from that history class, the Plumbers were a group of former CIA guys and Nixon loyalists who did illegal work for the President. They famously got arrested while trying to bug Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, but did you ever wonder why they were called "The Plumbers"? Originally, one of their jobs was to stop, and start, leaks, and leak number one was the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg didn't know this at the time, of course. He was more worried about preparing for his trial. He figured he'd be spending the rest of his life in prison, and the government was certainly going to try.

Male: A federal grand jury handed down new indictments today in the case of the Pentagon Papers. The charges were against Dr. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. The former Defense Department aide could receive a maximum of 115 years in prison and fines up to $120,000.

Michael Corey: Ellsberg is a free man today, so he got acquitted, right? Nope, because the trial never got that far.

Male: In Los Angeles today, federal judge Matt Byrne interrupted testimony at the Pentagon Papers trial with a dramatic announcement. Burns said he had received a memorandum from the Justice Department stating that two Watergate conspirators, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, had burglarized the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. ABC's Dick Shoemaker has details.

Dick Shoemaker: The Judge Matt Byrne read the memo to a shocked courtroom. He said the government didn't know if any information from the files was communicated to the prosecution. He wants to know if Liddy and Hunt worked for the White House at the time of the alleged crime. The defense held a hurried conference, and they said the burden of proof is now on the government to show Ellsberg hasn't been compromised. It's certain there'll be a motion for a mistrial.

Michael Corey: I bet you thought Nixon resigned because of Watergate, but that's only sort of true. If the Plumbers had only been caught on the Watergate, yeah, some heads would probably have had to roll, but the burglars didn't actually have any evidence the implicated the president, but Nixon knew that if investigators got the Plumbers talking, they'd find out about the other illegal operations that the White House had authorized, like the planned burglary at Brookings and the Ellsberg break-in.

Daniel Ellsberg: They had to be paid off to keep them quiet and keep them perjuring themselves in front of a grand jury about what other crimes they knew.

Michael Corey: When it comes to Nixon, we all know it was the cover-up, not the crimes, that forced him to resign, and the news media followed every twist and turn as the scandals piled up.

Male: Finally tonight a word about the Watergate, and other matters. When it was learned today that some of the Watergate conspirators had been involved in illegal actions relating to the Pentagon Papers case, the whole affair took on a new and more sinister air. It began with a comic opera burglary of the Democrats, and then, in the past few days, the focus has shifted from the burglary to the much more important question of a possible cover-up in the White House itself, a possible obstruction of justice, and now, with word that these men with connections to the White House were engaged in other illegal practices, one frightening question must be asked: What else did they do, and what else are we to learn?

Al Letson: The public would learn enough about Nixon to end his presidency. As for Daniel Ellsberg, the espionage case against him ended in a mistrial. Reveal's Michael Corey joins me in the studio along with Robert "Rosey" Rosenthal. Hey, guys.

Michael Corey: Hey.

Robert Rosenthal: Hi.

Al Letson: Rosey, this was a personal journey for you. I mean, this started off when you were like in your twenties. I'm not going to say how old you are now, but it's been a little bit of time.

Robert Rosenthal: You could figure it out. Well, I was twenty-two, and for me personally, as a journalist, it really showed me, from the inside, the role of the press in a democracy in terms of challenging power and standing up to it, and also the role of a source who comes forward with information that may be very uncomfortable and even dangerous to publish, and it really informed my entire career.

Al Letson: Ellsberg never intended to take down Nixon. I mean, his idea was that the Pentagon Papers would end the war. Was he successful in that?

Michael Corey: Most historians would say that by the time Nixon resigned, the war was pretty much over for America. We had already withdrawn most of our troops, and we had stopped airstrikes. The big worry was what might happen next.

Robert Rosenthal: Right, and at the time that Ellsberg was really releasing the papers, though, his biggest concern was that the U.S. would escalate, potentially invade North Vietnam and bring in the Chinese, which he feared could lead to a nuclear war.

Al Letson: What's the legacy of all this?

Michael Corey: Well, a lot of what we're seeing today with Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, people call them traitors, they say they're threatening national security, people said all of those things about Daniel Ellsberg. The major difference between them is that he got away with it kind of almost by accident, and I think the other legacy has really been that the administration now, the Obama administration, is much more sensitive to these kind of things than previous administrations have been. There's actually been eight prosecutions, at least, under the Obama administration, for leaks of government information. Before the Obama administration, there had been three since World War I, including Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo.

Robert Rosenthal: Another lasting legacy is the cynicism about the role of government and the secrecy of government, and, again, go back to that period of time, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate capped a period which had seen the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Weather Underground, the Black Panthers. There was a tremendous turmoil, and this just proved, in a way, the Pentagon Papers, that you couldn't trust the government, and I think that's a lasting legacy that's continued, and really helped create a cultural split around whether this was legitimate to release this kind of information, or really the government had the right to withhold it.

Al Letson: That's Reveal's Robert "Rosey" Rosenthal and Michael Corey. Thank you guys for coming in.

Michael Corey: Thanks, Al.

Robert Rosenthal: Thank you, Al.

Al Letson: Before we go, we want to tell you about a podcast from our friends at PRX. HerMoney, with Jean Chatzky. It's dedicated to empowering women to live better by focusing on their finances. Whether you're a woman yourself or you have women in your life that you care about, HerMoney features interviews with inspiring women, like Gretchen Rubin and Arianna Huffington. It's a place to learn about earning more, saving more, investing wisely, and building the financial life you want. Check it out. You can find HerMoney on iTunes, Stitcher, or at jeanchatzky.com. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap for our show today. Now, you can listen to us any time you want by downloading our podcasts at revealnews.org/podcasts. Michael Corey was the lead producer and reporter this week, and our show was edited by [Kat Snow 00:51:59].

[00:37:00] Special thanks to Jeffrey Kimball and Ken Hughes for making sure we got our history right. To Luke Nichter for helping us track down Nixon tape, and to Robert Thompson at the National Archives. Our sound design team is the wonder twins, my man, J Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Claire [C 00:52:15] Mullen. Our theme music is by Camerado-Lightning. Our head of studio is Christa Scharfenberg, Amy Pyle is our Editor in Chief. Susanne Reber is our executive editor, and our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I'm Al Letson, and remember: There is always more to the story.