Pentagon Papers

[1][2] A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that Lyndon B. Johnson's administration had "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.

For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.

[13] McNaughton died in a plane crash one month after work began in June 1967, but the project continued under the direction of Defense Department official Les Gelb.

To keep the study secret from others, including National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, they conducted no interviews or consultations with the armed forces, with the White House, or with other federal agencies.

[22][23][24] On November 3, 1965, Secretary of Defense McNamara sent a memorandum to Johnson, in which he explained the "major policy decisions with respect to our course of action in Vietnam".

[25] Years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred on August 2, 1964, the U.S. government was indirectly involved in Vietnam's affairs by sending advisers or (military personnel) to train the South Vietnamese soldiers: In a section of the Pentagon Papers titled "Kennedy Commitments and Programs", America's commitment to South Vietnam was attributed to the creation of the country by the United States.

As acknowledged by the papers: We must note that South Vietnam (unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia) was essentially the creation of the United States.

Beginning in August 1963 we variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged the coup efforts of the Vietnamese generals and offered full support for a successor government.

[30] In a memorandum addressed to President Johnson on July 28, 1964, McCone explained: In response to the first or second categories of action, local Communist military forces in the areas of actual attack would react vigorously, but we believe that none of the Communist powers involved would respond with major military moves designed to change the nature of the conflict ... Air strikes on North Vietnam itself (Category 3) would evoke sharper Communist reactions than air strikes confined to targets in Laos, but even in this case fear of escalation would probably restrain the Communists from a major military response ...[30]Barely a month after the Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy warned that further provocations should not be undertaken until October, when the government of South Vietnam (GVN) would become fully prepared for a full-scale war against North Vietnam.

In a memorandum addressed to President Johnson on September 8, 1964, Bundy wrote: The main further question is the extent to which we should add elements to the above actions that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction, and consequent retaliation by us.

Examples of actions to be considered were running US naval patrols increasingly close to the North Vietnamese coast and/or [sic] associating them with 34A operations.

[31]While maritime operations played a key role in the provocation of North Vietnam, U.S. military officials had initially proposed to fly a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft over the country, but this was to be replaced by other plans.

Ellsberg approached Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Senators William Fulbright and George McGovern, and others, but none were interested.

[33][34] They declined to publish the papers, but passed on some of them to, and recommended he seek The New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, whom Ellsberg had first met in Vietnam[35] and was reintroduced to by Raskin and Stavins.

[35] The New York Times began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971; the first article in the series was titled "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement".

[46]: 475  The administration argued Ellsberg and Russo were guilty of a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917, because they had no authority to publish classified documents.

[11][48] The New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said: These papers, as our editorial said this morning, were really a part of history that should have been made available considerably longer ago.

[49]The newspaper appealed the injunction, and the case New York Times Co. v. United States quickly rose through the U.S. legal system to the Supreme Court.

[55] On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court decided, 6–3, that the government failed to meet the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint injunction.

And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.Thomas Tedford and Dale Herbeck summarized the reaction of editors and journalists at the time: As the press rooms of the Times and the Post began to hum to the lifting of the censorship order, the journalists of America pondered with grave concern the fact that for fifteen days the 'free press' of the nation had been prevented from publishing an important document and for their troubles had been given an inconclusive and uninspiring 'burden-of-proof' decision by a sharply divided Supreme Court.

[11] In March 1972, political scientist Samuel L. Popkin, then assistant professor of Government at Harvard University, was jailed for a week for his refusal to answer questions before a grand jury investigating the Pentagon Papers case, during a hearing before the Boston Federal District Court.

Halperin, who had originally classified the study as secret, obtained most of the unpublished portions under the Freedom of Information Act and the University of Texas published them in 1983.

[11] The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had expanded its war with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by the American media.

The Kennedy administration knew of plans to overthrow South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem before his death in the November 1963 coup.

[49] In another example, a memo from the Defense Department under the Johnson Administration listed the reasons for American persistence: Another controversy was that Johnson sent combat troops to Vietnam by July 17, 1965, [citation needed] before pretending to consult his advisors on July 21–27, per the cable stating that "Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance informs McNamara that President had approved 34 Battalion Plan and will try to push through reserve call-up.

"[63] Nixon's Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold later called the Pentagon Papers an example of "massive overclassification" with "no trace of a threat to the national security".

[11] After the release of the Pentagon Papers, Barry Goldwater said: During the campaign, President Johnson kept reiterating that he would never send American boys to fight in Vietnam.

I worried about the potential misuse of the papers by doves to stamp government leaders as liars and by hawks to brand war critics as traitors.

What troubled me was that the papers—a vast, undigested mass of fragmentary truths—in the newspapers would become like sticks of historical dynamite, damaging more than illuminating the ongoing struggle over Vietnam policy.

[10]On May 4, 2011, the National Archives and Records Administration announced that the papers would be declassified and released to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, on June 13, 2011.