What were the Pentagon Papers and Why did the US Government try to Censor them?

It has been about 55 years since the Pentagon Papers were released. Many of us weren’t even born yet, but we still experience the ramifications of the release of these “Top Secret” files. After the insane decade of the 1960’s that saw the assassinations of two of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., many gave up accepting the official government narrative. Originally, the phrase “Conspiracy Theory” was intended to be a slur for individuals on the fringe who did not accept the official government narrative of the Kennedy assassination. By the end of the decade, the phrase had stopped being as much of a slur. It had become part of the nations zeitgeist when it became mainstream not to trust the government. These documents proved to many that the US government not only lied to the American people, but had been lying for a long time.

In 1968, US President Johnson seemed to be more interested in domestic issues than Vietnam, allowing US troop counts to balloon to over half a million. President Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a campaign of ending the war by “achieving peace with honor”. By 1971, Nixon cut troop counts down to nearly 150,000 while keeping the war going by maintaining high military spending to aid the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam, aka South Vietnam) in their defense against the DRVN (Democratic Republic of Vietnam, aka North Vietnam). Meanwhile, the anti-war movement in the US began losing steam. Some in the movement saw troop withdrawal from Vietnam as a shell game where the US pretended to exit Vietnam while still paying to keep the war going. This was the political environment when the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press.

A few reporters were allowed to read the documents and have been reporting on them since the 1970’s, but the documents were never fully released to the public until 2011 under Obama Executive Order 13526. Now they are fully released as PDF files on the National Archives website. ¹

What are the Pentagon Papers?

The Pentagon Papers were a top secret study commissioned by Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, that he commissioned only months before he quit. He commissioned the study after several difficult interactions with Vietnam War protestors who seemed to know more about the war than his colleagues in the Presidential cabinet. While speaking to protestors, McNamara found himself cornered into a brief debate that challenged the narrative he had believed about the war. McNamara faced additional pushback at home when his son began to question the morality of the war. This began wearing on McNamara. By early 1967, McNamara’s doubts about the war began to manifest physically with an occasional nervous shaking of his jaw. ²

The Pentagon Papers were an attempt to answer a series of 100 questions that McNamara had about the war. On June 17, 1967, McNamara commissioned the report, whose official name is the "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force", to preserve a historic record of the events of the war. This study officially assembled all the information they could about the US involvement in Vietnam, starting in the final days of World War II until the conclusion of the study in 1967.³ Surprisingly, most of the report sources were publicly available books and articles that were available for anyone to read. Occasional secret documents were interspersed, but these documents seem to be generally supporting evidence to give context or behind the scenes insights.

He requested that his close aide, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, answer the questions he prepared. McNamara only planned for the project to last three months, but McNaughton died in a plane crash shortly after starting the study. McNamara still wanted answers and commissioned a full study headed by an official with the Defense Department, Les Gelb. The project quickly ballooned to 36 researchers, half of which were active duty military and the remaining researchers were academics or civilian federal employees. As the researchers delved into the project, it became clear that the questions were much more complicated than they appeared on the surface. The project quickly bloomed into a project lasting several years and would outlast McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense. By November, McNamara had enough and quit his White House position to work for the World Bank.

The project finally completed only days before President Nixon’s inauguration on January 15, 1969. At final count, the report contained ~7,000 pages of documents, with ~3,000 pages of narrative and an additional ~4,000 pages of notes consisting of memos, telegrams, cables, etcetera. Although McNamara had already left his White House position, the study’s authors submitted the report to the current Secretary of Defense as well as McNamara. He refused to read it. McNamara had already started at the World Bank and probably wanted to forget about the war.

Daniel Ellsberg

The study had such a strong impact on the researchers that some developed an anti-war ideology as they learn details about the war. These researchers were not hippies. They worked for the government in activities relating to the war or were impartial academics. They all began the study with a pro or neutral attitude about the war, but as the study progressed, some were forced to confront new information that gradually changed their beliefs.

One researcher, Daniel Ellsberg, a former US Marine officer and military analyst at the RAND corporation, became so disillusioned with the war, believing it to be unwinnable, that he started attending anti-war meetings and became radicalized. When the study concluded, he became outraged to discover nothing would be done with the study. He believed US citizens deserved to know the truth the research team had discovered. With the help of Anthony Russo, a former colleague of Ellsberg at the RAND corporation (an intelligence think tank in the Los Angeles area), they made photocopies of one of the 15 studies printed.

Ellsberg produced several photocopies of the study with the attention of releasing these documents to members of Congress. He believed that if Congress knew how much Johnson had expanded Congressional approval to send troops into Vietnam, that the approval would be revoked and would end the war. He was wrong. After a year of trying to stir up interest among Congressional representatives, no one seemed interested in the study. Ellsberg became frustrated when it seemed Congress were only interested in burying their heads in the sand.

It became clear that the war in Vietnam was never about bringing Democracy to the region, but the containment of China. This motive became explicitly confirmed in a 1965 McNamara memo to Johnson that was entered into the State Department archives.⁴ This memo explicitly stated the containment of China was the goal of US policy in the region.

A frustrated Ellsberg started to reach out to members of the Press in 1971 and gave reporters at the New York Times and later Washington Post portions of the report.

Nixon verses the Pentagon Papers

Ellsberg had amazingly bad timing because President Richard Nixon had just started to implement a plan to divide the previously united Sino-Soviet communist bloc by opening up the US economy to the People’s Republic of China. Nixon hoped that if China would see the benefits of Western capitalism, they would eventually give up Communism.

After the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1960’s, it became clear Communism wasn’t nearly as ideologically homogeneous as many in the West once imagined. As China emerged into a global power, Mao wasn’t interested in becoming a Soviet puppet. China quickly developed a strong sense of independence. They created a new interpretation of Marxism that differed from the Stalinist doctrine.

Nixon had a plan to end the Cold War once and for all by bringing China into the Western system. This would free up the Nixon presidency to de-escalate the Cold War and possibly reduce the nuclear threat that plagued the Kennedy administration. Without the nearly 850 million people⁵ living in China to worry about, Nixon might negate the population imbalance and reduce the threat of nuclear war. He had already publicly expressed an interest in bringing China back into the world economic system in his 1967 Foreign Affairs article.⁶

Nixon began by sending National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, on a secret trip to China on July 9-11, 1971 following the events of “ping pong diplomacy” at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan.⁷ A mere days after this secret Kissinger meeting, the New York Times ran the Pentagon Papers article.

Initially, Nixon saw no problem with the release of the Pentagon Papers since they generally pointed the finger at the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. However Kissinger persuaded Nixon that he needed to take a stand against allowing top secret documents to be released in case another whistleblower considered releasing even more important documents such as defense secrets or nuclear targets. There might have been more to this story considering Kissinger was among the group of academics working on the study. Did Kissinger believe his study involvement to be personally damning due to his involvement in the bombing of Cambodia over the previous couple years?

The Nixon government probably also realized the damning reports of a policy of Chinese containment within the study could derail hopes of securing a Chinese deal.

Nixon agreed and his government worked on a strategy to stop publication and attack the character of Ellsberg. The initial tactic planned to squash any reporting of the McNamara study in the press by sending the Justice Department after the newspapers to prevent publication. Following the New York Times third article, the US Department of Justice filed a temporary restraining order against any future publication of the Pentagon Papers due to a compromise of national security. In New York Times vs. United States, the Times and later the Washington Post presented their justification to publish the documents under their First Amendment’s protection of the Freedom of the Press. On June 30th, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the government had failed to prove harm to national security.

This opened the doors for other publications to start reporting on the papers making it the most important news story of the year. Neil Sheehan, who wrote many of the articles for The Times published many of the documents from the report in a Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal awarded book.

A couple days before the Supreme Court ruling, Ellsberg surrendered to the US Attorney's Office in Boston to be sent to Los Angeles to face trial a year and a half later.

Following the Supreme Court decision, the Justice Department began to target Ellsberg personally by discrediting the report and going directly after his credibility.

The Nixon team immediately assembled a group of “plumbers”. They were given the name because of their job plugging leaks. These “plumbers” were sent to Ellsberg’s Psychiatrist’s office in Los Angeles in hopes of finding dirt that might silence him. Nixon became frustrated because there wasn’t anything really damning found within the Ellsberg psych file.

Using covert methods to discredit Ellsberg ended up yielding the opposite result. Ellsberg had the opportunity to defend himself in court against charges of breaking the Espionage Act of 1917 along with additional charges of theft and conspiracy. Initially, the case did not go well when the judge ruled that Ellsberg’s defense, claiming the documents were illegally classified to keep them from the American people, was irrelevant. However, when government misconduct began to be revealed with the discovery of illegal wiretapping, the break in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and the refusal of the Prosecution to share evidence with the Defense, the case began to turn. Ellsberg’s defense attorney showed that Ellsberg’s rights were repeatedly violated; poisoning any evidence the prosecution would try to throw at Ellsberg. This forced the judge to dismiss the entire case on May 11, 1973.

The report didn’t seem to harm the talks in China. While the Ellsberg case proceeded in Los Angeles, the Nixon team continued working on their plan for Nixon to visit China between February 21-28, 1972. The visit became a huge success and encouraged a Nixon visit to the Soviet Union on May 22–30 to further de-escalate Cold War tensions.

Nixon’s “plumbers” became a liability when they were sent to fix another set of problems coming from the DNC (Democratic National Committee) offices in the Watergate office building. At the same time, it became known that the US Presidency greatly overstepped their Congressional authority starting in 1964 by repeatedly bombing Cambodia and Laos under “Operation Menu” and expanded under “Operation Freedom Deal” during the Nixon presidency until August of 1973. This violated the Paris Peace Accords which called for the end of all US military intervention in Vietnam by March of 1973. Nixon wanted to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail to give the South Vietnamese government a chance to form a stable government after the US left.

The discovery of the multiple covert programs seemed to all leak at the same time leaving a black mark on the Presidency that led to Nixon’s impeachment. Rather than let these covert programs go public and undermine any progress made in foreign relations, Nixon made the strategic plan to resign the Presidency on August 8, 1974. This allowed Nixon’s replacement, Ford, to pardon Nixon before impeachment proceedings could begin.

The legacy of Nixon is mixed. On one hand, he left a legacy of diplomatic progress for a future President to build upon. A mere decade later, the Reagan Presidency built upon Nixon’s work to finally end the Cold War.

On the other hand, multiple scandals at the highest office began to erode faith in the US government. As each subsequent scandal broke, trust declined even further. By the time my generation came of age in the 1990’s, trust in the government found new lows as Congressional approval declined to the point that current surveys now rank them among the least trusted profession. The script had flipped. It used to be fringe to believe in conspiracy theories. Now, many consider it naive to believe the government ever tells the truth.

In the next article, I am going to explain what specifically were in the Pentagon Papers that made them so damning.

Notes:

1. https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers

2. Langguth, A.J. Our Vietnam The War 1954–1975. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

3. Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.

4. Robert McNamara, Draft Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson. Department of State, Vietnam – June to December 1965, Document 189, November 3, 1965.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v03/d189

5. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CHN/china/population

6. Richard Nixon, Asia After Viet Nam. Foreign Affairs Magazine, October 1967.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1967-10-01/asia-after-viet-nam

7. The Strange Forgotten History Of The Communist Civil War