blackmail fielding into telling him, them, what i told him. stuff that wasn't written down. squeeze fielding who's one of that 25% of psychoanalysts who wouldn't cooperate. get him to cooperate. so that's, i think, that's what they had in mind when they thought of going into his home. they proposed going into his home. maybe he kept his noets there. but if he didn't keep his notes there, and he didn't have any notes, they could get stuff on him there that they could blackmail him with. now, why did they put the document on top of the file? why did they leave it in such a mess. why did they make it so obvious that the place had been broken into, you know? they broke the file p open, they jimmied open the door, i believe, in the end. oh, no, they broke a window. they scattered pills supposedly, to make it look like a drug addict was coming in to get pills.

one of them says what are we celebrating? we didn't find anything, which is not quite true. and hunt says, i think this is in the harper term, we know that, but he doesn't know that. >> you've been watching american history tv in prime time. part ii of the interview with daniel ellisburg begins shortly. and a reminder that every

weekend here on cspan-3 experience american history tv starting saturday at 8:00 a.m. eastern. 48 hours of people in the events telling the american story. here to witness historians, visit museums and college campuses as top history professors and leading historians delve into america's higs ri past. all weekend, every weekend on cspan-3. and our prime time presentation continues tuesday night in farmville, virginia. a seminal on the civil war in 1865. the program was co-hosted by the university and national historical park. that begins tuesday at 8:00 p.m. eastern right here on cspan-3. >> coming up next, part two of a two-part interview with daniel ellisburg. he talks about handing over the pentagon papers, the fall out

from the leak and has arrests and trial which spans from june 1971 to may, 1973. the richard nixon presidential library conducting this interview as part of a project. this portion is about 50 minutes.

that weekend on a sunday, the office is broken into. i believe the name of the assistant was andrew pierre. you will think that might be it. andrew pierre. and he told me there's no question there had been a burglary of the files that weekend. and it's in gredell's office.

vrjs now my former wife had told the f.b.i. that i had given the pentagon papers to fullbright and gredell. so they kpaj rated the degree of my intimacy. so i think hunt and libbey on the way homemade a little

operation into gredell's office. they didn't do burglarizing themselves, but they probably had some other help on that. it didn't matter in the end. >> did you ever ask kroeg about that? >> yeah i i think i did, but he did not know. oh, yes. why would they be interested in my wife's analyst? the plumbers were -- that is the cubans who work for hunt and lib by, were interviewed at great length by taylor brarj and

george trial for a book they were doing on the bay of pigs, actually. their publisher went bankrupt and branch and kryle had a fight over how they would split the royalties or something if they found another publisher. and it never did come out. and i was very anxious to get the files from branch, but they both -- it's a whole other story. but i didn't get it. houf, branch told me at the time a good deal about what they were after.

and he said that they learned from the cubans that their objective was to find -- there were four objectives in this effort to neutralize me all together. to get information, basically, that i didn't want known. blackmail blackmail-type information. their highest hope was that i would commit suicide, which was what rather than have this material come out, which is what, of course, the f.b.i. did exact ly exactly with martin luther king. many others have discussed.

their highest hope was he would commit suicide if he did that. otherwise, they would put it out and discredit him, hopefully. so their hope was that he would kmit suicide. second, that i would leave the country. go to cuba. like various other people had done. ex-ldridge cleaver, so forth, timothy leary, algeria. obviously, again, putting me out of action. both of those would keep me quiet very effectively. third, that i will -- one of things was i would not go on the stand. and, interestingly they had been told a story which is very little known. here were these cubans that don't even -- some of them hardly speak english. they heard it from hunt, obviously.

and they had the anecdote in mind of the hyst case where hyst's stepson was kept off the stand and he was the only person who could testify to is only station of chambers. so he didn't get that corroborating testimony that he had not seen his tempt that he had not seen chambers very much.

and then i think the other point was keep me from telling. now, kroeg has told me, and i wanted's in my book, i quote\him telling the judge, actually. his number one priority as the man in charge of "neutralizing me requests was what other information did i have and would i put it out.

and who might i be getting it from? that's your critical conspiracy. who might still be in the administration who is giving me or other people information about him, not about the pentagon papers. the concern of the plumbers under kroeg and hunt, and so forth, was what else could i put out that would tell of nixon's vietnam policy. the crimes of going into a lot of different little burglaries and my doctor's office. trying to shut me up, break my mouth. barker said to lloyd sharer of parade, the editor of parade my orders were to break both of his legs. well, that would put me in the

hospital, but not keep me from talking. all of these different crimes, that would not have happened. but it was methias who had the incentive. but, fortunately, from my point of view, did not tell them what it was. he didn't know the significance of it. the possibility that i had documents on mining and on

nuclear weapons and so forth and i had to be stopped. this led to crimes which, again, could have been kept secret if the criminals themselves had not -- c.i.a. -- they didn't think of themselves as criminals, of course, but as warrior, covert warriors. patriots. so had they not been caught, again, if they talked earlier, they would have come up. if fielding had told me against the advice of his lawyer that his office had been broken into by the white house we would have, of course, put that out. and the plum eres would not have been hired to go to work for crete. the people who were -- even though the police wouldn't have known who did it, but they would know. i don't think would have used those people, again, that the police were looking for.

to go into the offices of the democratic national committee. so the people who did come in would not have had to be kept secret. by pretending that it was a c.i.a. operation. the supreme court had to decide that the tapes were to be given over. the saturday night massacre. nixon was not terribly reckless to believe that he could commit crimes like this and keep them quiet. presidents did this kind of thing all the time.

and nearly all of them they kept quiet. and, moreover, once they come out, george w. bush has committed crimes like this right and left. and a lot of them have come out. and he's still there. i don't sigh he's going to get re-elected. none of his officials have gone to prison, even libby, whom he essentially pardoned. so as he, himself, is pardoned. so he wasn't unusually reckless in doing this. he had bad luck. he was vulnerable. there was a possibility. and he took that risk to preserve a vietnam policy that he thought would work foolishly but, not impossibly. he was wrong.

to renew the bombing of north veet nap as soon as american troops were out in march, april 1973. but dean told the prosecutors, there's a letle confusion about that. dean told the prosecutors who promptly, illegally, told nixon. nixon keeps it quiet from going again, for another ten days or more. but it does come out and, now, he's in deep trouble. burn has to put it out because he knows that now that dean is talking, it's going to come out.

so he can't sit on it any longer. he has to put it out. and nixon lost all of that. >> so you believe this is the most important information that dean told the prosecutors? >> oh it was crucial that dean told the prosecutor. it was curable. it didn't involve the president. he deliberately kept from involving the president, i think, for various reasons. maybe loyalty. but also a fight with the president, dean knew very well is a very dangerous process. in fact, by that time, he knew that he was dealing -- they were dealing with people who were assassins. hunt, had organized, managed, efforts to assassinate castro.

but they were all in a plot to assassinate toreos in order to get the panama canal through the -- what was it? to have another canal, another canal. i think there was some idea of a sea level canal. and toreos was in the way of that. so toreos did, of course, later die in a plane crash, an unexplained plane crash. but that's why it seems to be why, for example hunt and ddabierd were all involved in the break in to green in las vegas had something to do with howard hughes. so complicated, but there are records on this. a guy named jonathan marshal did an investigation on this in inquiry magazine. i can put you onto that.

in '68, i gave neil a series of top secret leaks, including westmoreland's year-end report. eyes only for the president, top secret. which this was right after the offensive that i was doing this. and his report, which was only a month or so earlier it ended in late january, told the president that we have, to paraphrase it, we have driven the veet congress out of south vietnam to the borders where we are pursuing them. this was ten days or so before the veet congress hit simultaneously.

so it made westmoreland look quiet bad. westmoralland was told that afternoon that he would be replaced. i was anxious to see westmoreland replaced because i knew that he was likely to use nuclear weapons over jenbenfu i'm sorry over kayson which they were afraid would be another. so that's another story. that's why i did it. i foresaw the president giving what he had just asked for, 206,0 0 troops. you've read this story.

mainly, i wanted the president, johnson, to feel that his administration at high levels have suddenly become transparent. that he would not be able to give westmoreland secretly a hundred thousand troops or two hundred thousand troops and lie about what he was given. more troops that hn he revealed to the public. to thinking that he could do it secretly, i wanted him to know that if he made that decision, it would leak out. and the way i thought of

continuing was doubling the estimate we were facing which otherwise would never have been revealed. he had taken efforts to cover me on this in various ways.

i had gone to him before and trusted him when he was in town. i didn't know, well, they had already given it to neil. >> they? you mean the three at the isp? >> the isp people had already giveren a thousand pages. this is a product that has yet to be worked out at this late date, exactly what happened here. neil and mark tell quite different stories.

not entirely different. >> you weren't the first? >> i didn't know that until a year or two ago. >> in the. >> he'd be a good one to talk to, i'm sure. >> so this was the first i knew of this. neil had never up until this day, had never told me anything about it.

they had done that in i guess january of late january of 1971. i went to him i think early march. it was not coincidental that i suggest they go to neil. it's what they suggest is a complicated story. but that means to me by the way, that the times, someone at the times had knew about that story long before they had committed. probably kept it very closely here.

>> had you talked to neil since 2002? >> yeah, he won't talk much about that. he says i've told you all i can tell you. in other words, the times involvement remains a very sensitive internal secret of some sort. of course, what i have to infer is that the times has been lying steadily, everybody on the times, many of them probably didn't know the facts. some did. whoever it was about how who knew and so forth, in other words, they must have made the decision to go ahead as mark was assured they had. long before i dealt with neil, rather than much later. so, anyway, that's another story.

>> what warning did you have? >> i'll just tell him. again, for reasons that neil just were not really be forthcoming. and neil, by the way, all this time, was very friendly to me. as far as i knew, very friendly. and some of the reasons for not saying some things on ordinary journalistic practice were not to tell me, at the time, that he had it from somebody else. keeping them secret is normal internalistic kind of practice. but whooi he would keep that up for 35 years seemed a little odd. but, in particular it remains somewhat mysterious to me that he did not tell me from the time that he himself, copied the papers, having said that he

wouldn't. copy the papers to which i gave him access. he had copied them. and, then, later, he asked me if he could have physical copies. i had asked him not to take them with him in dealing with them to get a decision. i felt as soon as there's a copy out, it's totally out of my control.

those copies would have been copyied by other people. everybody had sort of had second thoughts about this. so i thought they won't do it at the end. and then the copies will be all over the place. and somebody will tell the f.b.i. and later events showed there was a good deal of realism to that concern. so i said, i'll take that chance at the point that you tell me that the times is seriously interested in running these. they think they probably will. and then i'll take the chance of letting them have the copies. and then if they change their

mind afterwards, that's too bad. just to convince them, to do it, you know, i need more. can't -- i don't want you to give them until i have more assurances. i have to try to convince them. in fact, it turns out that -- so he said, well, can i read them? >> i said, you can read them. you can even take notes on them. as long as you don't xerox. so i gave him a key to the apartment where they were being held so he could read them and take notes. he immediately then arranged for "the times" and brought his wife down to help him and checked into a motor hotel and took the papers out and got them copied for "the times" so i couldn't back out entirely. i never blamed him doing this. in effect it was -- he didn't

have to do that but i felt it was pretty much what i had done. this material must get out. and i want to be sure that it does and so he got a copy. that seemed to be when i learned about it that i could even admire it as journalistic behavior, even though it did involve lying to me. but what i never fully understood was why he never did tell me that "the times" was working on it and the reason why that's odd is that not knowing that they were serious, i continued to try to get them out by other channels. so he was taking that risk that i would succeed in getting it out. so it was after that that i talked to mcclowski and i gave him about 1,000 pages or more and i showed it to some other

people and i showed it to howard zinn to get his interest and feedback on the thing. and i dealt with mathias and so forth. so he was taking a real risk that by not telling me. now, i think that he feared that if he told me that they were about to do it that i would get real busy and try even harder to get it out through congress. i'm just trying to rationalize what he was doing. >> right. >> and indeed i might have done that unless he told me not to. but if he told me very seriously, dan you know, this won't happen unless "the times" has the scoop, don't do it and so forth i would have obeyed that. i take it he didn't trust me you know to do that. he thought i might try to get it out somewhere else. it was a misunderstanding somehow. anyway, he didn't tell me. and so the first i knew that

"the times" was even -- oh he went even further. he said, "the times" has put this on the back burner. they are not making a decision on it and they have given me another job to work on. but i would like to just keep myself current on it and do more reading on it. i'm working in new york. is it all right if i actually take a copy, make a copy of it? and so i said okay, what the hell, a month had gone by and i said, go ahead. and i had always told him that when i give you the copy as far as i'm concerned it's out of my hands. i know i can't control whether it's done or isn't done and so forth. that's my okay to go ahead. and even though he hadn't told me yet, i changed my mind and did let him have the copy. that was about in april. they were working night and day,

meanwhile, of course, in the new york hilton to put it out. so actually, this uncertainty on me persisted until the last day because i had learned that senator senator gravell was going to do a filibuster against the draft which was about to expire and i thought, okay, this is perfect material for him to use in his filibuster, you know, get it out on the floor of the senate. so i had had it in my apartment with the intent that i was, for the first time that i was going to take it to washington on monday and deal with gravell on the issue, hand it to him if he wanted it. but i had never allowed it in the apartment before lest i be caught with it.

so on saturday the 12th i get a call from a guy from "the times" who i had given him part of the papers for his book and he told me almost crying, dan, that material you gave me you know, from the bigger study "the times" has it and they have the whole study and i said oh really? but i can't 00 told that they were doing -- he said, yes. they are bringing it out tomorrow. they are going to bring it out tomorrow. this place is locked up tighter than a drum and they are afraid the fbi is going to confiscate it or injoin them. i never heard of an injunction though the time was very worried about it. and so everybody -- nobody can

get in or out without a pass. and he said my book is ruined. his book was coming out in a month. i said tony, maybe this will give you more publicity for the book? he said, no, no. he was right actually as it turned out. it did kill his book, essentially, called "the president's war" even though he was onto something that "the times" didn't have. but the book didn't get much attention. i said, that's very interesting tony. i'm sorry about your book. i put a call in to neil. neil was unavailable. and now i had the pentagon papers in my apartment and they were worried the fbi was going to -- they mentioned that i should expect an fbi raid any minute. so i called my friend howard

zinn and said, howard can you store something for me tonight? we were going to see buch cassidy and the sundance kid that evening with roz and howard. so we arranged -- we went over to his apartment. i took -- his house. i took the pentagon papers with me and gave them to him to store and then we went to see "butch cassidy and the sundance kid" and that night i went into the harvard square station kiosk and got the first editions of the pentagon papers that were coming out. >> did you think you were going to go to jail? >> well, yeah. i had always assumed that i would go to jail if they chose to prosecute. i knew there was a slight chance -- i could figure there was a slight chance they might

not choose to prosecute due to political reasons and in fact ehrlichman advised not to prosecute. good advice. if he had followed that he would have stayed in office essentially. or he still would have been concerned about what other stuff i was going to put out, the plumbers would have come in. but if i hadn't been on trial dean's revelations could have been kept secret. the only way they came out was that i was still on trial ten days after nixon learned of it and he had to send it to nixon and it came up. if i hadn't been on trial, they could have sat on that information successfully. so ehrlichman's advice was good. but -- but i thought, if they prosecute, which is 97% likely, i'm bound to be convicted 7,000

pages of top secret documents. as my lawyer said to me later it has a bad ring to it. and moreover you know 7,000 pages, i'll go for life. i thought this won't be a year or two or five years. so i expected to go to jail. >> for life? >> for life. well, life. 30 years. you know not necessarily consecutive life terms. i was put on trial facing 12 felony counts, 11 were worth 10 years each and the conspiracy country, 5 years. so 115 years possible sentence. with good behavior, i'd only serve a third of that, which would be 35 years. i'd be getting out this year. that's 35 years after 1973 which is when my trial ended. so i'd get out this year. >> did the fbi contact lewis --

the administration feared that the fbi wasn't working hard enough to prosecute you because of lewis marx. >> yes. the story was all over that he feared the fbi wouldn't go over, libby thought he wouldn't go after because lewis marx was such a close buddy of j. edgar hoover. they never met. did you know that, by the way? >> no. no. >> lewis marx never met j. edgar hoover. he's a right-wing republican and did admire j. edgar hoover so he did what he did for everybody he knew -- he would send boxes and boxes of marx's toys to give out as presents at christmas. i got when i was in vietnam -- and i was engaged to his daughter, he sent me boxes that i could give out to embassy

people and vietnamese and what whatnot. he must have sent thousands of these boxes to friends and associates. so he would send lewis -- he would send j. edgar hoover boxes of toys to give out and they knew people in common. they had friends in common because of the right-wing circles that my father-in-law moved in. and he was on i think a list of friends of the fbi. so actually when -- i think his name was brennan an officer in charge of the investigation, is willed people who should be interviewed with respect to me they listed my father-in-law and stepmother-in-law. and they had approved or not approved. and apparently, the story is the

tapes -- or rather the records show hoover disapproved the interview of m achl rx on the grounds that he was a friend in the fbi and brennan apparently misread this mark and did assign someone to interview marx, which didn't happen. now, lewis marx would have been more than happy not just for the interview but to -- he was a nixon republican and he thought i should be in prison and he told my wife and patricia said, i don't want you to hear that. he's my husband and so forth. lewis marx never would see me again after the pentagon papers came out and his son, his oldest son has never seen me again for 37 years now and the father is dead now. so he would have been happy to -- when hoover learned that

brennan had scheduled an interview against his -- he was furious and wanted to reassign brennan to siberia somewhere. and he had to be prevailed on that this would not be good, brennan was a very good guy and they couldn't do this and so forth. so that's what that was about. but, in fact, there was no question of there not being interest in me. it was just specifically lewis marx that hoover was inclined not to have interviewed, mistakenly, and the stepmother was interviewed by the way the stepmother-in-law. they were all interviewed except for lewis marx and he was envious. he wanted to be interviewed. but remember -- the people i'm talking to don't know.

the fbi knew who put out the pentagon papers because they had owned it since early 1970. they had been told by my -- now, this is my former wife's mother-in-law, her father's wife -- not her mother. second wife. the stepmother had told -- i think i've got the wrong relationship here. mother-in-law. >> no it's your mother-in-law. >> stepmother-in-law. >> i'm very bad on the relations. her stepmother, correct? her father's second wife is her stepmother. >> yes. >> i do this all the time with relatives. okay. she had become quite conservative in her older age and went right to the fbi having

been told by my former wife that i had copied the pentagon papers. so the fbi knew this from '69 or early '70 and they interviewed rand. do you know about this? >> no, i do not know. >> i think this is something that i had to cut out of the book just for space. i had a whole chapter on it. the fbi came to rand in april of '70, having already tried to interview my wife -- former wife. and my former wife had been advised by her lawyer not to see them unless with a lawyer and they don't interview people with lawyers so they gave up on that. they came to rand and the security officers and various people to tell them this story that i had copied the pentagon papers and apparently not known as pentagon papers but copied a

top secret study and gaveniven it to fulbright and they said they had a right to see it as senators. they could get it. mistaken. because when fulbright asked for the study on a classified basis four times of secretary -- he didn't get it. but even a well-informed harry is not exactly a layman at that point. he had been in the country and did have a right to it and indeed the senators thought that. but, you know -- so he said harry actually said, it's not a security issue here. it's indiscretion. but at this point, hearing that -- knowing that it had gone to fulbright and goodell, the

fbi had backed off. they decided that since fulbright was involved it had the potential to quote embarrass the bureau if they pursued this issue. meaning it would come out, fulbright might hurt them on their appropriations somehow, get into a fight with the senator from arkansas. so they backed off on this in about may of 1970. 1970. >> yes. >> a year before the pentagon papers. well, when the pentagon papers came out, they knew who had given it very quickly. what is not clear from the files, i've gotten -- what is it -- i think 24,000 pages -- let's see. no. no. i've gotten 16,000 pages of

files from the fchl bbi. fyi, a lot of it i have blacked out, of course. from what i did read it's not clear whether the fbi made clear to the white house that they had known about this a year earlier and hadn't moved on it. on the other hand, it's possible that they did tell henry kissinger and others. there's some indication that henry kissinger did know about it. >> in response to my last question, your relationship with henry kissinger. he was initially madder than anyone else in the oval office. >> well no. you know that's very -- the history of that is be lied by the tapes very strongly. in fact, i'm surprised you say that. haven't you seen the -- >> in the book. >> -- the very first discussion between him and nixon? >> i'm sure i have. wasn't he upset -- what was he

thinking about you? >> very mild reaction. the idea of someone putting out tapes was very ominous as a precedent for others because they had a lot of secrets that had to be kept secret from the public and from congress. the question was it was a question though of whether the person had access. there's a lot of discussion between nixon and kissinger. what does state have? what does laird have? rogers and laird were both skeptics of their policy. kissinger assures them, i haven't given state or defense, you know, real data on what our plan