drat fink

gouge away

finally getting through daniel ellsbergs memoir about the pentagon papers. heres a conversation between kissinger and nixon upon its release. how great is it to have those audio tapes?

one bit of trivia i just picked up was that neil sheehan, ellsbergs contact at the new york times, actually stole a copy of the papers from ellsberg. ellsberg had let sheehan read everything but only selectively released pages to the times until they had assured him the papers would receive the type of coverage he hoped to garner. ellsberg only mentions this anecdote as an aside at the end of a chapter with no editorial remarks so ill assume for the moment that it ultimately made no impact on their subsequent release. but i wonder what was sheehans ultimate motivation? maybe he was worried the times wouldnt print it and he would lose access to the documents. or maybe he thought that ellsberg could be arrested by the fbi at any moment and the documents would be lost. guess we will have to wait for neil sheehans memoirs to find out. meanwhile, heres an interview with sheehan.