Q+A: From the old school

It seemed unbelievable that the two men hadn't yet met.

Their careers had collided in the most public way, shaping the way Americans understood the Vietnam War and the freedom of the press. But when Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Nixon-era whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg first shook hands, it was in the green room at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center last night.

Their lives intersected in 1971 when Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of documents to The New York Times and The Post that illuminated damning secrets about the Vietnam War. But in a Diamondback interview, they chatted like old friends, bringing up mutual acquaintances, travels and trading stories.

After years of telling the story of the Pentagon Papers individually, the two seemed more interested in getting to know each other.

The Papers revealed, among hundreds of state secrets about the Vietnam War, that President Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about his involvement with the escalation of the war.

Incensed, then-President Richard Nixon obtained a federal injunction preventing The Times from publishing any more of the Papers. Ellsberg, determined to keep the information in the public eye, gave 4,000 pages of the Papers to The Washington Post, where reporters had spent nearly a week trying to uncover The Times' source.

Bradlee, then The Post's executive editor, hated to lose a scoop to The Times. When the newspaper published its own excerpts from the Papers on June 18, Bradlee risked The Washington Post Company's financial standing and its television licenses, which could have been lost if the company were found guilty of a felony.

Sure enough, the Nixon administration obtained another injunction against The Post. Both cases made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled on the side of the newspapers.

It was, many said, the story that forced Americans to mention The Washington Post in the same breath as The New York Times.

Ellsberg - whom Henry Kissinger famously dubbed "the world's most dangerous man," was forced to go into hiding. He later turned himself in to the FBI, expecting to spend his life in prison. Years later, all charges - theft, conspiracy and espionage - were dropped against him after the Watergate scandal.

The two men sat down with a Diamondback reporter yesterday, piecing their accounts together.

Diamondback: When the Pentagon Papers story broke, how did the public receive that? Did you hear back from your readers at all or get any mail about it?

Ben Bradlee: Well, sure. The New York Times broke the story. For three or four or five days, the journalistic world was buzzing about their exclusive. And who was this guy Ellsberg? And at The Post we were just going crazy because we didn't have it. And it was a big, big story. It was a big story in the courts as it went up and down to the Supreme Court. One of my problems. Danny, you may not know this, but do you remember the judge? Who was the judge in the lower court?

Daniel Ellsberg: Well yours was different from the Times's.

Bradlee: Yeah... It was [Gerhard] Gesell.

Ellsberg: Yeah, Gesell.

Bradlee: He lived right across the street, right across the street then.

Ellsberg: Had he just become a judge, just then?

Bradlee: Yeah. This was very shortly after ... Before it was in the news, he used to walk past our house when I had the whole crowd working on the Papers.

DBK: So when you were working on the Papers, it was in your house?

Bradlee: Yeah, in my house, in Georgetown. Yeah, I mean, we had five or six reporters and editors there. I mean, it was very big. There were 4,000 pages. An enormous amount of things to read. And we were determined to print the day after we got it, so we had to read enough to know to make a half-intelligent decision about which stories to run first.

DBK: If you hadn't published, what was at stake for The Post? - because it was already run, at least some of it, in The Times.

Bradlee: I would have died. That's the stake. You would have lost me. I would never have- no, I mean, it was and is a competitive world, especially between The Times and The Post. When The Times had it and The Post didn't, that was - that was not nice ...

Ellsberg: You know I - you probably don't know - I went to Cambridge with Meg Greenfield [the late editor of The Washington Post's editorial page]. Did you know that?

Bradlee: No, I didn't. I know she knew you.

Ellsberg: Yeah, that's how I knew her. She went with a friend of mine ... As a matter of fact, the night that I met my wife-to-be, in 1964, in Washington, she was having a party to meet eligible bachelors - a friend of ours was hosting ... It just so happens I took Meg home that night, just to accompany her to her door. But Meg and I didn't really connect that first night. I dated her a couple of times.

Bradlee: She was a unique lady.

Ellsberg: Yeah.

DBK: Mr. Ellsberg, I always wondered why you first decided to give Neil Sheehan of The New York Times the Papers.

Ellsberg: I tell about it in my book really for the first time. I had met him in Vietnam - a few times, but not very much. I didn't know him too well; I was at his going-away party from Vietnam in '66. I didn't really know him very well, but he was covering the Pentagon when I got back. And it so happens that in '68, early '68 - I won't go through the whole story - but I had decided to leak stuff, for the first time, and so, since he was covering the Pentagon and since I knew him, I went to Neil ... I wanted a leak a day for a week. I wanted to warn Johnson that if he sent another 20,000 troops -

Bradlee: As was planned -

Ellsberg: And if it was his plan to say 'I'm sending 50,000 or 100,000 and not 20,000,' I wanted him to know that there was somebody who knew this stuff up high who was leaking it. I thought that might deter him from putting it on the line. So I wanted a leak a day to show him there was a bad leak out there. I never did that in my life. I had always thought leaking was a terrible sin ... and I kept my identity secret and so forth. A lot of stories that I gave them would be datelined Saigon. Send it to Saigon. And put a Saigon dateline on it. So when it came to putting it out after I had given up on Fulbright and other senators, Neil was the logical person for me to go to. And I chose The Times because I couldn't conceive of any other paper printing the documents at length. The Times was the one that would give you pages of stuff.

Bradlee: Well, we would have done it.

Ellsberg: Really?

Bradlee: Oh, sure.

Ellsberg: Well, you didn't print the full documents.

Bradlee: We didn't print all of it, but we printed - oh yeah, I think, four pages Monday in the paper.

Ellsberg: See, I wasn't seeing The Post then. I was underground, eluding the FBI. People would bring me The Times. It occurs to me that I didn't see The Post.

DBK: One last question. Mr. Ellsburg I read you called newspapers' decisions to publish the Pentagon Papers a kind of "institutional civil disobedience." Both of you, do you think there's a place for that kind of thing with relation to the Iraq war?

Ellsberg: I said that, but no newspaper person has ever said that. Let me ask Ben Bradlee, how do you respond to that description?

Bradlee: It's a marvelous description.

Ellsberg: Oh really, you don't shy away from it?

Bradlee: No, no. In the U.S., the number of secrets that were published you could put in your ear. It wasn't any great secret. It was the fact that it was out there. And mind you, I've forgotten the dates, but the events described in the Pentagon Papers were at least a year old. So you weren't talking about ships leaving the harbor loaded with troops, and submarines waiting for it and all that dramatic stuff.

Ellsberg: If I may say, the secret that made it news, after all, was the enormous discrepancy between what they were saying to the public and the truth.

Q+A conducted, transcribed and condensed by Megha Rajagopolan. meghara@gmail.com