If they did it once, they'll do it again.
Black April and the killing fields are probably a legacy of Nixon's loss of power and removal from office. And it all started when he demanded to learn the identity of the Pentagon Papers leak, launching the creation of the Plummers.
Was Kerry in on the fun? Did he know that Vietnam would be used as a wedge to destroy a president? Was his testimony engineered as an overture to impeachment?
President Bush, watch your back, sir. Our nation depends on your success.
Tom Wells, Wild Man : The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, 461-462
The White House did not believe that Ellsberg had acted alone. In fact, the first "suspected villain" had been Leslie Gelb (just as Gelb had worried). Morton Halperin and Paul Warnke were also suspect. . .Even the staunch cold warrior Paul Nitze attracted suspicion. "He's a co-conspirator with Gelb and Halperin," Ehrlichman reported to Nixon on September 10. "Paul Nitze is?" Nixon responded, incredulously. "I'm quite sure. Quite sure that he's the guy," replied Ehrlichman. . .
Wells goes on to discount Nitze as a suspect, but IMO he's a plausible suspect. Since 1950 he had been the chief political ally of Dean Acheson, a long-time enemy of Nixon who resented being squeezed out of influence after Nixon was elected in 1968. During the last years of the LBJ administration Nitze led a "dove cabal" opposed to the Vietnam War, along with Clark Clifford and the above-mentioned Paul Warnke. Morton Halperin, mentioned above, was a Warnke hiree. Ellsberg claimed he had been Nitze's assistant at one time. During the Nixon administration Nitze worked to undermine the administration's policies. In any case he was on Ehrlichman's list of suspects, along with Gelb, Halperin, and Warnke.
Also: When Ellsberg was deciding where to leak the Papers, he initially approached the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Marxist think-tank linked to the Soviets and Cuba. Ellsberg allowed IPS to make a copy of the Papers, and in September 1970, months prior to Ellsberg leaking the Papers to the New York Times, IPS held a conference, "US Strategy in Asia", featuring Ellsberg, Halperin, and Gelb as speakers.
Finally, Ellsberg also approached Senator George McGovern before leaking to the Times. McGovern was supporting the VVAW's Winter Soldier investigation (held in late 1970) around this time (cf. Douglas Brinkley, Tour of Duty, 356). If there's a VVAW link to the Pentagon Papers, my guess is it would involve some type of coordinaton between the Papers leakers, the Winter Soldier investigation (which like the Papers was intended to discredit the military), and the McGovern campaign.
PS: Another note: Kerry's political ally Robert Drinan was the Congressman who introduced the resolution calling for Nixon's impeachment.
I NEED FREEPER'S HELP!!....When Kerry was supposed to be sleeping on the steps of the Capital when they were protesting, he was picked up in an expensive car by someone and taken to hs home....Kerry said it was someone high up in the Pentagon. Does anyone remember that story?? He talked about having a cognac in the study.....HELP!!