Project X

"Neil Sheehan feels Viet Nam is his story," says a friend of the New York Times reporter. Sheehan's first reporting job was in 1962 as U.P.I.'s Saigon bureau chief; he covered the war for three years. But it was never more his story than last week, when the Times began publishing the Pentagon's secret record of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.

Neither Sheehan nor the Times is talking about the source of the material. But the evidence is that Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, is the man (see THE NATION) who volunteered the files to Sheehan. The reporter wrote a long, controversial book-review essay in March, weighing the question of whether U.S. officials had been guilty of war crimes. Ellsberg told friends that he admired Sheehan's analysis. A short time after the essay appeared, Sheehan, normally based in Washington, was in New York City carrying a sample of the 47-volume report. He spread the papers on the desk of Times Managing Editor A.M. Rosenthal, whose eyes widened. "The decision to publish," said Rosenthal, "was made almost the moment it came into our hands."

Rosenthal dispatched Assistant Foreign Editor Gerald Gold to Washington, where he set up headquarters with Sheehan in a hotel room. But it soon became obvious that the project was too big for two people. On April 22, Sheehan and Gold moved their crates of paper into a five-room suite on the eleventh floor of the New York Hilton. They were joined by a team of eight or nine Times men and women selected not only for their knowledge of Viet Nam but also their ability to keep a secret. Inquisitive colleagues were told that Hedrick Smith, a diplomatic reporter soon to be assigned to Moscow, was "off studying Russian"; E.W. Kenworthy, who covers the environment beat, took an unscheduled "vacation"; Fox Butterfield was called in from his New Jersey suburban assignment. The team also included two other editors from the foreign desk and two secretaries. All worked under the operational charge of Foreign Editor James Greenfield, who brought a special expertise to the project: he had been Deputy Assistant (1962-64) and Assistant (1964-66) Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the crucial years of the Viet Nam commitment.

Daily Walks. The security problem was extraordinary, but in the end it was solved better than at the Pentagon. A telephone tie line from the suite to Washington was used, but all local calls were made from phone booths. A special identity check was required of anyone entering the team's headquarters. Hotel staff members wondered about the mystery guest, Gerald Gold, who sometimes consumed ten breakfasts and whose bills were running above $500 a day.

The "Project X" team--as they were dubbed--worried about losing the story. Village Voice Writer Nat Hentoff had run an item about a "breakthrough" war story, and it was believed that the Washington Post was on to the Pentagon study. For seven weeks the team worked seven days a week, often past midnight; in all, some 30 Times staff members were eventually involved. Gold saw his family only five times during the period. Sheehan, who has a bad back, took daily walks in the beginning; but as deadline time neared, had even given up sleeping. The last push was provided by his wife Susan, a New Yorker writer. On the Monday after publication, with Sheehan's third piece still in the typewriter, she brought a double bounty: a visit from one of their two daughters, who had not seen her father for weeks, and some Dexedrine. At the Times plant, a small, trusted composing crew was walled off to get the story in type; many editors realized the hush-hush project was ready only when they were told that their normal Sunday news space had been cut.

Writing the story was an even bigger job than keeping it a secret. The pages of the huge report were unnumbered and out of order; they had to be organized before they were read, judged and condensed. The writers absorbed 45 books, preparing themselves to compare official, public statements with private memorandums in the report.

At the Times, editors were outlining the project to Publisher Arthur ("Punch") Sulzberger in his paneled, 14th-floor office. His reservations against running the news stories were minor, but on the advice of at least one Times lawyer, he hesitated at printing the related documents. A few days before press time, Rosenthal, Vice President James Reston and Sulzberger met until the small hours of the morning. The publisher agreed to run the documents, but ordered the overall daily space allotment cut from twelve pages to six.

Satisfying Headline. After being virtually ignored all Sunday, the story's impact hit the next day. Callers to the Times were informed that there would be no comment whatsoever from any Timesman. Sulzberger himself finally broke the official silence. The report, he said, is "a part of history that should have been made available a long time ago." Added Rosenthal: "The essence of journalism is to make information available. How could we say to our readers, 'We know, but you can't know?' " Rosenthal, an acclaimed correspondent and writer who has lived through some bitter power struggles as a Times editor, had plainly never been happier. "The most satisfying headline I've ever seen in the Times," he confided, "is the one that read MITCHELL SEEKS TO HALT SERIES ON VIETNAM BUT TIMES REFUSES.

I'm going to have that engraved on my tombstone."

Buttons suddenly appeared on lapels of copy boys, reporters, editors, even Sulzberger himself: FREE THE TIMES XXII. (Twenty-two Times officers and employees were named as defendants in the Government complaint.) Morale had never been higher. Reston called it "the best week we've ever had." In his column he recalled that the Times (at his urging) refused to publish the advance invasion plans for the Bay of Pigs. He claimed that the paper, far from being irresponsible, is in fact often attacked for "playing the Government game" (the Nixon Administration hardly sees it that way). In an odd aside, Reston even admitted that the paper is occasionally "a tedious bore." There is 1,0 general principle covering all cases, he concluded. The conflict is "not between what is right and what is wrong, but between two honest but violently conflicting views about what best serves the national interest and the enduring principles of the First Amendment."

At week's end, an "utterly exhausted" Sheehan surfaced long enough to compare the preparation experience to "living in a submarine." The report, he told TIME, "is a history that belongs to the people of the United States. They paid for it with their lives and with their treasure. These documents are classified only because their disclosure is embarrassing to some people." Born in Holyoke, Mass., and Harvard educated, Sheehan is known as a determined, dogged reporter who eschews the Washington social whirl. In Viet Nam he was one of the trio of correspondents (the others: Malcolm Browne and David Halberstam) whose pessimistic reports about the war so infuriated Madame Nhu that she once reportedly offered to light the immolation match. Last week, through Sheehan's enterprise, a number of past and present Government officials were revealed to have shared the trio's pessimism all along.

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