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overheard on that while I was staying, as a friend of Halperin, at his home while I was a consultant from
the RAND Corporation.
And also a bunch of newsmen were tapped, not people who had been involved in the leak, just
newsmen they were interested in, including Hedrick Smith and others. There were seventeen wiretaps and
those figured in the impeachment proceedings against Nixon. This led to his resignation and actually thus
shortened the war, which ended nine months after he resigned. It could not have ended while he was still
in office; he would not have ended it. So, the revelation of the commission of that crime was, it turned
out, very helpful in shortening the war. And it’s interesting to notice that it was focused on officials and
journalists specifically—no one else.
In terms of the leak of the bombing of Cambodia (a country we were not at war with and that
Congress was unaware we were even bombing) by order of the president, the pilots of the B-52s that were
involved filed two sets of flight reports at the end, with different coordinates for their bombings. And it’s
not clear to this day if the pilots themselves knew that the original coordinates—the real ones—were not
in Vietnam but were in Cambodia. Congress was being given the false reports and did not know that this
bombing of Cambodia was occurring. So when it leaked out in one story in the New York Times, these
warrantless, illegal wiretaps were ordered by the president to find who was leaking.
Interestingly, the reason they were particularly interested in me later on was that Nixon feared
that I had information going beyond the Pentagon Papers, which was a history of U.S. decision-making
that ended in 1968. Nixon had come into office in 1969. So he was not concerned about what was
revealed that may have occurred before he took office. On the contrary, he liked it. It showed that
Democrats had lied again and again. Indeed, it also showed that the Eisenhower/Nixon administration had
lied, but that was history. And he really liked the fact that the Pentagon Papers were incriminating the
Democrats. When the Nixon tapes came out, he was heard exulting over the fact that the Democrats’
secrets were being told here, and he got very excited about finding out other things that were
incriminating or illegal that they could expose on the Democrats going all the way back to Yalta, the Bay
of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Diem assassination—an assassination of a Catholic head of state
under the first Catholic president of the United States. He named all these. Nixon was very excited to get
this out because it would undercut Ted Kennedy, who he still regarded as his most formidable rival. So
someone pointed out that this would be quite a big historical project to reveal all of these crimes over
decades and that it would really take somebody to organize all of this and to leak it out. It would take
quite a bit of effort to do that, so Nixon said, “What you want is an intellectual, someone who knows the
history of the times, knows what he’s looking for. What you need is an Ellsberg—an Ellsberg who’s on
our side.” And I know when I read that, I thought, “You could have had me.” While on trial, or from
prison, I would have been glad to do that—whether it was on the Democrats or not.
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