>> yes it was suggested -- they suggested i give it to neil sheehan. they had already given it to him. >> you mean the three at the ips? >> yes, this is the part that has yet to be worked out at this late date exactly what happened here. neil and mark raskin tell quite different stories. they all agree that ips gave a lot of documents to neil sheehan and the significance of that is disputed or what followed from that. >> you're are not the first to give him the pentagon papers? >> no i did not know that until a year or two ago. i'll tell you exactly what i learned -- in the spring of 2002, i guess the spring of 2002, mark raskin gave some interviews which led me to talk to ips. he would be a good one to talk to. this is the first i knew of this. neil had never told me anything about it. concealing his sources, you know. they had, in fact, given him all i had given them which was 1000 pages of important stuff and did that in january late january of 1971. it's in the book, i think i went to him in early march of 1971 after it was suggested i go to neil.

i did give them to neil sheehan with no expectation that the times would put them out. he did not tell me they were working on them for reasons that are not clear to me entirely. he chose not to tell me that the times was moving ahead very rapidly though it took him several months as they sought to get it in order. during that time, i continued to see mccloskey in hopes he would put them out, senator mathias. i tried out senator gaylord nelson. mcgovern and mccloskey and matthias were all very favorable to putting them out first. then they thought better of it and delayed. in retrospect, they all thought, let ellsberg put it out and whatever negative facts will come out. what people think of as watergate generally, the dirty tricks, the campaign contributions, the enemies list, the entry into the watergate itself -- these are things none of which has ever been traced conclusively or directly to nixon himself. it's partly because people like mitchell and haldeman did not talk, basically, or liddy about what they knew and essentially took blame for these moves. whether ni

on anybody's book shelf who reads -- who's interested in the vietnam war as far as nonfiction neil sheehan's book, "a bright shining light." philip caputo, david halverstan's the best and the brightest, wallace terry's book "blood," robert mason's book "chicken hawk," one of the first and best helicopter pilot's memoirs. lou puller, he was from virginia. that book won the pulitzer prize for autobiography. you know, he was chesty puller's son, he graduated from college in 1967 and what did he do? yeah. he went to the marines. can you imagine? and there's a great probably the best memoir by a woman is linda van zanter's home before morning. she was a nurse in the vietnam war. then there's tim o'brien's "if i die in a combat zone," it's nonfiction. albert french's "patches of fire" is also another great memoir african-american vietnam veteran, and david maraniss' they. marched into sunlight. and that's only the nonfiction top of the list. as far as fiction, you know we've had pulitzer prize winners like robert butler connected series of short stories each one told in the voice of a vietnamese e