David Marlin, 89, shot the Cronkite/Ellsberg interview for CBS, just a part of his long brush with history.
SARASOTA — David Marlin and his wife, Elaine, had settled into their seats to watch “The Post,” Steven Spielberg’s take on the 1971 “Pentagon Papers” controversy, when an attendant ushered everyone out, saying there had been a fire alarm.
Turns out there wasn’t a fire after all, but the place was cleared and Marlin missed out on seeing exactly how Hollywood played his historic footage. It was political dynamite back then — the first recorded interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the former Marine and RAND analyst at the center of the storm, with media legend Walter Cronkite asking the questions.
Marlin got a refund and has plans to give the film another shot. Truth be told, however, during that cloak-and-dagger rendezvous 47 years ago with the subject of a nationwide FBI manhunt, Marlin was more preoccupied with production and logistics than content.
“Oh, I knew it was important,” said the 89-year-old Sarasota resident, “but really, your mind is more on the technical side than anything else. You’re dealing with sound, lighting, camera positioning, and coordinating all that stuff. My job was to get the footage and make sure it got back to CBS.”
In fact, as the network cameraman who pretty much owned the Northeast for nearly 30 years when it came to breaking news, Marlin is a portrait of nonchalance when it comes to reminiscing about his Zelig-like brushes with history.
Ronald Reagan, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace, John Kennedy, Duke Ellington, Julia Child, Jimmy Hoffa, a papal visit, the sinking of the Andrea Doria, Ted Williams’ final home run — the luminaries and events suspended in time by Marlin’s shutter finger literally fill a book. It’s a glossy hardback called “Newsmakers of Our Time,” and it’s self-published because Marlin couldn’t find anyone willing to make the investment. The man who counts five photos in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery also has an 83,000-word memoir he can’t find a publisher for, either.
And that’s too bad, because part of the Massachusetts native’s legacy continues to raise questions about what sort of public image we want our political leaders to project today. Marlin covered seven presidential primaries, but none were more noteworthy than a sequence credited for the collapse of a presidential campaign in 1972.
That was supposed to have been the year that Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, became the Democratic Party’s standard bearer. Unbeknownst to the senator from Maine, he was being sabotaged by what became known as Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks” squad. Among its provocations was planting a fake letter in the Manchester Union Leader prior to the New Hampshire primary.
The letter asserted that its author had overheard a Muskie campaign staffer call French Canadians “Canuks,” a derogatory term, and that Muskie laughed at it. The Union Leader rolled out a 1A headline proclaiming “Senator Muskie Insults Franco-Americans.” The next day, the paper followed up with a Newsweek blurb about how Muskie’s wife, Jane, enjoyed telling dirty jokes, drinking pre-dinner cocktails and smoking cigarettes on the sly.
Immediately thereafter, on the morning of Feb. 24, 1972, amid a snowstorm, two weeks before the primary, Muskie chose to air it out. He stood on the flatbed of a truck parked outside the Union Leader to denounce publisher William Loeb, who had called him “Moscow Muskie” during the 1968 race. Marlin was there, maybe 15 feet away, filming Muskie’s remarks with his Bell & Howell camera.
“By attacking me,” said Muskie, “by attacking my wife, (Loeb) has proved himself to be a gutless coward. Maybe I said all I should on it.” He paused in what was clearly an emotional moment. “It’s fortunate for him he’s not on this platform beside me.”
Washington Post political reporter David Broder, considered the unofficial leader of the White House press corps, wrote a lead stating Muskie had "tears streaming down his face and his voice choked with emotion." Broder also told readers “Muskie broke down three times in as many minutes.”
Muskie denied he had ever cried and said he had merely brushed snowflakes from his face. A UPI reporter standing next to the contender excluded tears from his article because he said Muskie didn’t cry. An AP reporter didn’t mention tears either, but said his lead was rewritten by an editor to include the tears because of Broder’s reputation. In 1987, Broder admitted he might have been mistaken. “Unwittingly,” he wrote, “I did my part in the work of the Nixon operatives in helping destroy the credibility of the Muskie candidacy.”
Although Muskie won the New Hampshire primary, his margin was much smaller than anticipated and his lead began to evaporate nationally. U.S. Sen. George McGovern went on to win the nomination, only to lose the general election to Nixon in a landslide.
Forty-six years later, the man who shot the footage remains ambivalent about what it actually showed. “My recollection is that he choked up and he seemed to tear up,” says Marlin. “But I leave it to the writers to describe what he did. I actually liked Muskie and I hated to see it happen, but he did it to himself.”
Marlin’s work is testament to William Faulkner’s observation that “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past,” and nowhere is that more evident than with the box-office success of “The Post.” Last month, The New Yorker ran an article about the people who surreptitiously helped Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers to the press. Fearing negative repercussions, half a dozen of those volunteers prefer to remain anonymous today.
The First Amendment crisis stoked at opposite ends by Nixon and Ellsberg is part of a ongoing conversation in America. But for Marlin, a Korean War-era veteran and Army Signal Corps photographer, the stakes took a dramatic turn in its aftermath, when FBI agents showed up at his house.
As a CBS contractor, Marlin’s skills and contacts were indispensable for outfits wanting to cover events in New England. He shot the Kennedy clan so often that one reporter wondered if Marlin was a family photographer. But what would prove to be one of his most explosive assignments kept him in the dark until the last possible second.
In June 1971, Marlin got a call from CBS producer Stanhope Gould. Gould needed Marlin and a second photographer — CBS staff photographer Walter Dombrow — to meet him in Boston. Marlin was told to rent an unmarked windowless van, and to buy enough cardboard boxes to conceal their recording gear inside. Both photographers and their crews were to meet Gould at a hotel near Kenmore Square. Neither were told what they were shooting.
The night before, Gould called Marlin to ask if everything was in place. Marlin said yes, except the tripods were still sticking out. Gould ordered Marlin to cover them up with whatever he could get his hands on. Elaine offered up some old sheets and blankets.
The next morning, Gould showed up at the rendezvous point on a bicycle. He told them to follow him on a meandering route that crossed the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge into Cambridge, then came to a stop somewhere near Harvard Square, at a house Marlin couldn’t pick out of a lineup today. The production crews hustled all their equipment inside for a two-camera interview.
An hour and a half later, to Marlin's surprise, CBS News vice president Gordon Manning and Walter Cronkite stepped into the room, joined by the most wanted man in the U.S. -- Ellsberg. America got its first look at the whistleblower who spilled the beans on the Pentagon’s secret and bleak assessment of the Vietnam War. Marlin managed to grab a still photo — the one of Ellsberg and Cronkite in deep discussion — that wound up in the Smithsonian.
The day after the interview aired, Marlin and his wife left Boston for a sightseeing vacation in Washington, D.C., which included a tour of the White House. They left their kids at home in the care of their grandmother. While mom and dad were gone, FBI agents knocked on the door, wanting to know where Ellsberg was.
“I wouldn’t have been any help if I’d been there,” says Marlin. “I had no idea where the guy was.”
Marlin has one regret about his career path. After leaving the Army, he went right to work as a portrait photographer at a department store instead of attending college on the G.I. Bill. He transitioned into shooting local TV news stories before getting his national contacts.
“It’s hard to imagine what I would’ve done if I had the degree,” says Marlin. “But I guess it worked out OK.”