Personal History (83 page)

It’s disconcerting to see all this in print, and I’m sure I would have handled the whole thing differently later, but I was in an embarrassing position. I had grave concerns about some of the stiletto party coverage that “Style” seemed to produce, and, knowing how sharp Judith’s pen could be, I actually had wondered privately why we had to take on this battle when we were engaged in so many more serious ones. My view was that Judy was an able, even brilliant reporter, but I wasn’t sure I’d want her to cover my own daughter’s wedding. She had, for instance, already compared Tricia to a vanilla ice-cream cone. I didn’t mind defending us under most circumstances, but when I had my own doubts about the rightness of our position, the situation grew more ambivalent.

In the end, because the
Post
was denied credentials to cover the wedding, the paper had the best coverage of the event, since, as a form of protest, reporters from other papers all gave Judy their notes, placing at her disposal the finest pool of material available to any reporter in town. The story in the
Post
appeared on page one with no byline.

Much more important was a piece that appeared on the same day, June 13, about a study of the Vietnam War that
The New York Times
had found out about and was publishing. Ironically, it was at another wedding—also on that Saturday in June—that I first learned about what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

Don, Mary, and I had gone down to Glen Welby for the weekend to attend the country wedding of Scotty and Sally Reston’s middle son, Jimmy. The wedding was a casual event, and while we were talking to Scotty, he told Don and me that the
Times
would be publishing, starting the next day, articles about a super-secret history of the decision-making that led us into and through Vietnam, labeled the “Pentagon Papers,” but more formally titled “History of the United States Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy.”

Unbeknownst to President Johnson, the review had been commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sometime in the middle of 1967, before he left the Pentagon. McNamara later said he had started the study “to bequeath to scholars the raw material from which they could re-examine the events of the time.”

Don and I were unclear what it was the
Times
had, but we knew that, whatever it was, it was important, and that editors and reporters there had
been working on it for some time. And, important for us, whatever it was,
The New York Times
had it exclusively. When we got back to Glen Welby, I called the
Post
’s editors, who immediately started calling around, to no effect. Ben had heard rumors, starting in the early spring, that the
Times
was working on some kind of “blockbuster,” but was not able to find out anything about it until he read it in the paper himself.

On Sunday morning, I sent to Warrenton for ten copies of the
Times
, since there was a sizable group staying at the house over the weekend. Most of us spent much of the day poring over the six pages of news stories and articles in the
Times
that were based on the Pentagon Papers, and in discussing their content and their possible impact.

What emerged was that the Pentagon Papers had turned out to be in large part just what McNamara had envisioned—a massive history of the role of the United States in Indochina, which he had intended to be “encyclopedic and objective.” We learned of a year-and-a-half-long study that had resulted in a three-thousand-page narrative history with a four-thousand-page appendix of documents—forty-seven volumes in all, covering American involvement in Indochina from the Second World War to May of 1968, when peace talks on the Vietnam War began in Paris.

Later we understood that there had been a bitter fight at the
Times
over whether or not to publish these so-called top-secret documents, with Scotty and other editors arguing for publication. Scotty believed always that this was a question not merely of legality but of a higher morality: a vast deception had been perpetrated on the American people, and the paper must publish. The lawyers for the
Times
—Lord, Day and Lord—felt so strongly against publishing that they ultimately refused to handle the case. But the
Times
went ahead and delivered their bombshell on that Sunday morning in mid-June.

Ben Bradlee anguished over being scooped. He had worked so hard to build up the paper, not just to be competitive with the
Times
but to be taken as seriously, to be “out there” with them, to be mentioned in the same sentence. Now the
Times
had landed this big one on us, and Ben, mortified but unbowed, set to work to try to get the Papers for the
Post
. Meanwhile, he swallowed his pride and rewrote the stories that appeared in the
Times
, crediting the competition with their original publication.

The next day, Monday, I was in New York and ended up having dinner with some friends, including Abe Rosenthal, managing editor of the
Times
. When we had settled down with a predinner glass of wine, I congratulated Abe on the publication of the Papers. Soon afterwards, before we had been served dinner, he got word that the government was asking the
Times
to suspend publication. In fact, Attorney General John Mitchell and Robert Mardian, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s internal-security division, had dispatched the message, with
the president’s approval, that if the
Times
did not comply the government would seek an injunction. Abe left immediately, and I used the head-waiter’s telephone to phone Ben and tell him what was going on.

Meanwhile, the
Times
“respectfully” declined to cease publication of the series, sending the paper on its path through the courts. By an odd coincidence, when Scotty heard about the government’s reaction he and Sally were dining alone with Bob McNamara, whose wife was in the hospital. Scotty asked McNamara what he thought of the
Times’s
defying the government, and McNamara considered the issues in his usual objective way and, despite his distaste for the early publication of these documents, nevertheless encouraged the
Times
to go ahead. He even went over with Scotty the message that the
Times
proposed to send back to the government, responding to Mitchell’s message. It was Bob who suggested altering the proposed sentence that the
Times
would abide by the “decisions of the Courts” to read “the highest Court.” In fact, a compromise was reached by which the
Times
agreed to abide by “the final decision of the Court.” Scotty later recalled that, had it not been for McNamara’s intervention, the
Times
would have been committed to stop printing by the adverse decision of
any
court. So, half an hour before its deadline, the
Times
recovered from a careless and potentially harmful mistake, courtesy of the former secretary of defense.

Deciding to continue publishing the Papers also meant that the
Times
had to scurry to find new lawyers after seventy-five years with one firm. They were lucky to get Alexander Bickel, a Yale law professor, and a young lawyer, Floyd Abrams, to work with him as litigator. On Tuesday morning, the
Times
carried the third part of the series, as well as the story of the government’s effort to stop the paper from publishing. Also on Tuesday morning, after an all-night stint by the lawyers, the
Times
went before Judge Murray Gurfein, who was only in his second day on the bench. Gurfein asked the paper to suspend publishing voluntarily, which the
Times
refused to do. He then issued a temporary restraining order, setting a hearing for Friday of that week. This was America’s first-ever order for prior restraint of the press.

The last story rewritten from the
Times
ran in the
Post
on June 16, my birthday, which I celebrated at dinner with Polly Wisner and Bob McNamara at Joe Alsop’s. That day was also the last on which the
Times
was free to publish, and the day we received the Papers—a tremendous day for the
Post
, and for me as well.

Our editors and reporters had been trying desperately to get their hands on the Papers. Ben Bagdikian, the national editor, had guessed that Daniel Ellsberg was the source for them at the
Times
, and he had been frantically calling Ellsberg. Finally, on the 16th, a friend of Ellsberg’s
phoned Bagdikian and asked him to call back from a pay phone. Bagdikian spoke to Ellsberg, who said he would give him the Papers that night. He then returned to the paper and consulted with Gene Patterson—Ben Bradlee was away—asking for assurances that if we got the Papers we would start printing them on Friday morning. Gene said we would but felt Bagdikian should check with Bradlee, which Bagdikian did from the airport. Bradlee’s response, which may be apocryphal but certainly sounds like something Ben would say, was: “If we don’t publish, there’s going to be a new executive editor of
The Washington Post.”

Bagdikian then departed for Boston with an empty suitcase, as per instructions. He returned to Washington the next morning with what has been described as “a disorganized mass of photocopied sheets completely out of sequence and with very few page numbers.” The suitcase he’d brought was too small for what he was given, so he loaded the Papers into a big cardboard box and flew back to Washington on a first-class seat, with the box occupying the seat beside him—an additional expense the
Post
didn’t mind paying.

Bagdikian went straight to Ben Bradlee’s house, rushing past, as Ben later reported, “Marina Bradlee, age ten, tending her lemonade stand outside.” Ben Bradlee had already gathered there several reporters—Chalmers Roberts, Murrey Marder, and Don Oberdorfer among them—and two secretaries to help sort out the mess, as well as Phil Geyelin and Meg Greenfield from the editorial page, and Howard Simons. Chal was two weeks short of retirement, but he and Murrey knew the most about the story, and Chal was the fastest writer on the paper. They were joined at Ben’s house by Roger Clark and Tony Essaye, our principal lawyers since Bill Rogers had left his firm to become secretary of state.

Sorting out the forty-four hundred pages that we had and deciding what to write was more than a day’s chore in itself, and we were also working under the added pressure of knowing that the
Times
had been enjoined from further publication and that The Washington Post Company was about to go public, with all that that entailed.

I was pleased that we had found the Papers and had them in hand, but I spent the day of June 17 in a rather routine way. I had planned a large party to be held that afternoon at my house for Harry Gladstein, a lovely man who was leaving the
Post
. He had come to the paper as circulation director but was vice-president and business manager at the time. The whole business staff of the
Post
was gathered for the party, including Fritz, who had come down to Washington for it but had gone over to Ben’s house to check on things there. As it turned out, a fierce legal battle was being waged.

What Ben experienced as he rushed back and forth between the
rooms where the reporters were working and the living room, where the lawyers were conferring, was that the lawyers seemed to be pushing strongly for not publishing, or at least for waiting until there was a decision on the injunction against the
Times
. Our situation, however, was very different from that of the
Times
. The court order against them meant that, if we were to publish, our action might be viewed as defying the law and disrespecting the court. Even more difficult than that was the delicacy of our business position. In going public, a company negotiates with its underwriters—in this case a group led by Lazard Frères—and on the day of the offering, everyone agrees on a price and signs an agreement. Our agreement said that in a week the underwriters would buy all the stock from the company and then turn around and resell it to those they’d offered it to in the intervening week. There was a standard stipulation that if any one of a variety of crises—such as a war or national emergency or, more to the point in our case, the company’s being subjected to criminal action—were to intervene, the underwriter would be let out of the contract. We were exposing ourselves to just such a possibility if we published while the
Times
was enjoined.

In addition, Fritz had written into the original prospectus a paragraph stating that we would publish a newspaper dedicated to the community and national welfare. He now worried that the underwriters could make a case—as indeed the administration was trying to do—that what we were doing was contrary to the national welfare. Fritz had an extraordinary sensitivity to editorial issues and to the editors themselves, both at the
Post
and at
Newsweek
, but in this case, as a lawyer, he had to worry about the future of the company. Furthermore, he worried that we could be in trouble under the Espionage Act. He thought the government would be most likely to prosecute the corporation or the company, and if the corporation acquired the status of a felon, we would be stripped of our licenses to own and operate our television stations, adding a huge financial issue to the already high stakes.

So, while in one room at Ben’s house Chal was banging out his story for publication the next day, Murrey was slowly reading through the material, and Don Oberdorfer was working on installments on the late Johnson years, in another room the lawyers, with Fritz and the editors, were locked in tough and tense arguments. Clark and Essaye argued against publication and in favor of letting the
Times
handle the freedom-of-the-press issue. Fritz seemed to be siding with the lawyers.

Ben was beginning to feel squeezed between the editors and the reporters, who were solidly lined up for publishing and supporting the
Times
on the issue of freedom of the press, and the lawyers, who at one point suggested a compromise whereby the
Post
would not publish the Papers
on Friday but would notify the attorney general of its intention to publish on Sunday. Howard Simons, who was 100 percent for publishing, summoned the reporters to talk directly with the lawyers. Oberdorfer said the compromise was “the shittiest idea I’ve ever heard.” Roberts said the
Post
would be “crawling on its belly” to the attorney general; if the
Post
didn’t publish, he would move his retirement up two weeks, make it a resignation, and publicly accuse the
Post
of cowardice. Murrey Marder recalled saying, “If the
Post
doesn’t publish, it will be in much worse shape as an institution than if it does,” since the paper’s “credibility would be destroyed journalistically for being gutless.” Bagdikian reminded the lawyers of the commitment to Ellsberg to publish the Papers and declared, “The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.”