On the night of March 23, 1971, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan excitedly called Max Frankel, the Times’s Washington bureau chief, to give him the news he had been waiting weeks to hear. “I got it all,” Sheehan told Frankel.
Sheehan had just accomplished one of the greatest journalistic coups of the 20th century. He had obtained the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s 7,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War, which revealed that the government had been lying to the American people about the brutal conflict since it began. It was the first mass leak of classified documents in modern American journalism, four decades before WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.
But Sheehan had lied to his source, Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned former defense analyst turned whistleblower, to get the documents. He had secretly copied them after he had promised Ellsberg he wouldn’t.
Sheehan confessed to his editors that he had “Xeroxed the materials without permission and the source was unaware that he had done so,” according to a remarkable and previously unpublished 1971 legal memo obtained by The Intercept. When confronted by an anxious Times lawyer, Sheehan insisted that the Pentagon Papers “were not stolen, but copied,” according to the memo.
The long-buried memo contains Sheehan’s contemporaneous and confidential account of his relationship with Ellsberg, as well as Sheehan’s version of events inside the Times as it prepared to publish the Pentagon Papers. It offers an unprecedented, real-time depiction of Sheehan’s actions — including his phone call to Frankel and his admission to his editors that he had lied to his source.
“He Stole Our Glory”
For decades after the Times published the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg quietly seethed about what he saw as the deceitful way he was treated by Sheehan and the newspaper. He was furious when he discovered that Sheehan had lied to him repeatedly, and he remained mystified as to why Sheehan had misled him in ways that Ellsberg felt violated the basic tenets of a reporter-source relationship. To Ellsberg, the lies seemed gratuitous, as when Sheehan told him that the Times hadn’t decided whether it was really interested in the Pentagon Papers, even as Sheehan and other reporters were furiously drafting stories based on the documents that Sheehan had secretly copied. He only found out that Sheehan had been lying to him when he was alerted by someone else at the Times the day before the first Pentagon Papers stories were splashed across the front page of the June 13, 1971, edition.
Sheehan’s behavior has been “a great puzzle for me for 50 years,” Ellsberg said in an interview conducted just months before he died in June at the age of 92. “Why did Neil Sheehan not tell me that the Times was coming out with this stuff?”
