Neil Sheehan, the New York Times journalist who published the acclaimed Pentagon Papers in 1971, has died at the age of 84. Sheehan was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
In the early 1960s, Sheehan was a war reporter in Vietnam. In his own words, he quickly saw that it was “the first futile war” in the US.
Sheehan subsequently became a reporter in Washington DC, but he remained interested in the Vietnam War. He came into contact with Daniel Ellsberg, a former employee of the United States Department of Defense who co-wrote a confidential report on the war in the late 1960s.
Pentagon Papers
The report was intended as source material for future historians, with 3,000 pages of analysis and original documents, plus 4,000 pages of appendix. The study found that early on, US governments realized that the Vietnam War was not to be won, and that in the years that followed, presidents and ministers had lied to the American people and Congress about their intentions.
Ellsberg, who had become a fierce opponent of the war, secretly took photocopies of the study and passed them on to journalist Sheehan, who made the case public. The Pentagon Papers hit like a bomb, changing both the outlook on the Vietnam War and the relationship between journalism and government in the US.
The Vietnam War is a black page in American history:
After publication, Sheehan had never told how exactly Ellsberg’s report got into his hands. But when a journalist asked him to tell that story in 2015, he agreed on one condition: it could not be published until after his death.
Unpredictable source
Yesterday The New York Times published the article. This shows that Ellsberg had only given Sheehan permission to read the documents and possibly take notes in Ellsberg’s apartment in Boston. So he was not allowed to take them.
Sheehan didn’t like that, also because he found Ellsberg unpredictable. He feared that sooner or later Ellsberg would slip up with the wrong person, causing the Nixon administration to get wind of the leak and making publication impossible through lawsuits. Ellsberg himself was also afraid of prosecution, so Sheehan was unsure whether he would keep access to the documents.
So Sheehan decided to ‘steal’ Ellsberg’s documents. He seized the opportunity when Ellsberg went on vacation and had obtained permission from him to continue studying the papers in his Boston apartment. Sheehan had his wife flown in with extra suitcases and copied the papers in copy shops.
Suitcases full of top secret material
Back on board the plane, the couple had reserved an extra seat for the suitcases full of top-secret material. Sheehan then locked herself in a hotel in the heart of New York with colleagues to process the matter into newspaper pieces. In the meantime, he kept Ellsberg on the line by saying, among other things, that the newspaper was still struggling with exactly how to publish the Pentagon Papers.
Shortly before the actual publication, Sheehan asked Ellsberg if he could still get the original pieces. “For my conscience, so he got some kind of warning that we were going to bring it soon,” said Sheehan. Ellsberg agreed, but Sheehan had his stories ready by then.
Six months after their first publication in 1971, Sheehan confessed to Ellsberg about how he actually got his hands on the papers. “So you stole them, just like me,” Ellsberg told him. “No,” replied Sheehan. “And neither did you. These documents belong to all Americans, who paid for them with government money and the blood of their sons. They have the right to them.”
Sheehan told The New York Times that he never wanted to say how he got the report because he didn’t want to embarrass Ellsberg. In 2011 the Pentagon Papers were officially released.