Assaying the Defense

At a recent Hollywood benefit for Pentagon-papers Defendants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, even the invited luminaries paid $125 each to get in, and Barbra Streisand agreed to sing to anyone over the phone for $3,000 a song. The resulting $50,000 haul was impressive, but the money quickly evaporated. Ellsberg and Russo are finding out that while the price of liberty may be eternal vigilance, the cost of justice can be astronomical. Their trial, which is now nearing an end, will have cost the defense between $900,000 and $1,000,000; the prosecution tab may reach $5,000,000.

To meet the high cost of justice, the defense team has a salaried staff of 25, who raise funds, do legal research, plot courtroom strategy, type, prepare press releases and copy documents. "We open the office at 6 a.m.," says Head Fund Raiser Stanley Sheinbaum, an economist formerly of the Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Actually, three persons have normally been working all night duplicating, collating, indexing and distributing copies of the previous day's trial transcript, exhibits and memos.

By 7 a.m., Chief Attorneys Leonard Boudin and Leonard Weinglass plus the three other trial lawyers begin gathering in their offices located five blocks from the courtroom; legal aides report on points they have spent the night researching. Meanwhile the fund raisers are arriving to call East Coast donors. Even during the trial, the offices, emblazoned with antiwar posters and looking more like a political headquarters than a law firm, continue to buzz. The phones are always ringing, the Xerox machine never stops. But the heart of the office day begins at 4:30 p.m., when the lawyers return from court and meet with 15 legal helpers to assess what has happened and where to go next. The session usually lasts well past the dinner hour.

With it all, monthly tabs mount. At $1.50 a page, transcript costs alone (paid to the court reporter) run $8,000 to $9,000. (To date, there have been 20,000 pages of transcript in the 15-week trial.) The phones cost $5,000. The Xerox machine another $5,000; Ellsberg wryly notes that it is much more efficient than the one he used originally. Salaries are another $10,000 a month--ranging from $50 a week to some law students to $185 for the highest-paid nonlawyer. The five attorneys will divide a total fee of just over $100,000. Monthly rent for the offices and staff sleeping quarters, a collection of seven apartments, is $4,000. The defense is housing seven persons, including the lawyers, who are all from the East Coast; Ellsberg pays for his own apartment and the impoverished Russo has his rent paid by an anonymous donor.

Then there are the extraordinary costs. Many of the 30 defense witnesses have had to be flown to Los Angeles and housed, some of them two or three times (including M.I.T.'s Noam Chomsky and Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy) because courtroom delays pushed back their testimony. Though some pay their own way, as Bundy did, most cost an average of $1,000.

Other bills come from checking out obscure facts and legal points. "For example," says Sheinbaum, "not long ago the best guy to supply some answers happened to be in Paris. Our phone bill talking to him was $500." Attorney Charles Nesson adds, "Our research needs have been just awesome." One early project: going through the mountain of pertinent memoirs, Government publications and news clippings to show that most of the material published in the 7,000 pages of Pentagon papers was already public knowledge.

All in all, the monthly outgo is around $70,000. To help pay the bills, Ellsberg and Russo go out speaking nearly every weekend. "I usually appear on some campus or at a Unitarian church and bring in $300," Russo told TIME's Leo Janos. "Dan makes a talk in some living room and comes back with three grand." A bigger source of revenue is direct-mail solicitation, using the purchased mailing lists of such organizations as the A.C.L.U., Common Cause, the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. To date, 1,000,000 letters have brought in $200,000.

A continuing frustration for the fund raisers has been Ellsberg's father-in-law, Toy Manufacturer Louis Marx. "Mr. Marx has cost us tens of thousands of dollars," Sheinbaum groans. "People figure he is certainly rich enough to foot the bill. This is true. Unfortunately Mr. Marx is absolutely opposed to what Dan did. He won't give a dime, won't even talk to Dan. But it's hard to convince people of that." Currently, the defense has a $70,000 operating deficit.

With interest in the proceedings now increasing as the trial heads to the jury, Sheinbaum is desperately trying to get out of the hole. A final telegram blitz went out two weeks ago to 20,000 former contributors. Says Sheinbaum: "By the end of the trial, I expect to be $150,000 in the red, and that's assuming acquittal. Obviously, if there are appeals, well . . . "

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