push his editors to do just that. After Sheehan returned to New York, copy of the Pentagon Papers in hand, he and other reporters at the Times spent the next several weeks sifting through the thousands of pages of the report, looking for reports and anecdotes that would tell a compelling story of how we got into the mess that had become the Vietnam War.

The Nixon Administration Goes to Court to Stop Publication

New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, Managing Editor A. Rosenthal, and Foreign Editor James Greenfield

On Sunday June 13, 1971, the New York Times ran a three-column, front-page story containing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. At the White House, Richard Nixon read the story with a mixture of disgust and relief. although he told aide H. R.Haldeman that it was "criminally traitorous" for someone to have turned over the Papers and for the Times to then publish them, he was relieved to find that the Papers focused on the earlier missteps of earlier administrations, not his. His first reaction was to "keep out of it" and let the story run its course, but later in the day a riled Henry Kissinger urged Nixon to take steps to stop publication of further stories based on the Pentagon Papers. In Kissinger's view, the release of information threatened ongoing secret negotiations.

As soon as he learned of the Times impending publication of the Pentagon Papers stories, Ellsberg bundled a few things from his apartment and went underground. Over the next couple of weeks, as the FBI searched for