Pentagon Papers

The ”Pentagon Papers” is the nickname for a 47-volume his-tory of American involvement in Vietnam compiled by the Pentagon. The official title was History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy. It was commissioned by then-secretary of defense Robert McNamara. Begun in June 1967, the history was not finished until January 1969, but covered events only through 1965. It was written as an inhouse history, and only 15 copies were made. Of its 7,000 pages, 3,000 focused on historical studies, with the remainder being copies of government documents. The Pentagon Papers showed that actual U.S. decision making in Vietnam did not always parallel the government's public pronouncements. They also confirmed that some officials had warned repeatedly about the possibility of a quagmire in Vietnam.

By 1969, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon employee, White House consultant, and employee of the Rand Corporation, had become disaffected with U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg had contributed to the Pentagon Papers when he worked for the Pentagon but had never read the entire history. While at Rand, Ellsberg obtained a full copy and decided that he wanted to leak the information to the press in the hope of affecting U.S. policy on the war. Using the photocopy machine of a friend, Ellsberg spirited out hundreds of pages each night from Rand and returned them the following morning. It took several weeks to produce a complete copy of the Pentagon Papers.

Ellsberg allowed a reporter to photocopy his personal copy of the collected papers, and the New York Times began publication of excerpts on Sunday, June 13, 1971. The following day the Nixon administration announced that it was opposed to the continued publication of the Papers. Citing threats to national security, government lawyers appeared in court on Tuesday morning, June 15, and asked for an injunction against the New York Times, the first time the government had sued the press to forestall disclosure of information for national security reasons. The injunction was issued with a hearing to be held later that week.

That same week, the Washington Post obtained copies of the Pentagon Papers through its own means, and editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham decided, over the objections of the Post's lawyers, to begin their own publication of the material. The White House then filed suit against the Post. Soon other newspapers joined (12 in all) and were summarily hit with lawsuits. Major newspapers across the country fought the White House lawsuits, citing the 1st Amendment right to a free press. At the end of June, the Supreme Court ruled against the federal government in a 6-to-3 vote. The majority justices believed injunctions against the newspapers either were not permissible or were simply inapplicable in this case. Across the country, newspapers began publishing further excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. Booklength versions were published over the ensuing months, but entire volumes remained classified and unpublished for years. In 1983, previously unpublished material finally made its way into the public's hands.

The content of the Pentagon Papers did influence many American citizens to both oppose the war and question their government. They discovered, for example, that even as Pres. Lyndon Johnson was stating publicly in 1964 that U.S. combat troops would never be sent to Vietnam, he and his advisers were already developing entry plans. There is no evidence that the papers compromised U.S. interests abroad; it is also unlikely that the disclosure of the papers had any impact on the conduct of the war in Vietnam.

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