in Saigon and Buddhist monks’ setting fire to themselves in protest against the repressive Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. They covered each other’s backs.

By the time I got to Saigon in November 1963, shortly after President Kennedy was shot, Sheehan, at 27, was already an experienced war correspondent, but seeing tanks in downtown streets was still novel to me. So one steamy morning in January. I told Sheehan that on my way to town, I’d seen tanks around the home of Gen. Duong Van Minh, then leader of the ruling junta. It struck me as odd that the tanks’ guns were pointed inward at Minh’s house, instead of outward, defending Minh. Perhaps, I thought, Minh was under house arrest.

“Sounds like a coup,” Sheehan said. “I’ll call Mordecai. He’ll know whose tanks those are.”

Mordecai was Sheehan’s code-name for a steel-haired C.I.A. agent named Lucien Conein, who had deep ties within the Vietnamese military. Conein had lost two fingers during some furtive escapade, and with a twist of Irish humor, Neil nicknamed him Mordecai after a Chicago Cubs pitcher named Mordecai “Three-Fingered” Brown, because he, too, had lost two fingers.

U.S. Embassy officials pooh-poohed the coup idea. But within a couple of hours, Mordecai and some Vietnamese military sources confirmed that, in fact, a coup was under way and the commander of those mysterious tanks was Gen. Nguyen Khanh, one of a string of unstable Vietnamese leaders.

Years later, Neil joined the Times and by the time Dan Ellsberg delivered Robert McNamara’s secret history of the Vietnam War to Neil, both of us had written many stories about the dissembling, the distortions, sham reports and outright lies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations over Vietnam, only to have them repeatedly denied by government spokesmen.

So as we dug through the Pentagon’s secret history, it was rewarding to see proof in the government’s most highly classified documents that our reporting had been accurate and if anything, understated, and that our inside sources had been on the mark. McNamara’s history, put together by the Pentagon’s best and brightest, confirmed that:

• Despite official denials, President Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup that had overthrown President Ngo Dinh Diem, and Lou Conein was at ground zero, inside Vietnamese military headquarters among the generals who organized the coup.
• Contrary to Johnson Administration claims that the North Vietnamese patrol boat attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 were unprovoked, the U.S. had been conducting what the Pentagon history called “an elaborate program of

covert military operations against” North Vietnam” since Feb 1, 1964.

Just as we had reported, and the administration denied, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Saigon, requested 206,000 more US troops for the war after the Vietcong’s Tet holiday offensive of February 1968.

Contrary to his public assurances on Dec 21, 1963 that the U.S. had “every reason to believe (its Vietnam operations) will be successful” in 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told President Johnson that same day in in a private memo: “The situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to a neutralization at best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state.”

By then, like many Americans, Sheehan and I had lost faith in the Vietnam War and in official communiques. But it was still a shock, a palpable body blow, to open up documents day after day after day and see how often, how easily, how callously high government officials had lied to or grievously deceived Congress, the media and the American public.

It was a shock to read documents showing how callously high government officials were deceiving the public.

 Neil would almost lunge at me as he charged bitterly, after each new stunning revelation:

“Rick, these bastards in government have been lying to the American people for years and years and years, lying about a war and policies that they knew weren’t working and that they knew the American people would never stomach if they were told the truth. And now we’ve got the goods on them” – and he relished that phrase – “we’ve got the goods, in their own words, in their own documents, and they can’t deny the truth any longer.”

To anyone, including attorneys from the Times’s private law firm, who argued that these classified documents were stolen from the government and neither the Times nor anyone else had a right to them, Sheehan sharply retorted: “The American people have a right to know the truth now. They have paid for this truth with blood and treasure, tens of thousands of lives lost and all that the money wasted when it could have been doing good in our own country. The people have a right to the true story.”

We were careful to insure that our stories would in no way jeopardize genuine national security or ongoing operations.

The Pentagon history cut off in 1968, three years earlier. And we decided not to use a word from

the diplomatic annex, because we could not be sure whether of any of the diplomatic strands of negotiations were still alive.

So exercising our loyalty to the First Amendment, we forged ahead and broke the government’s secret truths to the American public. And when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Nixon administration and allowed The New York Times and other papers to resume publication, we felt it had shown that the national security state could not silence the American press.

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© 2021 Hedrick Smith all rights reserved.

Originally published on Zenger News. Edited by Claire Swift and Kristen Butler. Videographer, Chris Tso.