but i think he was disappointed in the fact that the stance of the papers, the content of the papers did not seem to be absorbed by the public. i gave up my job, my clear, my clearance and i staked my freedom on a gamble. if the american people knew the truth about how they had been lied to, about the myths that had led them to endorse this butchery for 25 years, that they would choose against it. and the risk that you take when do you that is that you learn something ultimately about your fellow citizens that you won t like to hear. and that is that they hear it, they learn from it, they understand it and they proceed to ignore it.
turned out. and the fbi then came to harry, as president of rand he had been involved in getting he access to the pentagon papers. his impression at the time was i had not broken any law if i had given it to the senate. they had a right to see it. but i expected the fbi to come down on me very shortly after that. he had really radically changed in his view of the war. and i knew that. i knew he had changed. the first year of marriage we re talking about him going to prison for the rest of his life. he gave me a number of the papers to read. and as i was reading it, i was horrified by the coldness, the
on washington. the level of antiwar activity had been raised. should we do it? should we do it? and neil and i after we got a feel for what s in there, argued we could go ahead. it would not jeopardize national security and it was a public service. all i knew was they had a bunch of classified papers. and the question for me as a lawyer is can you publish classified papers. the law is the espionage act. if you read it and stretched it, it was possible to apply it to the pentagon papers. we re sitting down in the engine room doing the work, not up at the corporate hierarchy, but we re hearing the battles going on there, and, of course,
xeroxing. i put my hopes in congress. i took the papers to the most outspoken critics of the war. surely they would embrace these revelations and would want to make them public. the people that i needed to talk to or somehow to reach were the ones who had been saying they had been against the war for years. years while i was supporting the war, longer than me, who said that they saw through the war, saw it was wrong. and what i wanted them to do now and what i still want them to do and what they still can do is to act. but no one did. meanwhile, the war was escalating. then i heard congressman pete mcclos ski give a speech. i said i think they re not telling us the truth about vietnam and i told him some of the things i had just seen a month earlier. he went and revealed some of
part of some movement against war and for social justice. so all the years since then, he s act in the same spirit in which he revealed the papers to the nation. the courage we need is not the port attitude to be obedient in the service of an untrust war, to help conceal lies, to do our job by a boss who has deserved power and is acting as an outlaw government. it is the courage at last to face honestly the truth and reality of what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it.