Janny Scott, writing for The New York Times:

When it was clear that Mr. Ellsberg was leaving, Mr. Sheehan called home. “Come up,” he told his wife. “I need your help.” He told her to bring suitcases, large envelopes and all the cash in the house. She flew to Boston and checked into a hotel under a false name. Mr. Sheehan was in a motor inn, under yet another name.
From the Times bureau chief in Boston, he got the name of a copy shop that could handle thousands of pages. He asked the bureau chief to get him several hundred dollars in expense money for a secret project he declined to explain. When the bureau chief called the Times newsroom and reached the editors on duty that night, they declined the request. So he called the national editor at home.
“Give it to him,” the editor said, according to Mr. Sheehan. No questions asked.
Mr. Sheehan duplicated the apartment key in case he lost the original. Then he began copying the seven thousand pages — first in a real estate office where an acquaintance worked, then, with Ms. Sheehan’s help, in the suburban copy shop. He was ferrying piles of pages by taxi between the apartment and the copy shop, then to a locker in the Boston bus terminal and later to a locker at Logan airport.
When the machines in the copy shop crashed under the strain, the Sheehans relocated to a copy shop in Boston run by a Navy veteran. When the man noticed that the documents were classified, and became nervous, Ms. Sheehan, at the shop, called her husband at the apartment.
“Get down here,” he remembered her saying.

Finally, the backstory of one of the most important moments in journalism history.

Joe Stracci