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Frank Rich Reveals his Sources

illustration by Tim Bower

In 1971, thanks to a peculiar MIT fellow who hung out at the Crimson, Frank Rich found himself in the middle of history and at the beginning of a career. The New York Times columnist and critic took time out from finishing his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, to tell us his story:

I was on the Crimson with an incredible group of talented people. I overlapped with, among many others, Jim Fallows, Mike Kinsley, Jim Glassman, Nina Bernstein, Carol Sternhell, Peter Kramer, and two brilliant journalists who are now dead: John G. Short and Nicholas Gagarin. There was a hell of a lot to cover. The university was in a total uproar, largely over the Vietnam war. I covered the 1969 student occupation that ended in a violent confrontation with the police that soon pitched Harvard into student strikes, 24/7 debate, and, at times, utter chaos.

My senior year, Dan Ellsberg started hanging out at the Crimson and sitting in on the editorial-board meetings. He was a fellow at MIT, but he’d been at Harvard in the ’50s and was on the Crimson. As a rule, we didn’t have outsiders address editorial-board meetings, but Ellsberg claimed to have worked for [Secretary of Defense Robert S.] Mcnamara and the RAND Corporation, and he knew all these backstage stories about the war and its policy makers. Gradually, he befriended us, we befriended him, and he started turning up at these meetings at our invitation. He was obsessed with Vietnam—and his tales were spellbinding.

On Class Day, I got the New York Times and, like the rest of the world, learned of the Pentagon Papers; that was the first day they appeared on the front page. It was immediately apparent to those of us who knew Ellsberg that he had to be the source for the Times; some of the stories were the same ones he’d told us at the Crimson. As I walked to the Class Day events, I stopped by the newsstand at the center of Harvard Square to buy a pack of cigarettes and saw Dan there buying a stack of copies of the Times. He was still just an anonymous guy in Cambridge—it would be days, if not weeks, before he was publicly named as the leak. I said hello, and though he did not say to me, “I was the source of the Pentagon Papers,” he noticed that I saw him buying all these extra copies of the paper and sort of bemusedly said, “I’m going away for a while.”

To make a long story short, I got an assignment to do a profile of Dan for Esquire, and Dan agreed to talk to me. All my interviewing was done by phone because he was on the lam, calling from phone booths. Slowly but surely I started to put it together. At some point during this process, Dan was publicly identified as the source. I ended up writing a 10,000-word profile; that’s what started my career.

Today, we have the most secretive administration since the Nixon administration, perhaps even more secretive, and a press that again is trying to challenge the government’s secrecy—and doing so at some legal risk. Reporters across the country, not just in Washington, are being pressured to reveal confidential sources. And in the early 21st, century, the government has an arsenal of legal and extralegal weapons (which were not available in the early ’70s) to demonize a free press, to pressure it, to politicize it.

The historic value of the Pentagon Papers themselves was that they revealed what was going on in secret in the halls of power as a disastrous war was planned and executed—and the discrepancy between that secret history and the pablum and propaganda being fed to the public by their government as a cover story. The importance of the Pentagon Papers case is that the Supreme Court upheld the right of a newspaper to publish material that was in the public interest without restraint, whatever classification it had received from the government. The court upheld the public’s right to know what its own government is doing when it supported the decision of both the Times and the Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers. Whether this precedent will be held up by our current court remains to be seen.