PW: Why have you waited until now, more than three decades after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the press, to write Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers?

DE: For years after my trial, my highest priority was to build a movement against the arms race of the kind that helped bring about the end of the Vietnam War. I felt that was more important than writing my memoirs. In some ways, I'm very reassured now that I didn't do it earlier. If I'd written Secrets 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, I think people would have seen it as history, maybe an interesting story, but not even I would have seen any immediate relevance in it then.

PW: Because of the growing possibility of our attacking Iraq, you mean?

DE: I don't think there's been a time in the last 30 years that has so reproduced the events I was writing about, such as the assertions of presidential power to make war. Those didn't start with Bush; Clinton's inclinations to use cruise missiles as distractions from domestic events bothered me a great deal, and I protested against them at the time. But I'm certain there must be people in the Pentagon who believe the course Bush is on is a reckless, disastrous course.

PW: People tempted to take the same course of action you took then?

DE: I very much had in mind those people in precisely the position I was. I know people in the administration don't read books on the whole, especially in the midst of a crisis like this. But I really hope to reach them through the media, on radio or TV, and suggest to them they should do what I did, what Colleen Rowley did earlier this year in the FBI.

PW: Another recent case is Enron, where Sherron Watkins had an opportunity to blow the whistle, but only went so far as to voice her suspicions to Ken Lay.

DE: She did what she should have up to that point, though. She spoke frankly to her commander-in-chief, the head of her company. The Pentagon Papers showed that wasn't uncommon. A lot of people will tell the truth inside the organization, much more than the general public realizes. They just don't take the next step, to tell other authorities or to tell the public. When Colleen Rowley told the head of the FBI her concerns, she also sent copies of her memo to the two congressional intelligence committees, and somehow those copies got to the press. I don't know if she did that, or someone on the committee, but it got out, and that was the critical step.

PW: One advantage of the delay in telling your story is that declassified government documents have been released, supporting what you've said all along.

DE: The last three chapters of the book rely heavily on Nixon's White House tapes, and most of what I quote hadn't been made public until last April. It gave me an interesting new perspective on what Nixon was trying to do to me, certainly more than I knew about at the time.

PW: Did you visit the Nixon Library to listen to those?

DE: I did at first, and it was such a long, tedious project, I hired a research assistant to transcribe the tapes for me, or sometimes send them to me. There was one tape, of Nixon thumping the table as he spoke, I listened to over and over. I figured that if I didn't have the thumps in the right place, people would accuse my transcriptions of being unreliable. (laughs) My son, Michael, constructed a Web site for me: www.ellsberg.net. I've put the complete texts of almost all the memos I refer to in the book on that site, and it occurs to me I could put up the transcripts of these tapes, maybe even the audio itself. There's some juicy quotes I didn't get to put in the book for lack of space. Maybe they'll end up online.