Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers

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Daniel Ellsberg
My son has it right. He knows the story intimately, having lived through it. These are among the facts I would have told Janny Scott at the New York Times had she asked me for comments before publishing her article.

Robert Ellsberg
“Now It Can Be Told” runs the headline on a breathless New York Times story of how Neal Sheehan got the Pentagon Papers from my father Daniel Ellsberg. Sheehan wanted to counter the usual (accurate) narrative that my father gave the papers to the Times whereas (as he relates in an interview held for publication after his death) by the time my father gave him a full set of the Papers in April 1971 Sheehan had already secretly made his own copy (my father having given him full access in March). In fact my father already told this story in his 2002 memoir SECRETS. There he relates the reason why he initially told Sheehan he could review the papers but not have or make a copy without some assurance that the Times was interested in pursuing the story. While Sheehan expressed his own deep interest, he never, up to the day they were published, let on that the Times was also interested. My father’s concern was not his “fear of jail.” He didn't want copies lying around the Times if they weren't interested, thus increasing danger that the FBI would find out, seize the papers, and put him in jail without the papers getting out. He would have given the papers to Sheehan on day 1 if he had told the truth about the Times' serious interest. Instead, Sheehan said the opposite.

Not only did Sheehan--for mysterious reasons--not give this assurance, but he deliberately (per his account) strung his source along, pretending that he was still trying to interest his editors, while secretly making his own copy, and then preparing them for publication. In April, at Sheehan's renewed request, my father finally took the risk of giving him a copy without conditions. Sheehan did not tell him he had been working on them with a team for many weeks. His interview provides no clear reasons for this ploy. He says his deception was necessary and implies the papers would not have been published otherwise, but that hardly makes. If he was afraid my father would otherwise leak the story, his deception made that more rather than less likely. Absent a signal of interest from the Times my father continued to seek other outlets for them--a risky undertaking which he would have discontinued immediately had Sheehan told him the truth.

Since learning the truth, my father has never reproached Sheehan for his deception, since it all turned out so well--in fact, far exceeding his wildest hopes. "You did what I did,” he told Sheehan. (Not as Sheehan renders it: “So you stole it, like I did.”) My father never considered that he had stolen anything. Yet that sets up a supposed exchange wherein Sheehan tells him, "No Dan, you didn't steal it and neither did I. Those papers are the property of the people of the US..." (As if my father needed such a reminder.) Bottom line: Sheehan and the New York Times played a heroic role in one of the greatest whistleblowing feats in US history before Chalsea Manning and Robert Snowden. Meanwhile my father was arrested and charged with 12 felony counts facing 115 years and the full wrath of the Nixon admin.






https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/pentagon-papers-neil-sheehan.html

Neil Sheehan died on January 7, 2021, at his home in Washington, D.C.. He was 84, and suffered from complications of Parkinson's disease in the time leading up to his death.



Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers

By Janny Scott

Published Jan. 7, 2021Updated Jan. 9, 2021

There was one story Neil Sheehan chose not to tell. It was the story of how he had obtained the Pentagon Papers, the blockbuster scoop that led to a 1971 showdown between the Nixon administration and the press, and to a Supreme Court ruling that is still seen as a milepost in government-press relations.

From the moment he secured the 7,000 pages of classified government documents on the Vietnam War for The New York Times, until his death on Thursday, Mr. Sheehan, a former Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, declined nearly every invitation to explain precisely how he had pulled it off.

In 2015, however, at a reporter’s request, he agreed to tell his story on the condition that it not be published while he was alive. Beset by scoliosis and Parkinson’s disease, he recounted, in a four-hour interview at his home in Washington, a tale as suspenseful and cinematic as anyone in Hollywood might concoct.

It was a story he had chosen not to tell — until 2015, when he sat for a four-hour interview, promised that this account would not be published while he was alive.