Kevin: June 11, 1971. A Friday morning in the publisher's office at the New York Times in Manhattan. Arthur Salzberger, who everyone calls Punch, is 45 years old. He's a former Marine and the man who runs the paper his grandfather bought in 1896. For three months, his reporters have been working in secret on two floors of the New York Hilton Hotel. They have 7,000 pages of a top secret history of the Vietnam War. Written inside the Defense Department and copied without permission by a former Pentagon analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. The pages show four presidents lying to the country for 20 years about a war that's still going on. Salzberger has read every page and he fell asleep more than once. His lawyers have told him what happens if he prints them. His family attorney, Louis Loeb, says printing them violates the Espionage Act, and that even reading them is a crime. His managing editor, Abe Rosenthal, sent word last night. No documents, no story. Rosenthal has privately decided to quit if the answer is no, and he's standing in front of the desk right now with Max Frankel, the Washington bureau chief. And they're both waiting. The presses roll tomorrow at 6 p.m. and Salzberger has two choices. Put the government's secret history on the front page of Sunday's paper, or take the lawyer's advice and lock the boxes away. He rolls the dice and prints the story. But what if Salzberger takes the advice? What if the New York Times, with the biggest story of the war sitting in a hotel room, decides it's not worth going to prison for? Let's hit Control-Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history, real 50-50 calls, and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision, we try it the other way, and see what changes. Daniel Ellsberg is 38 years old in the fall of 1969, and the whole study is sitting in a safe in his office. He's a former Marine with a Harvard doctorate who worked in Robert McDamara's Pentagon. He spent two years in Vietnam as a civilian advisor and came home convinced the war couldn't be won. He now works at the RAN Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, that does research for the Air Force, and he helped write the history he's about to steal. McNamara had ordered that history in June of 1967, right around the time that he'd stopped believing in his own war. Thirty-six analysts, half of them military officers, worked from the Defense Department's own files and finished five days before Richard Nixon took office. President Lyndon Johnson never even knew the study existed. It ran to 47 volumes and 7,000 pages and stamped Top Secrets. It showed four administrations, from Truman through Johnson, telling the public one thing about Vietnam while planning another. Of the fifteen copies that went out, the only one that reached the new administration went to Henry Kissinger. On October 1st, 1969, Ellsberg puts a few volumes in his briefcase and walks out of the Rand building. He drives to an advertising agency in Los Angeles that belongs to the girlfriend of his friend, Tony Russo. This agency has a Xerox machine. Halfway through the night, there's a knock at the door, and it's the Los Angeles Police Department. Russo assumes the government has found them. The owner explains that they've simply tripped the building's burglar alarm. So the officers leave and they keep copying for the next few weeks. Ellsberg doesn't want a newspaper, though. A lawyer has told him that he's less likely to be prosecuted if he gives the pages to Congress, and he thinks the hearings would carry more weight than a story anyways. So he takes them to Senator William Fulbright. Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and he intentionally hands them over in full view of the senator's staff. Fulbright holds them for an entire year and then says no. Senator George McGovern agrees to read them aloud in a filibuster, and then he announces for president and a week later says he can't. Two more senators also pass. Finally, one afternoon in the Senate cafeteria, Ellsberg spots the journalist I. He walks over and tells him he has the whole secret history of the war. Stone looks at him with tears in his eyes and says, God bless you. By early 1971, Ellsberg has left Rand for a research job at MIT, and he's now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the pages hidden in an apartment near Harvard Square. That winter, he's down in Washington for a visit and he can't find the friend he was supposed to stay with. So he calls Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter in the paper's Washington Bureau, who He's known for years. Sheehan sets up a cot in his basement and they stay up all night talking about the war. Ellsberg tells him about the study. Two weeks later, Sheehan takes the train up to Cambridge and Ellsberg gives him a key to the apartment, with one condition. He can read and he can take notes, but he cannot copy. Ellsberg then leaves town on vacation, and his wife tells him on the trip, he'll copy it. Sheehan and his wife check into a motel near Harvard Square as Mr. and Mrs. Thompson on Friday, March nineteenth. For those of you that are Simpsons fans, you probably understand that reference. They carry 60 pounds of paper out of the apartment in shopping bags. They spend three nights at all night coffee shops in Boston and Medford on fifteen hundred dollars of the Times' money, and the machines keep breaking down under the load. On the night of March twenty third, Sheehan calls his boss in Washington and says I got it all. Ellsberg won't find out for three months because Sheehan keeps telling him the paper hasn't decided anything. Meanwhile, its editors rent two floors of the New York Hilton and fill the suites with reporters, secretaries, and a security guard. The team starts writing. The in-house lawyer, a 37 year old named Jim Goodall, ends the first big editors meeting with a warning that everyone in the room may have just taken part in a felony. Louis Loeb, the family's outside lawyer, has Tells the publisher that printing the pages is a crime and that reading them is too. He comes back three weeks later with Herb Brownell, Eisenhower's attorney general, who says Salzberger will probably go to jail. Both men refuse to look at even a page. The editors dig up the last time the paper faced this. In April 1961, the Times had a story about the coming invasion of Cuba and softened it for national security. President Kennedy told the paper afterward that if it had printed everything, You would have saved us from a colossal mistake. Salzberger says yes on June 11th. The series starts that Sunday next to Trisha Nixon's wedding under the headline Vietnam Archive, though within days everyone else is calling it the Pentagon Papers. For a day, almost nobody notices, including the wire services. Nixon reads it and tells his chief of staff it was criminally traitorous to leak and to print. Then he says the White House should stay out of it. Because the study makes Kennedy and Johnson look like liars and ends before he took office. By that evening, Kissinger has changed his mind, telling him that letting it go would show that he was a weakling. The next day, the chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, says on tape that the study has shown the country, quote, you can't trust the government, you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment. Monday evening, A telegram from Attorney General John Mitchell reaches the Times asking it to stop. Salzberger is asleep at the Savoy Hotel in London. His editors wake him at two in the morning and put him on a speakerphone. They ask what he wants to do. He asks Goodall whether one more day of printing makes the paper's legal position any worse. Not by five percent, Goodall says, and Salzberger tells them to keep printing. On Tuesday, the government goes to a federal judge in Manhattan named Murray Gerfein. Who has been on the bench less than a month? He orders the Times to stop, the first time an American court has ever done that to a newspaper, and the Times obeys. Ellsberg has been moving between motels since the FBI started looking for him. He calls Ben Bagdikian, an editor at the Washington Post who once worked at Rand. Bagdikian flies to Boston and comes home with 4,400 pages in a cardboard box that gets its own first-class seat. The post had sold its stock to the public for the first time two days earlier at $26 a share. In the living room of the editor Ben Bradley's house in Georgetown, the paper's lawyers tell the publisher, Catherine Graham, that a criminal charge could wreck the offering and cost the company its television stations. The company chairman tells her he wouldn't publish. Her editorial page editor tells her there's more than one way to destroy a newspaper. She says, let's go, let's publish. And the first post story runs Friday morning. A judge in Washington refuses to stop the post, and an appeals court stops it anyway at 120 the next morning. Within days, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch have pages of their own, and more than a dozen newspapers end up printing pieces of the study. When Ellsberg gave the post its box, he set one condition that a second box go to a senator. Mike Gravelle is 41. A first-time Democrat from Alaska, and he's filibustering a bill to extend the draft by himself. Ellsberg has decided he's the senator. Just before midnight on June 24th, Begdikian awaits in a Volkswagen under the awning of the Mayflower Hotel, five blocks from the White House. Gravel pulls up and loads the box into his own trunk because his aides don't have a senator's immunity. Then he drives home and sleeps on it. His staff spends the weekend on his living room floor reading. On the night of June 29th, he walks into the Senate with the pages in two flight bags and a security detail of Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs. He can't get the 51 senators the rules require before the chamber can do business. So he calls a night hearing of the subcommittee he chairs, which handles public buildings and grounds, in a room across the street. He tells the reporters that arms are being severed and metal is crashing through human bodies because of decisions this government made, and he breaks down. After three hours of reading, just past one in the morning, he puts the rest, more than four thousand pages, into the record. The day before, Ellsberg had walked up the steps of the federal courthouse in Boston and surrendered. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy, he tells the crowd of reporters, and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision. The Supreme Court hears the case on a Saturday, june twenty sixth, for two hours and thirteen minutes. Four days later, on june thirtieth, It rules six to three that the government hasn't shown enough to stop the papers. Justice Hugo Black writes that the point of a free press is to expose what the government hides. The Times and the Post start printing again the next day. The solicitor general who argued the government's case, Erwin Griswold, wrote eighteen years later that he had never seen any trace of a threat to national security in the Pentagon Papers. Nixon wants Ellsberg ruined, and the FBI won't do it. Ellsberg's new father in law is Lewis Marks, the toy manufacturer, who gives money every year to a charity J. Edgar Hoover runs. When the Bureau's intelligence chief tries to interview Marx about his son-in-law, Hoover blocks it and takes the man's job. Nixon complains on tape that Hoover won't investigate because Marx's daughter is married to that son of a bitch, Ellsberg. So in July, John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, sets up a unit in the executive office building next door to the White House to do the work. instead. Two young aides, Bud Crow and David Young, run it. A former CIA officer named Howard Hunt and a former FBI agent named Gordon Liddy do the fieldwork. On September third, Hunt and Liddy fly to Los Angeles with three Cuban exiles and break into the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg psychiatrist, looking for something to smear him with. The following May, the Times wins the Pulitzer Prize for public service. Nixon says on tape that the thief has been made a national hero And the New York Times has been given a prize for stealing documents. He asks, What in the name of God the country has come to? A year after that, in a Los Angeles courtroom, the prosecutors in Ellsberg's espionage trial have to tell the judge about the burglary, and he throws out every charge. And here is where we press Control Z. It's Friday morning, June 11th, 1971, and Salzberger tells his editors no. He says it to Rosenthal and Frankel across the desk. The paper will run a story saying the study exists and describing what's in it without quoting a page. If that isn't enough, then it will run nothing. Rosenthal gives him the answer he gave the night before. Without the documents, there is no story. Salzberger says, then there is no story, and the meeting is over in a few minutes. By that afternoon, the foreign editor, James Greenfield, is standing in a hotel suite telling the reporters. He's run the operation at the Hilton from the beginning. Sheehan has finished his second installment and is halfway through his third. Security guards carry the typewriters, the filing cabinets, and the safe down to the service entrance, along with the two copies of the study the team's been working from. Greenfield fetches the third from his own apartment, where the paper's lawyer insisted it be kept so nothing classified was ever inside the Times building. All three go into the company vault. The Times has locked a story away before. In 1908, Salzberger's grandfather, Adolf Oakes, killed an interview with the German Kaiser after President Teddy Roosevelt objected to it, and he left it in his safe for 31 years. At six o'clock Saturday evening, the presses run the Sunday paper, and the front page belongs to Trisha Nixon's wedding in the Rose Garden. Salzberger packs for London where he has a trip planned and flies out that weekend. On Monday, a letter from Rosenthal reaches the publisher's office and is read to him by phone at the Savoy Hotel. Rosenthal has resigned. Seymour Topping, his deputy, takes over the newsroom and the team at the Hilton goes back to its old beats without a word of the story in print. Sheehan makes a phone call the same day. For three months, he's told Ellsberg that the paper hasn't decided anything, and that he's only reading the study to be ready in case it ever does. Now he calls Cambridge and tells them the publisher killed it. Ellsberg had given the Times one condition at the start, that it print large chunks or not touch the study at all. He takes the news the way he took Fulbright's and McGovern's. He goes back to the plan he had before Sheehan ever slept in his basement. On Tuesday, he makes two calls from his apartment. The first is to Ben Bagdikian at the Washington Post, who once worked at Rand and knows exactly what Ellsberg is describing. The second is to the office of Senator Mike Gravell of Alaska, who's been on the Senate floor for days filibustering a bill to extend the draft. Ellsberg asks the aide who answers whether the Senator plans to keep the filibuster going. The aide says yes. Ellsberg tells him he has some material that could keep the Senator reading until the end of the year. Begdikian is in Cambridge on Wednesday and back in Washington on Thursday afternoon, with four thoures in a cardboard box strapped into the first class seat beside him. Ellsberg has given him two boxes and one instruction that the second go to Gravel. That evening, the post's editors, lawyers, and business executives gather in Ben Bradley's house in Georgetown, and the paper's publisher, Catherine Graham, listens to them by phone from her own home. The company sold 1.2 million shares to the public two days earlier at $26 apiece, and the lawyers walk her through what a criminal charge would do to that offering and to the licenses of the company's television stations. Her chairman, Fritz Beebe, tells her that if it were his call, he guesses he wouldn't. Bradley tells her the newsroom won't stand for a delay. She asks him how long a careful job would take, and he tells her the time spent three months. She tells him to take the time and keep the pages at his house. She wants a series she can defend. The reporters keep writing in Bradley's living room. A week later, just before midnight on Thursday, June 24th, Bagdikian parks a Volkswagen under the awning of the Mayflower Hotel, five blocks from the White House. Gravelle pulls up beside him and gets out. He lifts the second box into his own trunk. Bagdikian offers the senators two aids and Gravelle refuses because he has immunity for what he does as a senator and they don't. He drives home through empty streets and tells his wife he has the papers. She says they'll put them under the bed and sleep on them, and they do. Over the weekend, his staff sleeps on the living room floor and reads, calling out names as they find them so the senator can decide which ones to cut. He brings in a physicist and anti war activist named Leonard Rodberg to help. On Tuesday, june twenty ninth, Gravelle walks into the Capitol carrying two flight bags he bought for the occasion, past a half a dozen Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs he's asked to guard his office. That evening, he tries to read from the bags on the Senate floor and fails. Only one other senator is in the chamber, Robert Griffin of Michigan, and Griffin objects to going ahead without the fifty one the rules require. So Gravelle walks across the street to the new Senate office building and convenes the subcommittee on buildings and grounds, which he chairs. The witness is a congressman from upstate New York he recruited in the hallway. Two fellow senators take seats, and the reporters he's called filled the rest of the room. He explains that the Vietnam War is relevant to public buildings because the war is taking the money that would build them. Then he starts to read aloud from a study that has never been printed anywhere. He gets through three hours. When he reaches the passage about metal crashing through human bodies, he stops and wipes his face with a handkerchief, and then he goes on. Just after one in the morning, he says he's physically unable to continue and bangs the gap. He enters the remaining pages, more than four thousand of them, into the record of a subcommittee on public buildings. Graham calls Bradley from her house on Wednesday morning and says, Let's go, let's publish. The first post story runs Thursday, July first, quoting both Bagdikian's box and the senator's transcript. Attorney General John Mitchell sends her a letter asking the paper to stop and turn over its copy. Bradley tells the Justice Department by phone that it will not. In the Oval Office that week, Nixon hears two pieces of advice. Kissinger wants nothing released. Melvin Laird, the defense secretary, wants the whole study declassified and handed out. His theory is that friendly papers will print it with the slant the administration wants, and that the pages indict Kennedy and Johnson while stopping before Nixon's own presidency. Nixon takes Laird's advice. The senator can't be sued for what he says in a hearing because the Constitution's speech and debate clause protects it. A newspaper quoting the congressional record is quoting a public document. The Justice Department files nothing against the post and starts looking for the man who handed a senator 4,000 pages. In New York, Former Times reporter named Sidney Zion goes on the radio and names the leaker, a former Rand analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. Then he says the New York Times had the whole study in a hotel for three months and put it in a vault. On Friday morning, the Times runs the story of Gravel's hearing on page one, written from the wire and from the transcript by a newsroom that had the same pages typed and edited three weeks earlier. Sheehan's unfinished third installment is in the vault. And Salzberger flies home from London on the day he planned to. The FBI comes to 43rd Street in the second week of July with a grand jury subpoena for the boxes. Two agents from the Bureau's leak investigation sit in the publisher's outer office while Salzberger calls his lawyer. Loeb tells him what he told him in May. Possessing the study is a crime and the paper should return it. Brownell, who was on the phone with Attorney General Mitchell in June, arranges the handover. Two days later, Times lawyer carries three cardboard boxes into the federal building at Foley Square and signs a receipt, and Sheehan resigns that afternoon. In Washington, Nixon is thinking about Ellsberg. He tells his chief of staff on July 1st that he wants the safe at the Brookings Institution cleaned out. He also wants Ellsberg destroyed, and the FBI won't do it. Ellsberg's father-in-law is Lewis Marks, the toy manufacturer. And he's one of J. Edgar Hoover's donors. The director has already removed the agent who tried to interview him. So on July 17th, the president's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, summons a 31-year-old lawyer from his old Seattle firm, Bud Crow, to a closed door meeting and gives him a unit of his own, with rooms in the executive office building next door to the White House. Krog's first call is to a former FBI agent at the Treasury Department, Gordon Liddy. Who joins on July 20th? The president's special counsel, Chuck Colson, has already hired a retired CIA officer, Howard Hunt. Their assignment is Ellsberg. In the middle of the month, he walks up the courthouse steps in Boston and surrenders. And a grand jury in Los Angeles charges him with theft and espionage. Gravelle has a different problem. The pages he read into the record are public, and nobody will print them. The senator who controls the printing money, Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, refuses to pay a stenographer to type up the subcommittee transcript. Without one, the government's own printers can't set it, offers the pages to about 35 publishers. Simon Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, and Harvard University Press all say no. The Board of the MIT Press votes yes, and the university's provost at a school with more Pentagon contracts than any other in the country overrules it by phone. Then Gravelle's aide, Rodberg, reminds him that his own church has a publishing house. The Unitarian Universalist Association owns Beacon Press, which works out of an old townhouse at the corner of Mount Vernon Place and Joy Street on Beacon Hill in Boston. Its editor in chief, Arnold Tovell, takes Rodberg's call. He tells him that if Beacon is going to consider this, the papers have to be carried up the hill and put on his desk. Rodberg brings them, more than 7,000 pages, in a great container of loose photocopies. And the press's director, Gobin Stair, looks at the pile and says it isn't a possible book. He takes it to his trustees anyway. He tells them the house exists to publish the important books commercial publishers won't. He says that it has been evading that duty in every way it can, and that saying yes will cost them. They say yes. And on August 17th, Beacon announces it. The printer that submitted the lowest bid withdraws it the same week because its other customers hold government contracts, and the next bid is $10,000 higher. On the night of September 3rd, Hunt and Liddy wait outside a medical building in Beverly Hills. Inside, three Cuban exiles they've hired break into the office of Ellsberg psychiatrist and pry open his file drawers with a crowbar. They report back. That they couldn't find the file. The psychiatrist finds it the next morning on the floor, and someone has been through it. Ehrlichman tells the president that week that there was one little operation out in Los Angeles that got aborted and that it's better he doesn't know about it. Two weeks later, two men in hats and coats walk into Beacon Press and ask for stare. His secretary, Brunell O'Brien, comes into his office shaking and tells him the FBI is here. He tells her to have them come back in half an hour. She sends them on a tour of the Old North Church while he calls the lawyers and the newspapers. When the men return, they demand the study back and Stair refuses. So they run sheets of paper through every copier in the building to see whether Ellsberg used those machines. They leave with an appointment for the Defense Department's general counsel, Fred Buzzhart, to come the following week. Buzzhart keeps it. He tells Stair and the association's president, Robert West, that every page Beacon prints is stolen government property, and that the department will hold the press responsible for each one. The government beats Beacon to the bookstores. At the end of September, the House Armed Services Committee puts a 12-volume edition on sale for $50 a set, runoff from the original photocopies, with the negotiation volumes left out and no page numbers. Because the public printer calls the copy an ungodly mess. About 300 people buy it. On October 15th, Gravel sees his own edition for the first time, four volumes stacked on a grand piano at a hotel party in Washington. He tells the room he was prepared to give up his Senate seat so the country could have these papers and that he'd do it again and again. The Beacon edition goes on sale a week later, 20,000 sets at $45 in cloth and $20 in paper. Beacon printed it on a $100,000 loan from a Unitarian Foundation. Its ad in the New York Times promises readers they'll be intrigued by the sections the government chose to delete. Within a week, three FBI agents walk into the New England Merchants National Bank and ask to see every account the Unitarian Universalist Association holds there. The bank refuses without a subpoena. And two days later, the agents come back with one covering all 12 accounts. West learns of it on November 4th, and he issues a statement that the government is subpoenaing the checks of a religious denomination over a book. Gravelle holds a press conference in Beacon's offices and calls the Justice Department outlaws. The chairman of Beacon's board, a lawyer named Edwin Lane, later learns his office phone has been tapped. In January, the Appeals Court in Boston rules that Gravel's immunity as a senator covers his aide Rodberg and does not cover Beacon Press. Four days after that, agents walk into a press conference the association is holding. They serve Stair with two subpoenas and ask who the keeper of the records is. Tovell tells them Mr. Stair is the keeper of the records, since he already has one subpoena and can hold another. The agents come back 45 minutes later. And take the subpoenas away because they were served too early. In February, they come back again, and this time the grand jury in Boston has indicted Gobin Stair on three counts: for receiving stolen government property, for holding documents related to the national defense, and for carrying stolen property worth more than $5,000 across state lines. Stair spends half his time running the press and the rest with lawyers. Beacon advertises for a secretary with only a phone number, and four of the first five people who call cancel their interviews when they learn whose office it is. A customer asks West whether buying the book is a crime. West's brother, an FBI agent of 30 years, lets him know he'd rather not be called anymore. West sends a cassette tape to book publishers around the country explaining the case, and in July, the president of Random House, Robert Bernstein, stands up at an emergency meeting of one hundred and seventy publishers, calls the government's treatment of Beacon a sad, shabby affair, and asks for one hundred thousand dollars for a defense fund. At the end of the meeting, an editor from Rutgers University Press walks over and hands West a personal check for one hundred dollars. On April twentieth, nineteen seventy two, the United States Senate appears before the Supreme Court for the first time in its history to argue for Gravelle. On June twenty ninth, A year to the night after the hearing, the court rules five to four that a senator's aid is protected and a publisher is not. William Rehnquist, who was an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department when it began the case, does not step aside. Justice William O. Douglas writes in dissent that Beacon is publishing what a senator lawfully put in a public record, and that the lawless party in the case is the government. Twelve days before that ruling, the At 2:30 in the morning, police arrest five men inside the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate complex in Washington. Two of them are the Cubans from Beverly Hills. Liddy, who left Krog's unit to become the lawyer for Nixon's re-election campaign, planned the job, and Hunt was with him in a hotel room while it happened. The grand jury in Boston keeps going into the fall. It calls a Harvard government professor named Samuel Popkin, who knows Ellsberg and was in Hong Kong when the papers came out. When he refuses to name the people he talked to about Vietnam, a judge sends him to the county jail in Dedham for eight days. On november twenty eighth, the government asks that the grand jury be discharged, and it goes home without indicting Sheehan or anyone at the times. Ellsberg's trial opens in Los Angeles in January 1973 and Stair is subpoenaed to testify at it. On April 26th, the prosecutors tell the judge, Matthew Byrne, that Hunt and Liddy broke into the psychiatrist's office. Earlier that month, Ehrlichman had met Byrne and offered him the directorship of the FBI. The Bureau then admits it recorded Ellsberg on a wiretap two years before, but has lost the logs. On May 11th, Byrne throws out every charge against Ellsberg and Brusso. The following week, the U.S. attorney in Boston drops the case against Gobind Stair, and a spokesman for the association tells a religious news service it assumes the East Coast investigation is finished. Stair stays at Beacon for two more years. Asked afterward what he'd do if the papers came to him again, he says he's not sure the press could even publish the case. In May 1973, the Washington Post wins the Pulitzer Prizes Gold Medal for its Watergate reporting, and Salzberger's newsroom spends the year covering a scandal from behind. Bradley's two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, become the most famous journalists in the country. Nixon resigns on August 9, 1974. Two years after that, Robert Redford plays Woodward in a movie about the Post. Sulzberger has his own problem, and that problem is money. The paper had been losing it when he took over in 1963, the first year in the red since 1898, and by the middle of the 1970s, the company is in another slide. So he changes the product. He adds sections on science, food, sports, and entertainment. He buys the paper's first color presses. And starts a national edition that reaches readers across the country. The readers come, and by the middle of the nineteen eighties, the New York Times is more profitable than it has ever been. His managing editor through the rebuild is Seymour Topping. In 1992, he hands the publisher's job to his son, Arthur Jr., and keeps the chairman's chair until 1997. Sheehan writes his book. The friend Ellsberg had gone looking for the night he ended up on Sheehan's cot. John Paul Van died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in the summer of nineteen seventy two. Sheehan spends the next 16 years on Van's life and the war. The book, A Bright Shining Lie, comes out in 1988 and wins a Pulitzer. The government tries the courthouse again in nineteen seventy nine against a magazine. The Progressive, a monthly out of Madison, Wisconsin, has an article by a freelance writer named Howard Moreland. Explaining how a hydrogen bomb works, assembled from public sources. On March 9th, a federal judge in Milwaukee, Robert Warren, orders the magazine not to print it, and he rests the ruling on a 1931 Supreme Court case about a Minneapolis scandal sheet. The magazine's cover proofs go into a bank vault. The order holds for six months and 19 days until a newspaper in Madison prints a letter with the same information and the government gives up. The Progressive runs the article in November. Mike Gravell loses his Senate seat in a primary in 1980. He runs for president in 2008 in his late 70s, and again for the 2020 nomination at 88 years old, with a campaign staffed by teenagers. He dies on June 26, 2021, in Seaside, California, three days before the 50th anniversary of the night in the hearing room. Ten years before that, On June 29, 2011, the National Archives had released the full study, all 7,000 pages. The Archives compared the new release to Beacon's Edition, the only complete one ever printed, and found 2,384 pages that had never been public. Sulzberger dies at his home in Southampton, New York, on September 29, 2012, at 86 years old. His own paper's obituary opens with the National Edition and the 31 Pulitzer Prizes, and its second paragraph is about the vault. Sheehan dies on January 7, 2021, at 84. The Times publishes an interview he gave in 2015 on the condition that it run only after his death. He describes the fake names in the motel registers and the pages hidden in a bus station locker, all of it for three installments that went into a vault. Ellsberg outlives him by two and a half years. He dies on June 16, 2023, at 92 in Kensington, California. In his last interviews, he's still asking the question he'd asked for 50 years, which is why Sheehan lied to him for three months and copied 7,000 pages for a paper that handed them back to the FBI. In 2019, the Justice Department charges a publisher under the Espionage Act for the first time. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. And it's done over the military files his site put online in 2010. He pleads guilty to one count on June 26, 2024, in a courtroom in Saipan and flies home to Australia that same day. On September 19th, 2025, the Pentagon hands its press corps a 17-page policy requiring reporters to pledge that they will publish only what the department approves, even if it's unclassified. More than 30 news organizations refuse to sign, including the Times. On October 15th, dozens of reporters turn in their badges and carry their chairs and a copy machine out to the parking lot. The New York Times sues on December 4th. On March 20th, 2026, a federal judge in Washington, Paul Friedman, rules that the policy's true purpose is to weed out disfavored journalists and order seven times credentials restored. He writes that the people who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation's security requires a free press and an informed people, and that the principle has held for almost 250 years. The Pentagon moves the reporters into an annex with escorts, and on April 9th, he finds that the rewritten policy is an attempt to negate his order. The department appeals. The Times lawyers build their brief on Nier v. Minnesota. A nineteen thirty-one case about a Minneapolis weekly newspaper the state had shut down as a public nuisance. The same case Judge Warren used in Milwaukee in nineteen seventy nine. The Pentagon Papers are remembered as a newspaper beating a president in court. Remove the newspaper, and the papers still come out, 18 days later, from a freshman senator with two flight bags and a church press on Beacon Hill that nearly went broke printing them. Gravelle and Beacon are real, and in our world, they're a footnote to the newspapers. Take the newspapers away, and they're the whole story. Ellsberg had picked his senator before the Times printed a word. War ends on the same day in both timelines, and so does Nixon's presidency. The editor-in-chief at Beacon, Arnold Tovell, said in 1972 that the papers hadn't affected the war because the public doesn't read them. Congregations bought sets for their local libraries, and he said the first volume got checked out and the other three never left the shelf. Salzberger's choice settled two things: who would carry the pages? Whether a newspaper would ever stand in front of a judge over them. In one world, the Supreme Court says in 19 days that the government can't stop a newspaper from printing what it has. In the other, nobody ever asks the question. And 55 years later, the Times is suing the Pentagon with a case about a Minneapolis Weekly from 1931. The lawyers told Salzberger he'd go to prison. In neither world has a newspaper been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The one publisher the government ever charged pleaded guilty in Saipan in 2024 and flew home that same day. The Justice Department went after people instead. It indicted Ellsberg and a church publisher, and it jailed a Harvard professor for a week. Salzberger's fear was that the readers would call the Times treasonous. In the real world, That fear was wrong. The paper got a precedent with its own name on it, and it got the story it still tells about itself to this day. In the other world, he took the lawyers' advice, and they were wrong about the prison there too. He gave up a fight he would have won, and the paper kept a receipt from Foley Square. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control-Z with me. Control-Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, subscribe for free on Patreon. That's patreon.com/slash CTRLZ rewritten, all one word. and leave your idea in the comments.