Pentagon Papers

Secret government study about America's involvement in the Vietnam War, the release of which sparked an unprecedented legal battle between the administration of President Richard Nixon and the national media (particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post). Commissioned in 1967 by then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the Pentagon Papers examined the decision-making process behind U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam.

Researched and written under utmost secrecy, the Pentagon Papers were supposed to provide posterity with a candid account of the context surrounding the U.S. decision to go to war in Vietnam. Instead, thanks initially to a former government official and to the New York Times, the papers were partially revealed, in 1971, to the American public, whose attitude toward the Vietnam War was already rapidly deteriorating. The disclosure of the study (first by the Times and subsequently by the Washington Post and other publications) led to a string of high-profile legal confrontations between the federal government and the press.

Contents of the Study

Robert S. McNamara had been serving as secretary of defense for six years under two presidents (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) when he asked 35 Pentagon officials and civilian experts to undertake an in-depth study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam since the end of World War II. The task took one year to complete (from 1967 to 1968) and yielded 47 volumes of documents, including both copies of official memoranda (4,000 pages) and the researchers' own analyses (3,000 pages).

Preoccupied solely with establishing the facts related to Vietnam, the researchers wrote their assessments without any consideration for the government's official perspective on historical (and contemporary) events. The uproar that the papers subsequently brought about when they were leaked to the press is rather easy to understand in light of the study's revelations.

The information unearthed by the researchers showed that the U.S. government had repeatedly misled the American public with reference to its handling of the initial stages of the conflict in Vietnam—that is, from early 1964 to the spring of 1965, before U.S. ground troops landed in South Vietnam. Even as administration officials were publicly denying reports of conducting extensive hostile actions in the region, the Pentagon was engaged in ground-troop deployments in South Vietnam and was conducting air strikes in Laos. In addition, contrary to official government pronouncements, the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government was described as an “emerging fascist state,” and the communist movement was shown to enjoy a huge popularity in both South Vietnam and North Vietnam.

Leaking the Papers

Upon its completion, the study was kept under close guard and only 15 copies were made. Two of these copies ended up in the vaulted archives of the RAND Corporation, an organization that had been closely associated with the Pentagon.

Prior to being one of McNamara's 35 researchers, one of RAND's employees, Daniel Ellsberg, had worked for the U.S. Department of Defense in Vietnam, studying potential conflict-resolution options. Ellsberg became disenchanted with the American involvement in the conflict, and soon after the completion of the study, he decided to take the initiative and change the state of affairs.

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