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  In memory of Lynn and Jill

  Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America. He must be stopped at all costs.

  —Henry Kissinger

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  DANIEL ELLSBERG’S FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND ASSOCIATES

  Carol Cummings Ellsberg’s first wife

  Patricia (Marx) Ellsberg Ellsberg’s second wife and partner in activism

  Robert Ellsberg Ellsberg’s son with Carol Cummings

  Mary Ellsberg Ellsberg’s daughter with Carol Cummings

  Dr. Lewis Fielding Ellsberg’s psychiatrist

  Randy Kehler antiwar activist who influenced Ellsberg

  Tony Russo a former colleague from the Rand Corporation and co-conspirator in copying the Pentagon Papers

  Harry Rowen Ellsberg’s boss at Rand

  Lynda Sinay let Ellsberg and Russo use her Xerox machine to copy Pentagon Papers

  John Paul Vann retired Army colonel who showed Ellsberg around Vietnam

  Howard Zinn Boston University professor and antiwar activist

  PRESIDENTS AND THEIR STAFFS

  Harry S. Truman U.S. President from 1945–1953, supported France’s bid to retake Vietnam in 1945

  Dwight D. Eisenhower U.S. President from 1953–1961, opposed elections in Vietnam in an effort to block Communists from taking power

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy U.S. President from 1961–1963, increased the number of American troops in Vietnam from a few hundred to more than 16,000

  Lyndon Baines Johnson U.S. President from 1963–1969

  Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson First Lady

  Hubert Humphrey Vice President

  Dean Rusk Secretary of State

  Robert McNamara Secretary of Defense

  John McNaughton Assistant Secretary of Defense

  McGeorge Bundy National Security Advisor

  Walt Rostow National Security Advisor

  John McCone CIA Director

  Bob Komer aide to President Johnson

  Richard Nixon U.S. President from 1969–1974

  Pat Nixon First Lady

  Tricia Nixon older daughter of Richard and Pat Nixon

  Julie Nixon younger daughter of Richard and Pat Nixon

  Gerald Ford Nixon’s Vice President, 1973–74

  Bob Haldeman Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff

  John Mitchell Attorney General, later Nixon’s campaign manager

  Henry Kissinger National Security Advisor, later Secretary of State

  Mort Halperin National Security Council staff member

  Melvin Laird Secretary of Defense

  Ron Ziegler White House Press Secretary

  Erwin Griswold Solicitor General

  Charles Colson White House Counsel

  John Dean White House Counsel

  John Ehrlichman Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs

  THE PLUMBERS

  Egil Krogh White House aide, head of Special Investigations Unit, also known as “the Plumbers”

  G. Gordon Liddy formerly of the FBI

  Howard Hunt formerly of the CIA

  David Young of Kissinger’s staff

  Kathy Chenow Plumbers’ secretary

  “Steve” specialist with the CIA’s technical services

  Bernard Barker recruited by Plumbers to break into Dr. Fielding’s office and the Watergate

  Felipe DeDiego and Eugenio Martinez anti-communists working with Barker

  James McCord former CIA technician who worked with the Plumbers

  U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL

  General Earle Wheeler Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1964–1970

  John McConnell Air Force Chief of Staff

  General William Westmoreland Commander of U.S. military operations in Vietnam, 1964–1968

  Admiral Ulysses Sharp Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Pacific fleet, 1963–1964

  Captain John Herrick Commodore of the USS Maddox and Turner Joy

  Commander James Stockdale pilot in the Gulf of Tonkin, prisoner of war (POW)

  Lieutenant Everett Alvarez pilot, first American POW in Vietnam

  Lieutenant Philip Caputo one of the first marines to fight in Vietnam, later a journalist

  John McCain prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton, later U.S. Senator

  John Kerry first Vietnam veteran to speak against the war in Congress, later presidential candidate and Secretary of State to President Barack Obama

  General Victor Krulak U.S. Marines, demonstrated the flaws in General Westmoreland’s attrition strategy

  U.S. CONGRESS

  Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR), early objector to American involvement in Vietnam, cast the sole opposing vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

  Senator William Fulbright (D-AR), helped steer the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, later regretted his participation and considered releasing the Pentagon Papers

  Norvil Jones, aide to Senator Fulbright

  Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), ran against Johnson for president in 1964

  Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL), powerful senator, friend to Lyndon Johnson

  Senator George McGovern (D-SD), antiwar senator, later presidential candidate, considered taking the Pentagon Papers public

  Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK), read sections of the Papers into public record

  IN VIETNAM

  Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Tat Thanh) President, North Vietnam

  Nguyen Van Thieu President, South Vietnam

  Le Duc Tho North Vietnamese negotiator

  Bui Diem South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States

  THE PRESS

  The New York Times

  Neil Sheehan Reporter, broke Pentagon Papers story

  Abe Rosenthal Managing Editor

  James Goodale General Counsel

  Hedrick Smith Reporter, worked with Sheehan on Pentagon Papers

  Arthur Sulzberger Publisher

  Louis Loeb attorney for the New York Times

  The Washington Post

  Katherine Graham Publisher

  Ben Bradlee Executive Editor

  Ben Bagdikian Assistant Managing Editor

  The Boston Globe

  Thomas Winship Publisher

  Tom Oliphant Reporter

  CBS News

  Gordon Manning Vice President

  Walter Cronkite Anchor

  THE COURTROOM

  Matthew Byrne Presiding Judge in the case against Daniel Ellsberg

  Murray Gurfein Presiding Judge in case against the New York Times

  Alexander Bickel and Floyd Abrams Attorneys, defended the New York Times in Pentagon Papers case

  Charlie Nesson Defense Lawyer for Daniel Ellsberg

  David Nissen Chief Prosecutor in the case against Daniel Ellsberg

  PROLOGUE

  FEASIBILITY STUDY

  THEY CAME TO CALIFORNIA TO RUIN A MAN. Not to kill him, not literally. But the next best thing.

  On a summer day in 1971,
two men in wigs and glasses strolled along a sunny sidewalk in Los Angeles. One had a black mustache and walked with a limp. The other carried a camera on a strap over his shoulder.

  They stopped in front of a three-story building of brick and glass. The man with the mustache posed beside the entryway, smiling like a tourist while his friend snapped a series of surveillance shots. They quickly repeated the process in front of alternative entry and escape points—low windows and the door in the back.

  As they headed to their hotel, the mustached man’s limp grew increasingly pronounced and by the time they reached the lobby, he was struggling to keep up. After shutting the door of their shared room, he yanked off his shoe, causing a heel-shaped hunk of lead to drop to the carpet. He pulled off his wig and glasses. The mustache stayed on; that part was real. This was G. Gordon Liddy, former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  The photographer, a retired Central Intelligence Agency agent named Howard Hunt, sat down to take notes. All that remained was to visit the target building under operating conditions. That is, at night.

  Hunt and Liddy were part of a secret team working directly for the president of the United States. The focus of their mission was a man named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was all over the TV news that summer, and his blue eyes blazed from the covers of magazines. The press was calling him brilliant, intense, unpredictable. Some said he was a hero; some said the exact opposite. The president considered Ellsberg a traitor. At a White House meeting, the president’s top foreign policy advisor put it bluntly: “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America. He must be stopped at all costs.”

  Precisely what Hunt and Liddy were planning to do.

  After dark the operatives got back into their disguises. Liddy refused to put the lead hunk into his shoe—the limp-inducing device was part of his cover, designed to distract passersby from his face, but it was just too painful. He did, however, plan to try out a different piece of espionage equipment loaned to him by the CIA, a tobacco pouch with a miniature camera hidden in the bottom, and a hole for the camera lens.

  They walked out into the warm summer night. It was just a few blocks to the building. The front door was not locked. Liddy pulled the tobacco pouch and a pipe from his pocket, and stuck the pipe in his mouth.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor and started down the dark hall toward the office of a psychiatrist named Lewis Fielding. A woman stepped out of a different office, holding cleaning supplies. Hunt thought she looked Mexican American.

  “Señora,” Hunt began, “somos doctores y amigos de Doctor Fielding.”

  The woman, Maria Martinez, seemed unconvinced these visitors were really doctors and Fielding’s friends.

  Hunt continued in Spanish. “With your permission, we would like to go into his office for a moment and leave for him something he has been expecting.”

  She hesitated.

  “Please, we promise not to take anything.”

  Shrugging, she said, “Very well, caballeros.”

  Martinez unlocked Fielding’s door and flicked on a light in the small reception room. Liddy entered with his tobacco pouch. Martinez stood by the door, expecting him to drop off his delivery and come right out. He didn’t come out.

  “What’s he doing in there?” she asked.

  “Writing a message to the doctor,” Hunt said.

  She took a step into the office just as Liddy strode out.

  “Well, I left it,” he said.

  Hunt thanked the woman and tipped her. Liddy snapped a few photos with his tobacco pouch as they walked toward the exit.

  “Did you have time to get any shots?” Hunt asked.

  “A few, but Jesus, I kept thinking she was going to charge in on me!”

  Anyway, it all looked fine, Liddy reported when they got outside. The filing cabinets had locks, but they were child’s play. If the information they needed was in those files, it was there for the taking.

  The men drove to the airport to catch the red-eye back to Washington. They could report to the White House with confidence that the operation to destroy Daniel Ellsberg was most definitely feasible.

  PART I

  INSIDER

  COLD WARRIOR

  WHAT COULD DANIEL ELLSBERG possibly have done to provoke such wrath—to be seen as such a threat? The story begins twenty-six years earlier, as World War II came to an end and the Cold War began. Ellsberg was just starting ninth grade at a prep school near Detroit, Michigan.

  He did not, at that time, appear particularly dangerous.

  “Kind of a nerd,” is how one classmate described him.

  “Very intense,” another recalled. “Very studious and very interested in a lot of things.”

  A scrawny teen with dark curly hair, Dan was shy and quiet and had the unusual habit of walking around campus in a double-breasted suit, carrying his books and papers in a black briefcase. To classmates, he seemed obsessed with absorbing information and new ideas. But Dan did make an effort to branch out, landing the role of a wisecracking detective in the school play. He joined the bowling and rifle clubs. He gave soccer a try.

  Daniel Ellsberg, age 16

  “I was terrible at soccer,” he recalled.

  Like many of his peers, Ellsberg was riveted by the rise of the Cold War. The global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified quickly during Ellsberg’s high school years, as Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin installed communist dictatorships in the countries of Eastern Europe, violently crushing calls for freedom in any land under his control. Ellsberg admired President Harry Truman’s response—a commitment to supporting democracies and containing Soviet influence from spreading further.

  “I had become,” Ellsberg later said, “along with many other Americans, a cold warrior.” In 1949 the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, using plans stolen by spies from American labs. That same year Communists took power in China, the world’s most populous nation. Then, with Soviet and Chinese backing, communist North Korea invaded democratic South Korea in 1950. In the Korean War, U.S. forces helped push back the invasion, but at a cost of more than thirty-six thousand American lives. The Cold War was clearly going to be a long and bitter fight. Daniel Ellsberg wanted in.

  After graduating third in his class from Harvard University, Ellsberg stunned friends and professors alike by applying for officer’s training with the Marine Corps. “I didn’t seem the type,” he later conceded. “My interests were almost entirely intellectual, and I wasn’t any kind of athlete.” But those recruiting posters—the ones asking men if they were tough enough to be a Marine—called to him.

  Marine Lieutenant Daniel Ellsberg, 1954

  Ellsberg willed his way through a training course filled with jocks and tough guys, and he served with pride as a marine lieutenant. He then returned to Harvard and earned his PhD in economics. Questions of risk and decision making particularly intrigued him. “To act reasonably, one must judge actions by their consequences,” Ellsberg wrote in his doctoral thesis. “But what if their consequences are uncertain?”

  How should one act when consequences are uncertain? That question would become a major theme in Ellsberg’s life.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1964, Daniel Ellsberg was thirty-three, lean and fit, with blue eyes and brown hair cut short. As an analyst for the Rand Corporation, a think tank focused on military and international issues, he had been granted permission to conduct research at the Pentagon, home of the United States Department of Defense. He spent his days in a borrowed office, working on a study of recent international crises that he hoped would be useful to government policymakers.

  One day in mid-July, he was at his desk, reading and taking notes, when Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton dropped by. McNaughton knew Ellsberg’s reputation as one of the brightest young thinkers in the field of crisis decision making. He wanted to discuss a trouble spot of increasing concern to the Unite
d States: a mountainous, heavily forested country winding more than a thousand miles along the coast of Southeast Asia. He wanted to discuss Vietnam.

  Ellsberg was no expert, but on its surface the conflict there looked simple. There were two Vietnams in 1964. North Vietnam had a communist government, allied with the Soviet Union and China. North Vietnam’s ruler, Ho Chi Minh, was waging war to unite the country under one government—his. The United States, committed to stopping the further spread of communism, backed the government of South Vietnam; it was corrupt and unpopular, but firmly non-communist. About twenty thousand American soldiers were stationed in South Vietnam, arming and training the military. This was a clear-cut Cold War showdown.

  At that time, no one knew where events in Vietnam were headed. John McNaughton was the secretary of defense’s main assistant on Vietnam policy. He needed help. He wanted Ellsberg on his staff.

  Ellsberg was tempted, but hesitant. He liked working on projects of his own choosing, at his own pace. And he doubted he’d make a good aide to McNaughton, or anyone else for that matter. As he later confessed, “I’m not very organized.”

  McNaughton argued that Ellsberg could learn only so much from the study of historical cases. Here was a chance to see a real international crisis unfold as it happened—and from the inside.

  “Vietnam is one crisis after another,” McNaughton said. “It’s one long crisis.”

  That clinched it. Ellsberg took the job.

  And in the two weeks between that interview and Ellsberg’s start date at the Pentagon, violence in Vietnam pushed the country closer to open war.

  On the last night of July, South Vietnamese sailors on patrol boats fired missiles at radar stations in North Vietnam. On August 2, North Vietnamese forces spotted the American destroyer Maddox cruising in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam. Three North Vietnamese boats sped up and fired torpedoes at the Maddox. None hit the ship.

  President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Maddox to continue patrolling in the Tonkin Gulf. He ordered a second American destroyer, the Turner Joy, to join the Maddox. If there was another attack, Johnson intended to respond with force.