First of all, I can say with some confidence that The Times would have done exactly what it did with the archive when it was supplied to us via WikiLeaks: assigned journalists to search for material of genuine public interest, taken pains to omit information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed, and published our reports with a flourish. The documents would have made news — big news.

But somewhat less of it. While in reality The Times and the public benefited from a collegial partnership with London’s Guardian and other papers that took part in the WikiLeaks fiesta, I’m pretty sure that if we had been the sole recipient we would not have shared Manning’s gift with other news organizations. That is partly for competitive reasons, but also because sharing a treasury of raw intelligence, especially with foreign news media, might have increased the legal jeopardy for The Times and for our source. So our exclusive would have been a coup for The Times, but something would have been lost. By sharing the database widely — including with a range of local news outlets that mined the material for stories of little interest to a global news operation — WikiLeaks got much more mileage out of the secret cables than we would have done.

If Manning had connected with The Times, we would have found ourselves in a relationship with a nervous, troubled, angry young Army private who was offering not so much documentation of a particular government outrage as a chance to fish in a sea of secrets. Having never met Manning (he was in custody by the time we got the WikiLeaks documents), I can only guess what that relationship would have been like. Complicated. Probably tense. We would, of course, have honored any agreement to protect his identity, though Manning was not so good at covering his own tracks. (He spilled the story of his leaking in long instant-messenger chats with an ex-hacker, who turned him in.) Once he was arrested, we’d surely have editorialized against the brutality of his solitary confinement — as The Times has already done — and perhaps protested the disturbing overkill of the “aiding the enemy” charge. (If Manning’s leak provided comfort to the enemy, then so does every news story about cuts in defense spending, or opposition to drone strikes, or setbacks in Afghanistan.) Beyond that, we’d have made sure Manning knew upfront that he was on his own, as we did with the last leaker of this magnitude, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame.

“When the government moved to prosecute Ellsberg, we felt no obligation to assist him,” Max Frankel, who was The Times’s Washington bureau chief at the time, recalled the other day. “He was committing an act of civil disobedience and presumably knew that required accepting the punishment. We were privately pleased that the prosecution overreached and failed, but we did not consider ourselves his partner in any way.”