Pentagon Papers

In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a classified 7,000-page Defense Department study of American decision-making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. The study — commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, completed in 1969, and never intended for public release — documented in exhaustive detail how four administrations had systematically deceived Congress and the American people about the war's progress, its prospects, and the government's own private assessments of what was achievable. The man who leaked it was Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation analyst and former Defense Department official who had concluded that the war was unwinnable and that the public had a right to know what the government knew.

The Nixon administration went to court to stop publication — the first time the federal government had sought to prevent a newspaper from publishing a specific story on national security grounds. The case moved from district court to the Supreme Court in 15 days. In New York Times Co. v. United States, the Court ruled 6–3 that the government had not met the heavy burden required to justify prior restraint of the press. Publication resumed. The Washington Post, which had also obtained a copy, published simultaneously. The Pentagon Papers were in print across the country within days of the Court's decision.

The Papers did not reveal anything that attentive observers had not suspected, but they proved it. They showed that the Johnson administration had planned major escalation while publicly promising restraint, that military commanders had privately doubted their own optimistic public statements, and that the strategic rationale for the war had been reconsidered and found wanting years before the public was told. Nixon's furious response — creating the White House Plumbers unit to plug leaks, which later broke into the Watergate complex — connected the Pentagon Papers directly to the scandal that ended his presidency. Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act; the charges were dismissed in 1973 after it emerged that the Plumbers had burglarized his psychiatrist's office.