Years later, Neil joined the Times and by the time Dan Ellsberg delivered Robert McNamara’s secret history of the Vietnam War to Neil, both of us had written many stories about the dissembling, the distortions, sham reports and outright lies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations over Vietnam, only to have them repeatedly denied by government spokesmen. Nguyen Khanh, one of a string of unstable Vietnamese leaders. But within a couple of hours, Mordecai and some Vietnamese military sources confirmed that, in fact, a coup was under way and the commander of those mysterious tanks was Gen. Embassy officials pooh-poohed the coup idea. Conein had lost two fingers during some furtive escapade, and with a twist of Irish humor, Neil nicknamed him Mordecai after a Chicago Cubs pitcher named Mordecai “Three-Fingered” Brown, because he, too, had lost two fingers. agent named Lucien Conein, who had deep ties within the Vietnamese military. Mordecai was Sheehan’s code-name for a steel-haired C.I.A. Perhaps, I thought, Minh was under house arrest. It struck me as odd that the tanks’ guns were pointed inward at Minh’s house, instead of outward, defending Minh. Duong Van Minh, then leader of the ruling junta. I told Sheehan that on my way to town, I’d seen tanks around the home of Gen. Practically living at the New York Hilton while working on the story, Hedrick Smith would soon publish the first details of the 7,000-page report.īy the time I got to Saigon in November 1963, shortly after President Kennedy was shot, Sheehan, at 27, was already an experienced war correspondent, but seeing tanks in downtown streets was still novel to me. Sheehan and Halberstam formed a working partnership, with Halberstam covering the guerrilla war out in the Mekong River Delta while Sheehan covered military briefings in Saigon and Buddhist monks’ setting fire to themselves in protest against the repressive Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Vietnam built camaraderie among reporters. Hedrick Smith, former senior editor for the New York Times' Washington Bureau, retells the story about he lived in hiding for three months to make public the contents of the Pentagon Papers. (Wikimedia Commons) Our reporting partnership began seven years earlier in Saigon, when Sheehan was a one-man bureau for United Press International, and I was sent to Vietnam to replace the Times’ correspondent David Halberstam. We found eerie echoes and confirmation of stories that we had been tracking for years. And those stories were mere hand grenades compared with the kilotonnage that Neil and I now had in our hands. had already tapped my home telephone in 1969 because President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were infuriated over leaks that wound up in my Times reporting. Naïvely, I told Neil that I didn’t think the American government would stoop to tapping the phones of American reporters unless they suspected us of espionage - only to learn two years later that the F.B.I. would find and arrest us before we could get the Pentagon Papers into print. Neil was sure that if we used our own names, the F.B.I. When we ordered room service, we were “Mr. Neil had registered our suite in the name of Gerald Gold, the Times’s deputy foreign editor. We knew the risks, that if we were found out, we faced prosecution. “We’ve got the whole damned story.”įor the next three months, Sheehan and I holed up like monks in an 11th floor hotel suite, wary of phone taps, avoiding contact with colleagues, sources and even family, hoping the mass anonymity of a New York hotel would hide us from the FBI as we covertly plumbed 7,000 pages of TOP SECRET EYES ONLY government documents with bombshell revelations that would tell the inside story of the Vietnam War and blow wide open future relations between the media and the government. But when I walked into the hotel room, Sheehan exploded like a thunderbolt. I sensed something was up but that was not unusual since Neil and I had worked hush-hush projects before. His cryptic instructions were for me to meet Neil Sheehan, our Pentagon correspondent, at the Hilton Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. It was the Ides of March, 1971, when a senior editor in the New York Times Washington Bureau told me to head for New York for a Vietnam project and to take clothes for a few days.
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