tv Oral Histories CSPAN April 7, 2015 6:19am-7:10am EDT
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los angeles, actually, at that point. and, anyway, the white house had done a burglary of my doctor's office. i said to him, are you kidding? put it out. and he announced it in open court and there was a rush from the journalists both for the first time, a front page scene where they dashed to the phones to get out the word that as they put it water gate meets the pent gone papers trial. they'd been having a very dull trial most of the time for months at this point. and, suddenly, they were all envying their colleagues there washington who were covering water gate. and, suddenly, they were covering water gate. and so they were very excited by it. and it was -- that led, now to a wonderful ten days for us. because, if you want to know my mood, the rest of the trial is extremely a combination of boring and teed yus and
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stressful and frustrating at a time that i didn't want to look back on or relive. the last ten days were glorious. each day, there was a new revelation. hunt reveals a c.i.a. profile. and the break-in to the doctor's office. and then the taps come out. and then the c.i.a. profile. the fact that grey had destroyed material relating to me, the head of the f.b.i. in his home fireplace. it was just wonderful revelation after another. and we would have been glad to see it go on. but it was leaked out through the offer of the f.b.i., to the judge, who had not revealed it to us. and the judge disz missed that as a grounds for dismissal. we made a motion for dismissal in the trial at that point. said no that had not affected
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him as judge, that offer. and he said he had not disz cussed the trial at all or had not discussed the f.b.i. directorship. that was not true, as eric man, who had been part of the conversation, revealed. so lying criminality, instruction was just tunnelabling out at this point. and these were essentially the crimes that put nixon in great trouble, vulnerability of going to prison because they were crimes that directly involved him. after impeachment, there was every reason to expect prosecution. he needed that pardon which forgave him as a condition of becoming his vice president. it turns out. so a pardon which, of course, ford gave him as a blanket
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pardon for whatever crimes he might have committed not knowing what the crimes were at all. he knew these by this time. but who knows what else? i believe that giles colson could give you a dozen other crimes. i could hypothesize some of them quite specifically. >> dr. fielding had not told you about the break-in? >> no, no, he had not. >> did you have a chat with him about this afterwards? >> oh, yeah, i had much discussion. i had seen him during the trial not in a therapist -- not as analysis. and all he did was classical analysis, but sitting up and talking to him about what was going on. really, because i wanted him to have a sense of how he felt i was doing. actually this is a -- psychoanalysts don't give you much feedback like that. but if i could, i'm under a lot of stress here and maybe there are signs of it that i'm not
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aware of that he would note and be able to caution out. so i did see him, i think, every week. or every couple of weeks. during the trial, just to tell him what was going on. and he never told me what he did, see, was i can't guarantee to you that this office is secure anymore. i said, it might be bugged. and i said no paranoid, if i may say. no i dwoent think they'd bug your office. why would they do that? i might say, by the way, that when we moved out 06 our apartment at bunker hill, it was called, the day -- the weekend we moved out at the end of the trial, a cbs crew came in to shoot a commercial in our partment which had a very good corner view of los angeles. and the plug, the wall plug, was not working. when they tried to plug their camera in. the lights in.
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and so the camera man took apart fixtures and found a bug in them. i said how did you know it was a bug. he said well, i was in counter intelligence in korea. so he looked around elsewhere in the apartment and found another bug in the bedroom. so he had had bedrooms throughout the trial. fielding could well have been true. there may well have been a bug that's never been mentioned in his room. but, anyway, i didn't know why he would have such a suspicion. anyway, when it came out this they had broken into his apartment, to his office and i then did discuss that with him. he said that he knew it was white house and he knew it was after me from the beginning. because, now this will tell you in the sum of your other
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interviews, he's almost always been said that nothing was found with my name on it and they had photographed nothing. in fielding's office. actually barker had mentioned that they had photographed things in the office, documents in the office. and martinez i think had also mentioned in one interview i think it was his harvard interview, that he had photographed things in the office. what did he photograph? well fielding told me along paper that i had written a 68 page paper called escalating in a quagmire that's the heart of my book, papers on the war.
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and this document actually could have been some interest to them. it was a long study that i did of decision-making on vietnam which was based on the pentagon papers. and, in fact, it had quotes from the pentagon papers in it. and i had said, without identifying them and i had said in the document very provocatively. i wanted to see what would happen. so i wrote this in 1970.
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nobody was willing to publish it because it was only history. and i even offered to shorten it. >> i gave it to lots of people all over the place. i gave it to henry kissen jer. i gave it to many democrats. and everybody said, very, very interesting. kissenger's office had it. you know, interesting stuff. and nobody commented on the fact that it obviously was based on classified documents. and that although people were always writing memoirs based on classified documents, they never said that. that was fairly challenging. >> dr. fielding did he explain why he didn't tell you that he thought -- >> yes. he said that it upset him very much. he knew that he was sure that it was the white house. i remember, this was '69. they had not come out yet. but he knew what i had been doing. i told him what i was doing
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through -- i left him in -- let me see when i ended. when i went to cambridge in basically, july of '69 is when i ended. is that right? '6 9d. i'm sorry. yes. he saw the file cabinet was broken into in labor day weekend, '69. >> no, labor day weekend of '71. >> '71. that's right. sorry. so 37 years ago. >> hold for 15 segts here and see if this phone goes away. >> the phone is still -- wait. >> there we go. >> yeah okay. so the pentagon papers had come out in june. so he knew all of that. so he now knows, you know the white house is very interested
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in this. so somebody has burgled his office. he was certain it was the white house. but i wasn't seeing him then. i was in cambridge. he wasn't in direct touch with me. i called -- something else happened. but let me come to this point. his lawyer, he talked to a lawyer about it. and the lawyer advised him don't get involved. don't get ininvolved. it's a white house operation. and don't tell -- well he said -- he apologized to me. he said i felt guilty. i feel i wronged you, which, from a professional point of view, he certainly had. and i apologize. i said, fine. everything had turned out fine by that time, of course. however, it bothered him so much
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that he got a bleeding ulcer. and, at one point, it hemorrhaged and he went to the hospital, the emergency room, with a bleeding ulcer. so it bothered him enough he already had hypertension. so it bothered him enough that it worsened his hypertension and gave him a bleeding elser but not enough to tell me. not a wonderful performance. but it was pretty much like everybody else i dealt with. i could go into, you know a dozen similar examples. they all acted pretty much the same. but in his case, now other analysts used to tell me, you were blessed in your analysts that he didn't cooperate with the f.b.i. when the f.b.i. approached him. that's why they went into his office. i said well how can he cooperate? he's my psychoanalyst. and others told me oh, other analysts would have coop rated.
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>> and you stopped seeing him when you went to cambridge? what year? >> '70. >> '70. so, all right. >> so i got actually a -- an estimate. many people came up with pretty much the same estimate of the odds. they said that about 90% of psychiatrists would have cooperated with the f.b.i. given it was a national security matter without telling me. and perhaps 75% of psychoanalysts, smaller number everybody gave the same percentages. and so their hope that they would get something out of him. now, people have thought that they were foolish to think they would get notes. from a psychoanalyst. they didn't know much about the psychoanalysis psychoanalysis, of course. hunt and erlichman haldeman and kroed were all christian
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scientists as i had been and my father was. i wondered what had meant for them to be going after a fellow christian scientist. that's a good deal of cleej yal feeling. so when i asked erlichman and kroeg, who is now a friend of mine, how did you feel going after a christian scientist? they had not discovered that i was a christian scientist, which was not a secret. that's why i gave the papers to the christian science monitor. my father had given me praktically a life subscription. he was a very fanatic christian scientist. they had a whole room filled with documents on danny who somehow never picked up thatives a fellow christian scientist. and i asked kroeg how they would have felt. well, they would have felt very strange about that you know that that would not have gone unnoticed. that it was much easier for them to imagine that i might be a
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soviet agent not knowing that i was a christian scientist than if they had known. but, anyway what they were after was information that could blackmail me, as i say, into silence. that was not likely to be in notes and, in fact fielding now told me flou that i'm talking to him, i asked him, did you keep noets? he said no, no. at the very beginning, i would take names. and then i would tear up my noets. i said how did you get into a habit like that? i was general patten's third officer he says he was a blank
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slate, as far as i was concerned, you know. it would give me something to think about that i was telling all the stuff that i was doing to general patten's medical officer. >> i was going to say two rather interesting historical figures. >> well you remember, after all, show how things connect six degrees of separation here. nixon nerved himself up into the invasion of cambodia by watching patten about six times. plus, it would be more. >> the light of the administration breaks into patten's military office. >> right. that would have given nixon such a thing.
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kwun of the people in the group was, in fact, barker? he was in real estate. >> yeah. >> anyway, they looked at his real estate -- his income tax returns. and barker said in harper's art kal, i got the impression that the good doctor "was not reporting all of his income tax." why do they care about that? fine. just as good as getting stuff on me. they wanted to be able to 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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