Pentagon Papers

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By 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was becoming very pessimistic about the Vietnam War. He no longer believed it could be won at acceptable cost.

American casualties were growing, and public support for the war was getting shaky. He created a task force in the Defense Department to study how the United States had gotten into this fix. In 1969 the task force completed a top-secret history of U.S. policy from 1945 through early 1968, accompanied by thousands of pages of classified documents. Officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, it is usually called the Pentagon Papers.

Daniel Ellsberg had spent more than a year in Vietnam as a roving investigator for the U.S. government. What he saw convinced him that U.S. policy was not working and was harming the Vietnamese people. When he returned to the United States, he joined the task force and wrote one section of the Pentagon Papers. After it was finished, he was one of the few people allowed to read the whole study. It convinced him that the American effort in Vietnam had been wrong from the beginning, and that one president after another had deceived the public about it. He thought the new Republican president, Richard Nixon, was continuing this pattern, giving the public the impression that he was working to end the war, while actually planning to prolong it.

Ellsberg decided to make a large portion of the study public. He hoped Nixon would be less able to lie successfully if the public knew about the pattern of lies under previous administrations. Also, he hoped that, by making public the lies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he could offer Nixon the option of turning against the war and blaming it on the Democrats. After failing to persuade several senators to release the Pentagon Papers to the public, Ellsberg took them to the New York Times, which compiled, in great secrecy, ten long articles, each accompanied by the texts of original documents. The first article was published on June 13, 1971.

President Nixon liked seeing material published that made John Kennedy look bad. But he detested the New York Times; he thought the Times, and the press in general, were against him. Furthermore, the leaking of secret documents worried him. On June 15, the Justice Department persuaded a federal judge to issue an injunction ordering the New York Times to halt publication of the series. This was unprecedented. Newspapers had in the past been punished for publishing things, but not forbidden in advance to publish. Ellsberg then gave portions of the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post. Another injunction halted publication in the Post. But the injunctions were quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled on June 30 that the Justice Department had failed to prove that publication of the Pentagon Papers would seriously harm the national security. In the absence of such proof, the courts could not violate the principle of freedom of the press, laid out in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Having failed to halt publication, the Justice Department tried to have Ellsberg imprisoned. But the case was thrown out of court in 1973 because of violations of Ellsberg's rights, including illegal wiretaps and, with White House authorization, the burglarizing of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in a search for information that could be used to discredit Ellsburg.

Publication of top-secret documents had previously seemed almost unthinkable to most people. The New York Times's law firm was outraged by the editors' decision to publish and refused to defend it, so the paper had to hire new attorneys to appeal the Justice Department's injunction. But once the Times and the Post had opened the door, and the Supreme Court had decided that publication of the Pentagon Papers did not seriously harm the national security, the aura that had previously surrounded the "top secret" classification weakened. Ellsberg had been unable to go through Congress in releasing the Pentagon Papers, but in 1972, when he decided to make public another large batch of top-secret documents, he was able to get them printed in the Congressional Record.

The effect of the Pentagon Papers on public attitudes toward the Vietnam War is harder to evaluate. Ellsberg did not win a lot of new converts to the antiwar movement. The people who saw the Pentagon Papers as evidence that the war was wrong were mostly people already in opposition to it. But because of the Pentagon Papers, people of all viewpoints could base their arguments about the war on a much stronger foundation of historical facts than had previously been possible.

Perhaps the biggest effect of Ellsberg's actions was an indirect one. His leaking the Pentagon Papers to the newspapers led the White House to create the Special Investigative Unit—sometimes called "the Plumbers" because it was supposed to stop leaks—that burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in September 1971. Some of the same men were caught burglarizing the Democratic Party's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel nine months later. The ensuing Watergate scandal seriously weakened President Nixon in 1973 and forced him from office in 1974.

Civil Liberties, 1946–Present; Johnson, Lyndon Baines; Newspapers and Magazines.

Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002.

Sheehan, Neil. The Pentagon Papers, as published by the New York Times, edited by Gerald Gold, Allan M. Siegal, and Samuel Abt. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Rudenstine, David. The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

U. S. Department of Defense. United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, 12 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971.

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