The Pentagon Papers
Today in History
The Pentagon Papers published, 1971
The Pentagon Papers (officially: Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force) are a history of the U.S. role in Vietnam and elsewhere in Indochina from World War II until 1968. The history was commissioned in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Johnson administration, but it was not completed until the Nixon administration.
Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo secretly copied the papers, which Dr. Ellsberg provided to several newspapers and a senator. The New York Times began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971.
Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine Corps officer, was an economist and defense analyst employed by the RAND Corporation when he copied (with help from Anthony Russo, another researcher) and released the history to The New York Times. Dr. Ellsberg also had worked in Vietnam for the State Department, and at the Pentagon for Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton.
Dr. Ellsberg was at the Pentagon during the Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” the lie that justified eleven years of war. That incident, combined with his work on The Pentagon Papers, led Dr. Ellsberg to conclude that America’s involvement in Vietnam, beginning with the Truman administration, was based on lies.
“It was no more a ‘civil war’ after 1955 or 1960 than it had been during the U.S.-supported French attempt at colonial reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power — which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest — was not a civil war.
“To say that we had ‘interfered’ in what is ‘really a civil war,’ as most American academic writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier official one of ‘aggression from the North.’ In terms of the UN Charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.”
He released the classified papers so the American public could understand what the government was doing in Vietnam.
(Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002. See also the documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers).
On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing a series of articles based on the top-secret history. After the third installment, the Department of Justice obtained a temporary restraining order against further publication, stating it was causing “immediate and irreparable harm” to U.S. national defense interests.
As a precaution, Dr. Ellsberg then sent copies of the history to 17 other newspapers.
On June 29, Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the Congressional Record. This was a “failsafe” way to distribute the papers, since a senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said “on the record” before the Senate.
The New York Times and The Washington Post (which also had the material) fought the order. On June 30, in an important prior-restraint ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the newspapers to continue publishing the history.
Although the newspapers were cleared, Dr. Ellsberg and Dr. Russo were not. The Nixon Administration charged them under the 1917 Espionage Act. However, due to the illegal behavior of the government related to the case (including an office break-in that became part of the Watergate scandal), all charges were dismissed.
Dr. Ellsberg, who had become friends with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, along with other activists, became an anti-war activist and supporter of whistleblowers.
What’s in The Pentagon Papers? The 47-volume history consists of 3,000 pages of narrative and 4,000 pages of supporting documents and required 18 months to write. The Papers reveal America’s secret involvement in Vietnam, beginning when the Truman administration gave military aid to France in its colonial war against the communist-led Viet Minh.
In 1954, President Eisenhower decided to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam by destabilizing the new communist regime of North Vietnam. President Kennedy transformed the “limited-risk gamble” of Mr. Eisenhower into a policy of “broad commitment,” which President Johnson intensified into a covert war against North Vietnam.
According to The Pentagon Papers, the Johnson administration intended to wage overt war in 1964, a full year before the depth of U.S. involvement was publicly revealed. Further, the Papers showed that Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 despite warnings from American intelligence that it would not affect North Vietnam’s support for the Viet Cong.
In other words, we bombed North Vietnam, killing thousands of people, including some of our own airmen, even though our intelligence agencies said would be fruitless. And it was.
The publication of The Pentagon Papers solidified the sentiment many felt in America and elsewhere that the war in Vietnam was a moral outrage. It proved to be the end of President Johnson’s administration, as opposition to the war became so fierce that he felt he could not stand for reelection.
Nonetheless, President Nixon continued the war, widening its geographical reach to include Cambodia and Laos, claiming he only wanted “peace with honor.”
The war finally ended in 1975, after a period of “Vietnamization” (withdrawal of American troops), which allowed the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to capture South Vietnam. That day (April 30, 1975) left us with the haunting image of formerly American-employed South Vietnamese workers desperately attempting to board a U.S. helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy.
Link to The Pentagon Papers at the National Archives:
https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers
See also:
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, 1988.
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations, 1972.
