Pentagon Papers (1971): The Leak That Exposed Vietnam Policy

The Pentagon Papers were a secret US government history of the Vietnam War, leaked by the analyst Daniel Ellsberg and first published by the New York Times on 13 June 1971. They revealed that successive presidents had expanded American involvement in Vietnam while hiding much of the truth from the public. The Nixon administration’s attempt to stop publication led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedom, and its campaign against Ellsberg helped set in motion the Watergate scandal.

The secret study

In June 1967 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, increasingly doubtful about the war, ordered a comprehensive internal history of US decision-making in Vietnam. A team of officials and analysts, directed by Leslie Gelb, worked through classified files covering the years from 1945 to 1967.

The result, officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force”, was completed in January 1969. It comprised 47 volumes, about 3,000 pages of narrative and 4,000 pages of original documents. Only a handful of copies were made, and it was classified top secret.

Daniel Ellsberg and the leak

Daniel Ellsberg was a former Marine officer and a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation. He had worked in Vietnam for the government and contributed to the study. Over time he became convinced that the war was wrong and that the public had been misled about it.

In October 1969 Ellsberg, helped by his RAND colleague Anthony Russo, began secretly photocopying the study. He first tried to interest members of Congress, including Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, without success. In March 1971 he gave much of the material to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for the New York Times.

Publication and the courts

The injunction

After months of preparation by a team of journalists, the New York Times published the first article on Sunday 13 June 1971. The government of Richard Nixon, although the study ended before his presidency, argued that the publication harmed national security. After the third instalment, a federal judge granted a temporary order halting further publication, an almost unprecedented step against an American newspaper on national security grounds.

Ellsberg then passed copies to other papers. The Washington Post, under publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, began its own series on 18 June and was also taken to court. Further newspapers across the country published extracts. On 29 June Senator Mike Gravel read portions into the record of a Senate subcommittee he chaired, and they were later published as the “Gravel edition”.

The Supreme Court case

The cases moved through the courts with extraordinary speed. The Supreme Court heard argument on 26 June 1971 and decided “New York Times Co. v. United States” on 30 June. By six votes to three, it held that the government had failed to meet the heavy burden required to justify prior restraint, that is, preventing publication in advance.

Each of the nine justices wrote a separate opinion. In one of the best-known, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.” The decision remains a cornerstone of press freedom in the United States, though it did not rule out prosecution after publication.

What the papers revealed

The Pentagon Papers showed that US involvement in Vietnam was much older and deeper than most Americans realised. They documented American aid to the French war in Indochina under President Harry Truman, the Eisenhower administration’s support for South Vietnam’s refusal to hold the nationwide elections planned for 1956, and the Kennedy administration’s knowledge of the 1963 coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem.

The most damaging revelations concerned the Johnson years. The study showed covert operations against North Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964, and planning for a wider war while Johnson was campaigning on a promise of restraint. One memorandum by an assistant defense secretary, John McNaughton, suggested that avoiding a humiliating defeat had become the main American aim, more important than helping the South Vietnamese.

Ellsberg’s trial and the Plumbers

Ellsberg surrendered to authorities in Boston on 28 June 1971 and was charged, together with Russo, under the Espionage Act and with theft and conspiracy. To discredit him, the White House created a secret unit, nicknamed the “Plumbers”, to stop leaks. In September 1971 its operatives broke into the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, looking for damaging information.

When the break-in became known during the trial in 1973, along with illegal wiretapping and an approach by the White House to the trial judge about a possible appointment as FBI director, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges on 11 May 1973. Several men involved in the Plumbers also took part in the Watergate burglary of 1972, and the Fielding break-in became part of the case against Nixon’s aides.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the papers covered Nixon’s own war policy. The study ended in 1967, before Nixon took office. His administration fought publication partly on principle, to defend government secrecy, and partly from fear of further leaks.
• Myth: the leak exposed military secrets about current operations. The documents were historical. Even many officials later admitted that their publication did little or no real damage to national security.
• Fact: the full study stayed classified for decades. Although most of it was published in 1971, the complete, officially declassified version was only released by the National Archives in June 2011, forty years after the first article.

Legacy

The Pentagon Papers changed the relationship between the American press and the government. Newspapers became more willing to challenge official accounts, a trend reinforced soon afterwards by reporting on Watergate. The case is still cited whenever governments try to stop publication of leaked material.

Ellsberg himself became one of the best-known whistleblowers in American history. For the rest of his life he campaigned against nuclear weapons and spoke in support of later leakers of classified information, arguing that citizens have a right to know when their government misleads them about war. His critics, by contrast, argued that no individual official should decide alone to reveal secret documents.

The story has also been retold many times, including in Ellsberg’s memoir and in the 2017 film “The Post”, which dramatised the Washington Post’s decision to publish.

Key people

• Daniel Ellsberg (1931–2023), the RAND analyst who leaked the study.
• Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter who obtained the papers.
• Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who commissioned the history.
• Richard Nixon, the president whose administration sought to block publication.
• Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who decided to publish despite legal risk.

Timeline

• 1967, 17 June: McNamara orders the study of US decision-making in Vietnam.
• 1969, January: The 47-volume study is completed.
• 1969, October: Ellsberg and Russo begin secretly copying it.
• 1971, 13 June: The New York Times publishes the first article.
• 1971, 15 June: A federal court temporarily halts publication by the Times.
• 1971, 18 June: The Washington Post begins publishing extracts.
• 1971, 30 June: The Supreme Court rules for the newspapers.
• 1971, September: The Plumbers break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.
• 1973, 11 May: Charges against Ellsberg and Russo are dismissed.
• 2011, 13 June: The National Archives releases the full declassified study.

Why it matters

The Pentagon Papers deepened public distrust of government statements about the Vietnam War and became a defining case for press freedom. They also showed how far a president might go against a whistleblower, a chain of events that led directly towards Watergate. Debates about leaks, secrecy and the public’s right to know still return to this case.