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The Pentagon Papers: Filling in a Missing Piece


Neil Sheehan (October 27, 1936 – January 7, 2021) has died.  A giant of old-school American print journalism, Sheehan began his career in the Tokyo bureau of the UPI in 1962. He was in Japan with the US Army, and the reporting was a moonlighting gig. 

When he was released from the service, the UPI took him on his payroll, and sent him to Saigon.

In 1964, he returned to the US to take a job in New York, on the city desk of the Times. But that must have seemed boring to him. By 1966 (I'm skipping some career points), he was in Washington for the NYT, covering the Pentagon. It was that assignment that got him into the history books in a big way. 

See below: 

After Neil Sheehan’s death, secret interview reveals how he got Pentagon Papers (msn.com)


Here is where the new revelation, a post-mortem disclosure of an old Sheehan interview, sheds some new light. Sheehan says in the interview that Ellsberg was very wary of letting Sheehan make any copies of the famous report on the war. Sheehan was supposed to just sit in a room with copies and take notes, then write a story based on those notes. He knew this wasn't going to fly.

So ... Sheehan snuck the documents out and made copies behind Ellsberg's back.  Ellsberg never mentioned this fact in connection with his own trial in 1973 under the Espionage Act. One can attribute this to a sense of solidarity with Sheehan despite his sneakiness, or one can attribute it to t he fact that it likely wouldn't have helped Ellsberg's defense. In general, whenever you can be convicted of a crime for letting a reporter make copies of certain documents, you can also be convicted for letting him into the room to read them and take notes in the mutual expectation that here will be a news story about them. The distinction makes no difference. 

And, of course, Ellsberg didn't need to rat out Sheehan to avoid conviction. Nixon's plumbers, and revelations about their improprieties, led to the dismissal of charges in any event. 

Still, it is nice to know this particular piece of what happened.  That the "leaker" tried to draw a procedural line and the reporter blew right through it. 

As a television news anchor at the time would have said. That's the way it is. 

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