Thread by @RobertEllsberg

“Now It Can Be Told” runs the headline on a breathless @nytimes story of how Neal Sheehan got the Pentagon Papers from my father @DanielEllsberg. Sheehan wanted to counter the usual (accurate) narrative that my father gave the papers to the Times. . . nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/…

2/ 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).

3/ 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

4/ 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

5/ 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.

6/ 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.

7/ 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

8/ 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.

9/ 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.

10/ 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.”)

11/ 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.)

12/ Bottom line: Sheehan and the @nytimes played a heroic role in one of the greatest whistleblowing feats in US history before @xychelsea and @Snowden. Meanwhile my father was arrested and charged with 12 felony counts facing 115 years and the full wrath of the Nixon admin.

13/ He had willingly faced that risk since the moment he copied the papers in 1969 and he never doubted it was worth it. As he was being arraigned a reporter asked if he was worried about going to jail. His reply: “Wouldn’t you go to jail if it would help end a war?”

*hardly makes SENSE*