The New York Times began publishing portions of United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, colloquially known as the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971. . The papers consisted of 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of supporting original government documents and were initially assembled as Department of Defense encyclopedic history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. (The report was eventually (in June 2011) declassified and publicly released.) The New York Times, in a 1996 article, stated that the papers revealed that President Johnson had lied to the public and to Congress about many aspects of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. . Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who initially sponsored the preparation of the papers, according to Wikipedia, . . . wanted to leave a written record for historians, to prevent policy errors in future administrations. The report was prepared, in secret, by a small task force based purely on internal records (with no interviews conducted). . Daniel Ellsberg did some of the task force work, but he had become disillusioned by the Vietnam War and was opposed to its conduct. He and a friend photocopied the report in 1969 intending to disclose it. He approached a number of senior people in the current administration for support in his plans, but none were willing to support him. In early 1971, he discussed the issue with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan and gave him 43 of the 47 volumes of the report. The New York Times began running stories on the Pentagon Papers (as they came to be called) on June 13, 1971 in an article entitled Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement. . Quoting Wikipedia: The Papers revealed that the U.S. had expanded its war with bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by media in the US. The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions. For example, the John F. Kennedy administration had planned to overthrow South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem before his death in a November 1963 coup. President Johnson had decided to expand the war while promising we seek no wider war during his 1964 presidential campaign, including plans to bomb North Vietnam well before the 1964 Election. President Johnson had been outspoken against doing so during the election . . . . The unauthorized publication of the Pentagon Papers was highly controversial at the time and ultimately represented a major embarrassment to prior administrations. The extent to which Ellsburgs goal (to end the War) was furthered by their publication is uncertain since there was already widespread public opposition to the War. . Again quoting Wikipedia: Nixon Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold later called the Papers an example of massive overclassification with no trace of a threat to the national security. The Papers publication had little or no effect on the ongoing war because they dealt with documents written years before publication. . Nevertheless, the release by Ellsburg was believed to be a bad precedent for executive authority to maintain secrecy at its discretion, so Nixon, who originally believed the impact was primarily an embarrassment to earlier administrations, agreed to allow government intervention. Injunctions against further publication were obtained after the first three articles had been published by the New York Times and other papers (who had also been provided the material) began publishing their own articles. Ultimately, however, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated those injunctions stating in their decision that the government had not met its burden of proof for the necessity for secrecy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 02:28:40 +0000
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