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On June 11th, 1971, Arthur Sulzberger sat in the publisher's office at the New York Times with 7,000 pages of a top secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, copied without permission by a former analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. His reporters had been writing in secret in a hotel for 3 months. His lawyers had told him that printing the pages was a crime and that reading them was too.
He had 2 choices. Put the government's own history of the war on the front page of Sunday's paper, or take the lawyers' advice and lock the boxes away. He printed it. Within days a federal judge shut the series down, and 19 days after the first story the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government couldn't do that.
What if he had taken the lawyers' advice?
This week we hit CTRL+Z on the publisher's office at 43rd Street, and follow the ripple to today: a Washington Post editor in a Volkswagen under the Mayflower Hotel marquee at midnight, a freshman senator from Alaska reading 4,000 classified pages into the record of a subcommittee on public buildings, 2 men in hats running blank paper through the copiers at a church press on Beacon Hill, and a Times lawyer signing a receipt for 3 cardboard boxes. In 2026 the New York Times is suing the Pentagon with a 1931 case about a Minneapolis scandal sheet, because one Friday morning in 1971 a publisher listened to his lawyers.