Nixon had special anxiety about Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb, two former White House officials who had access to top secret documents.41 By 1971 both men were senior fellows at the Brookings Institution. The president feared that they had removed classified material and stored it in the Brookings safe. It was possible that Gelb, who had directed the McNamara study later published as the Pentagon Papers, might have taken files pertinent to the 1968 bombing halt.
