Pentagon Papers released in their 7,000-page entirety
The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom.
Prepared near the end of Lyndon Johnson’s term as president by defence department and private foreign policy analysts, the report was leaked by one of the analysts, Daniel Ellsberg, in an act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic cases of whistle-blowing in history.
The National Archives and presidential libraries are now releasing the report in full.
The release was timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971.
The papers showed that the Johnson, Kennedy and prior administrations had been escalating the conflict in Vietnam while misleading Congress, the public and allies.
As scholars pore over the report, Ellsberg says the chance of finding new revelations is dim. Most of it has come out in congressional forums and by other means. Ellsberg plucked out the best when he painstakingly photocopied pages that he took from a safe night after night and returned in the mornings.
At the time, Nixon was delighted that people were reading about bumbling and lies by his predecessor, which he thought would take some anti-war heat off him. But if he loved the substance of the leak, he hated the leaker.
He feared Ellsberg represented a left-wing conspiracy that would undermine his government with damaging disclosures if they did not make an example out of him.
It was his belief in such a conspiracy, and his willingness to combat it by illegal means, that put him on the path to the Watergate scandal that destroyed his presidency.
