Of Neil Sheehan and Merle Wolin
Two great reporters deserving of Pulitzers, and in a perfect world each would have won journalism's highest honor.
Neil Sheehan, The New York Times, and Merle Linda Wolin, L.A. Herald Examiner
Neil Sheehan, the great The New York Times reporter who in 1971 broke the story of the top-secret classified history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers and won the Pulitzer Prize, died Thursday.
I don't know if Sheehan and Merle Linda Wolin, a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner who almost won a Pulitzer Prize a decade later, knew each other or if their paths ever crossed.
But on Thursday, their careers crossed in my mind as I read Sheehan’s obituary in The Times. Far down in the obituary as well as in a separate sidebar story, the Times revealed that it was finally disclosing just how Sheehan had obtained the Pentagon Papers, which he revealed to editors in 2015 on the condition that it not be made public until after his death.
The revelation, which is likely to be talked about among journalists for some time, puts a new spin on the story of the Pentagon Papers, which has been the subject of numerous books and most recently the 2017 Oscar-nominated feature film The Post starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.
It has long been known that Sheehan received the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corp. analyst-turned anti-war activist who had worked on the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg had copied the papers without permission and in violation of government restrictions on classified documents, with the intention of making them public.
It had been assumed that Sheehan had used his legendary news sleauthing skills to ingratiate himself with Ellsberg.
But Sheehan’s death and the news of how he actually secured the Pentagon Papers now show that this was not completely the case.
According to The Times, Neil Sheehan admitted that Ellsberg hadn’t wanted him to have copies of the documents, increasingly fearing that he could be prosecuted for unlawfully stealing classified documents and disclosing them to the news media.
Ellsberg only gave Sheehan permission to read the documents and to take notes in his Cambridge, Mass., apartment — but not to photocopy them.
Ellsberg would only learn later, the paper reported Thursday, that “Sheehan had returned to Ellsberg’s apartment when [he] was out of town, removed the papers, photocopied them and taken the copies back to The Times.”
In the obituarry, The Times charitably described Sheehan’s decision of copying the thousands of Pentagon Papers documents as a decision “to override [Ellsberg’s] instructions.”
“But if to report now be called theft, and if to publish now be called treason, then so be it,” Sheehan is quoted in the obituary. “Let God give us the courage to commit more of the same.”
Ah, the greater good, of course.
But that story will almost certainly raise eyebrows in American journalistic circles. In journalism history, the 1970s was a period when ethics in the profession had begun undergoing a re-examination. A profession once notorious for conflicts of interest, accepting freebies and junkets from publicists, not to mention even monetary payments, slowly was born again and embraced principles.
Enter Merle Linda Wolin and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
In 1981, Wolin’s reporting on the sleazy garment industry's sweat shops in Los Angeles exposed inexcusable working conditions and governmental impotence in improving them for the thousands of Latinas working there long hours for low pay.
To get the story Wolin went undercover as an undocumented sweatshop worker and in over five weeks, she worked three different jobs. She even brought a lawsuit against one of the employers who refused to pay her. Eventually Wolin was asked to appear before a Congressional subcommittee investgating sweat shop labor as a result of her reporting.
The series of stories — which was also published in Spanish in La Opinión, the city’s Spanish language daily — deservingly won numerous journalism awards, and it was reportedly the unanimous choice for the biggest award of all — the Pulitzer Prize.
On the day the Pulitzers were announced, the Herald Examiner editorial office was even readied for a celebration.
Then in a stunning reversal, the decision to award Wolin and the Herald Examiner the Pulitzer was overturned by the ruling Pulitzer Board itself, apparently because of the nature of the undercover reporting without which the story could never have been told.
Ultimately, there was a celebration. The Herald Examiner was officially recognized as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, coincidentally the prize that Neil Sheehan and The New York Times had been awarded a decade earlier for publishing the Pentagon Papers — whose 7,000 documents had been stolen by Sheehan from a source without his knowledge or permission.