A former Times reporter obtained the answer to a major question involving Neil Sheehan’s source, then had to keep it secret until last week.
Janny Scott was researching the life of Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter who broke the news of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, when she noticed a gaping, unanswered question.
How did Mr. Sheehan actually get the documents? In all of the articles, movies and special reports about the story over the years, he never revealed what had really happened.
“We had the account of the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times at the time, we had various journalists’ accounts, but we didn’t have the account of one of the key players, who was Neil Sheehan,” said Ms. Scott, who worked as a reporter at The Times for more than a decade.
She was writing Mr. Sheehan’s advance obituary, something The Times prepares for prominent historical figures while they are still alive. In 2013, she wrote Mr. Sheehan a letter — the kind with a stamp and a postmark — and waited. Two years later, he agreed to an interview, but only on the condition that it would not be published until after his death.
The conventional wisdom had always been that the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages of classified government documents on the Vietnam War, were “given” to The Times. The source was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had contributed to the secret report while working for the RAND Corporation. But Ms. Scott discovered just how close readers had come to never learning the whole story.
Last week, when Mr. Sheehan died at 84, her account of her interview with him was published alongside the obituary she had written.
Mr. Sheehan had been a reporter in Vietnam when he first met Mr. Ellsberg and was back in the United States when they began discussing the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Ellsberg promised him access to the documents, but when Mr. Sheehan arrived to pick them up, Mr. Ellsberg said he could only take notes from them, not copy them. Mr. Sheehan, however, ignored him and smuggled the papers out of Mr. Ellsberg’s apartment in Cambridge, Mass., secretly copied them and took his copies to Times editors in New York. Later, as The Times was preparing to publish the papers, Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Ellsberg if he could have the actual documents, and Mr. Ellsberg consented. But Mr. Ellsberg was still surprised when they appeared in print.
“It’s a much more complex story about the relationship between the person who leaked the Pentagon papers and the person to whom they were leaked,” Ms. Scott said.
Times policy requires fair dealing with sources. But Mr. Sheehan said he felt that the documents were the property of the American people and that they had a right to see them.
“He ended up doing something — as Ellsberg pointed out to him, according to Sheehan — not unlike what Ellsberg had done for a perceived higher goal,” Ms. Scott said.
For Mr. Ellsberg, that meant violating the law; for Mr. Sheehan, that meant ignoring the traditional relationship between a source and a reporter.
“The ethics are murky,” Ms. Scott said.
She started working on the obituary in 2012 as a freelance assignment. Three years later, she interviewed Mr. Sheehan at his home in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington.
He was in reasonably good health and was sharp, Ms. Scott said. They sat down in his study, and with a tape recorder running, talked for four hours — with only a brief break for tea. Mr. Sheehan shared a cinematic tale of finicky 1970s-era Xerox machines and herculean efforts to conceal and transport thousands of pages of government documents.
“It was just an extraordinarily gripping story,” she said. “At that point, I pretty much had written the obituary, and I was trying to fill this hole, but what he had given me to fill the hole was three or four times the length of the obituary.”
She spoke with her editor and prepared a separate article. But she had to wait five more years to publish it, even as Hollywood covered the subject. In 2017, Steven Spielberg’s film “The Post” chronicled how The Washington Post raced to cover the Pentagon Papers, and along with The Times, fought court orders blocking publication. The newspapers, arguing for their first amendment right to publish, took the case to the Supreme Court, and won.
But Ms. Scott remained quiet.
“All I could think at that time was: ‘If you only knew,’” she said.
Mr. Sheehan said he had never told the story because he had never wanted to hurt or embarrass Mr. Ellsberg by describing some of the risks Mr. Ellsberg, who’s still alive, had taken. Ms. Scott wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t asked.
“Would the story have died with him? I don’t know,” she said.
Mr. Sheehan suggested to her that he had always intended, at some point, to share his account. He would help break his last great story at his death.
“I would imagine you wouldn’t want to die with that kind of misunderstanding, or a misperception, or that oversimplified version still out there,” Ms. Scott said, “when you’re the only person left who can really set the record straight.”
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A Scoop About the Pentagon Papers, 50 Years Later - The New York Times
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