The New York Times yesterday revealed the ins and outs after the exclusion of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War obtained by journalist Neil Sheehan, who died Thursday, January 7 at the age of 84 and who she wanted to keep a secret until his death.
The Pulitzer Prize winner, who was a correspondent in the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1966, died in his Washington home of complications from Parkinson’s disease, his wife Susan told the newspaper.
Sheehan managed to get Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who was in opposition to the conflict, to leak thousands of secret reports showing how the United States was involved in the war for two decades, despite his doubts about the possibility of winning from society.
The largest leak of classified documents in the country’s history led to a series of exclusive Times articles in 1971 that the Richard Nixon government tried to stop by ordering a temporary blockade, which was lifted in a historic Supreme Court decision on freedom of the press. .
For years, Sheehan refused to explain how he got the Pentagon Papers until 2015, when he agreed to be interviewed at home by a journalist on the condition that the story didn’t get out during his lifetime.
The veteran journalist said he defied explicit instructions from Ellsberg, his confidential source, who illegally copied all government documents and told him he could read them, but not copy them.
Sheehan pointed out that the former analyst did not “give” him the papers, but instead took them secretly from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment where he kept them, illegally copied them, and took them to the Times.
At first they agreed that Ellsberg would give them to him and that if the newspaper agreed to publish the story, he would do his best to protect his identity, but at the last minute he withdrew because he assumed he had the would lose control of the papers as soon as he come to the newsroom.
The ex-analyst went on vacation for a few days and allowed the journalist to continue reading and taking notes in his apartment, reiterating that he could not make copies, after which he followed the advice of his wife, a reporter for the magazine New Yorker: “Pass it on to Xerox.”
He had known Ellsberg for a long time and thought he would operate by the same rules as before: the source checks the material. He didn’t realize that I had decided, ‘This man is just impossible. You can’t just leave him in his hands too important and too dangerous, ”Sheehan told the NYT.
The correspondent locked himself up to work in a Manhattan hotel with a growing team of reporters and editors, dragging Ellsberg away without knowing that months ago he had given an excerpt of the documents to one of his colleagues, who published a book. it was preparing. .
It was that colleague, Anthony Austin, who hadn’t told anyone in the paper and realized he was going to get the exclusive, who warned Ellsberg that the first publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Times was imminent. , on June 13, 1971.
Ellsberg tried to contact Sheehan, but he ignored her calls until he learned that it was exclusive in the press and that it would be too late to intervene, so he asked a publisher to tell him when there were 10,000 copies printed, he recalls.
“I had to do what I did,” the journalist stated in the 2015 interview to justify his cheating to Ellsberg, who was torn between his desire to make the documents public and his fear of going to jail, he explained. , and had inadvertently given information to someone.
“It was sheer luck that he hadn’t quite sounded the alarm,” she added.