File 041 · 1971 · Leaked documents

The Pentagon Papers

A secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, leaked to the press in 1971, showed that officials had privately doubted the war while publicly promising progress.

Background

In 1967 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered a classified study of US decision-making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The result ran to thousands of pages. One of its authors, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst who had turned against the war, copied it and gave it to The New York Times.

On 13 June 1971 the Times began publishing excerpts. The Nixon administration obtained a court order to stop the series, the first prior restraint of this kind on a US newspaper. Other papers, including The Washington Post, then published parts of the same material, and the case went to the Supreme Court.

What the record shows

• The study showed that senior officials in several administrations had been more pessimistic in private than their public statements suggested.
• It documented that the US expanded its actions, including covert operations, in ways the public was not told about.
• The Supreme Court's decision in New York Times Co. v. United States allowed publication to continue.
• The charges against Ellsberg were dismissed in 1973 after it emerged that government agents had burglarized his psychiatrist's office.

Timeline

• 1967 McNamara commissions the history of US involvement in Vietnam.
• Mar 1971 Ellsberg gives the documents to a New York Times reporter.
• 13 Jun 1971 The Times publishes the first article; the government seeks an injunction.
• 30 Jun 1971 The Supreme Court rules 6–3 that the government may not block publication.
• 1973 Charges against Ellsberg are dismissed because of government misconduct.
• 2011 The full study is declassified and released by the National Archives.

Checking the claims

The claim: the government lied about Vietnam. The papers did not show a single big lie. They showed a pattern: public confidence that did not match private doubts, plans that were not disclosed, and an unwillingness to say that the war might not be won. Because the document is the government's own history, it is difficult to dismiss as opinion.

The papers also have limits. They covered the period up to 1967 and did not include the Nixon years. They do not show that every official statement was false, and historians continue to disagree about the intent behind individual decisions. What they did establish was the documented gap between private assessments and public claims. The case also changed the law of the press: the Supreme Court did not say that classified material may always be published, but it held that the government had not met the very heavy burden of justifying a prior restraint. In the years that followed, the papers became a standard reference for debates about leaks, secrecy and the role of newspapers, and they are still cited when new classified documents reach the press. Readers can check the original study and the court opinions themselves, since both are public.

Claimed, but not shown

The papers do not show that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was invented from the start. They are one source among several, including later NSA studies, on that question.

Verdict

Sources

• United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense (the Pentagon Papers)
• New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
• National Archives, release of the complete Pentagon Papers (2011)

Connected files (red threads)

• Gulf of Tonkin — The papers are one of the sources on the Tonkin incident
• Watergate — The break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist was part of the same White House circle
• Snowden and the NSA — A later case of leaked classified documents and the press
• Operation Popeye: cloud seeding in Vietnam — Another Vietnam War secret that reached the public through leaks

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