The Times begins printing the Pentagon Papers; four presidents, the documents show, misled the country on Vietnam
Four presidents had been telling the country one thing about Vietnam and doing another. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts from a 47-volume, 7,000-page classified Defense Department study — the Pentagon Papers — revealing that the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations had each misled the public about the scope and intentions of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. The Nixon administration obtained a federal injunction halting publication after three articles, but the Supreme Court overruled it, and the press ran.
The Supreme Court's ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States set the controlling First Amendment precedent on prior restraint — the government's ability to stop publication before it happens. Chief Justice Burger's majority opinion drew a line the press has stood behind ever since. The case remains the foundational legal authority every American newsroom cites when a government tries to kill a story before it runs.
QWhy did Ellsberg spend two years approaching senators and White House officials before going to the press — and what did they all say?
Ellsberg's first instinct was to work within the system. After photocopying the study in October 1969, he spent the better part of two years offering the Pentagon Papers to people with the power to act on them through official channels. Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, passed. Senator William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a vocal war critic, passed. Senator George McGovern, who would run for president on an anti-war platform in 1972, also declined. Each man, for his own reasons, judged the political risk too high. It was only after policy experts Marcus Raskin and Ralph Stavins read portions of the documents and pointed Ellsberg toward Neil Sheehan that the Papers found a path to the public. The senators who wouldn't touch them spent years afterward calling their publication a watershed moment.
QHow did Neil Sheehan actually copy 7,000 pages of classified documents — and where did he hide them afterward?
Sheehan didn't walk out of a government building with a single set of documents. He made copies — plural, across multiple copy shops in the Boston area — with his wife Susan Sheehan working alongside him to get through the volume. The finished copies then flew with Sheehan to Washington, where he and a team of Times editors worked around the clock to read, organize, and summarize the 47 volumes into publishable journalism. The sheer logistics of the operation — dozens of copy shop trips, the physical bulk of thousands of pages, the secrecy required at every step — made it one of the more elaborate acts of document handling in American press history, conducted entirely before the digital age.
QThe Pentagon Papers covered only through 1968 — so why did Richard Nixon, who took office in 1969, fight so hard to suppress them?
Nothing in the Pentagon Papers implicated Nixon. The study ended in 1968, the last year of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, and Nixon's name appears nowhere in the documents as a wrongdoer. His own lawyers acknowledged as much internally. Nixon's motive was forward-looking: he feared that allowing the press to publish classified material — any classified material — would set a precedent that could expose his own ongoing secret policies in Vietnam, including the bombing of Cambodia. The fight to suppress the Papers led directly to the creation of the White House 'Plumbers' unit, assembled to stop future leaks. The Plumbers' first major operation was a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Their second was Watergate.
