The Photocopier that Helped Topple a President

Amid the recent clamour around the WikiLeaks US Defense Department leaks, the figure of Daniel Ellsberg has re-emerged to greet our screens on various topical news programmes and fill column inches in national newspapers in the US and worldwide. To some, Ellsberg is now a US national hero, to others he will always be seen as one of the most serious threats to US national security in the country's modern history, Henry Kissenger at one time branding him "the most dangerious man in America." It was Daniel Ellsberg who was responsible for what has been described as "the most famous military leak in US history" when in June 1971 he passed on 7000 pages of "Top Secret", "Sensitive" material, concerning America's conduct in the Vietnam War to the New York Times and several other newspapers. The documents which became known as the "Pentagon Papers" revealed that the American public had been continually misled over Vietnam and the firestorm which ensued led to the first ever presidential resignation, when Nixon bowed-out ignimoniously in 1974. But many have put forward the contention that it was in fact the photocopier that was the real hero of this most dramatic episode in American history. It was one of the RAND Corporation's photocopiers afterall which allowed Ellsberg to pass on government files without alerting the immediate attention of colleagues. Here we examine the significance of the Pentagon Papers and how it was a humble photocopier which in fact effectively blew the lid on Vietnam and helped topple the President of the USA.

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg grew up in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from Harvard with an Honours Degree in Economics he studied for a year at Cambridge in the UK on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. From 1954-7, Daniel Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps as a Rifle Platoon Leader, an Operations Officer and a Rifle Comapny Commander. Ellsberg returned to Harvard in 1957 where he became a Junior Fellow. He earned a PhD in Economics in 1962 with his thesis on Risk, Ambiguity and Decision.

On the strength of his academic record, Ellsberg was recruited as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and acted as a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, advising on the problems of command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans and crisis decision-making.

It was in 1964 that Ellsberg joined the US Defense Deaprtment as Special Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton working on the escalation of the US miltary incvolvement in Vietnam. In 1965, Ellsberg was transferred to the US Embassy in Saigon, assessing the situation in the field.

Ellsberg became significantly more enlightened about US policy in Vietnam when having returned to the RAND Corporation in 1967 he started work on a Top Secret and landmark study under Robert McNamara into US foreign policy decision making in Vietnam between 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

The Most Infamous Leak in History

It was in working on this epic assignment that Ellsberg, already disillusioned at the Vietnam War's progress from his secondment to Saigon, began to realise the full scale of the US folly. He could see from the documents that four US presidents had misled and lied to the Americam public about the Vietnam War and that its continual excalation was an anxiety-driven, unjust and completely unnecessary campaign. In Ellsberg's words,

"It was a crime from the start carried oout by 4 presidents as revealed in the study. And now a fifth president was doing the same, with no end in sight."

It was in 1969 when Ellsberg began to photocopy the documents, of which there were only fifteen original copies, marked "Top Secret - Sensitive". He would take a few hundred pages of the dossier at a time to the photocopier at the RAND Corporation and stay up all night. In those days photocopiers were not the fastest. As Judith Ehrlich, a film-maker who has made a documentary about Ellsberg's exploits remarks,

"It was 1969 when he started photcopying and I remember what it was like making a copy in 1969 - it was a very tedious process."

As Ellsberg himself comments,

"It took a long time, one page at a time, so I'm quite jealous of the current capabilities...I used the most advanced technology I could - Xerox - and I couldn't have done what I did ten years earlier."

Initialy, Ellsberg's instinct had not been to disseminate the papers to a newspaper in fact. He had first requested that the papers be declassified and had asked various members of Congress to release them.

Finally Ellsberg approached Vietnam expert Neil Sheehan at the New York Times. A few months passed with Ellsberg uncertain about the fate of the papers and finally in June 1971 the first excerpts appeared in the New York Times. Two days later the New York Times was injuncted. The documents were sent onto the Washington Post. Again, the paper was injuncted. In the end 13 other papers ran excerpts.

Nixon and the Fallout from the Photocopied Pentagon Papers

It was Kissenger, as noted at the start of this article, who described Ellsberg after the leak as "the most dangerous man in America". The incident had the Nixon administration, one of the most paranoid in US history, absolutely fuming. Nixon's personal phone records reveal the extent of the President's anger,

"I just say we've got to keep our eye on the main ball. The main ball is Ellsberg. We've got to get this son of a bitch."

In late June 1971, Ellsberg was arrested for violating the Federal Espionage Act. In 1973 though, the prosecution collapsed as a result of several procedural abuses. Nixon had secretly raided the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, his team had illegally tapped Ellberg's phone as well as those of several other witnesses and he had attempted to bribe William Byrne, the judge in this case.

David Rudenstein, the US legal historian, has opined that the machinations against Ellsberg in the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers leak had helped to form two of the impeachment charges against Nixon which would lead to his eventual resignation in 1974. Many Pentagon insiders certainly thought that the Pnetagon Papers incident was the first step on the road to Watergate. As Nixon's paranoia became increasingly florid after the Ellsberg leak, the same "plumbers unit" which had broken into his pschiatrist's office would be deployed to take possession of whatever classified documents were suspected by Nixon of being held by "liberals" at the Brookings Institution. Even though the plans to mount an arson attack were eventually put to one side, the gradual slide of the administration into lawlessness would lead to that infamous abortive raid on the Democratic Party headquarters in 1972 and the impeachment and resignation in 1974.

As Ellsberg himself remarked, the release of the Pentagon Papers to the American press in 1971, up until WikiLeaks, the single biggest unauthorised release of classified official documents in history, would not even have been possible ten years earlier. The advances in reprographic technology, resulting in more widely available, realiable, fully automated photocopiers in the late 1960's, enabled Ellsberg, albeit painstakingly slowly, to copy the 7000 or so documents of the McNamara report and pass them on to the new York Times. That action, to many one of the bravest deceptions of a government official in US history, galvinised the anti-war movement and contributed to the toppling of Nixon, a true despot of US politics. As the commentator James Reston would write of the case, "The real source of the leaks is Chester Carlson [the inventor of photocopiers]."

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About the Author

Jeremy Samson is an imaging technology expert writing extensively on the latest developments in the document managment industry.