The Pentagon Papers Explained

Larry Holzwarth - September 28, 2019

12. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States provoked the war

It must be remembered that the documents commissioned by the Secretary of Defense were originally prepared by the Pentagon, or contractors working for the Defense Department. They were not prepared by organizations opposed to the American intervention in Vietnam. In fact, according to McNamara, who ordered the study, they intended to produce a document which accurately recorded the history of American involvement across several presidential administrations, of both political parties. When the documents appeared publicly the outrage was palpable. It was clear that the United States government, through the White House and the Secretary of Defense, had been lying to the American people for over two decades.

The papers made it clear that the war in Vietnam, that is, the war between the North and South, had been an American invention, hidden behind the veneer of American support for an embattled people. The United States already divided by the war was shocked. Supporters of the American war effort called for Ellsberg’s head on the proverbial platter. Opposition leaders called for Johnson’s and Nixon’s, who bore the brunt of the outrage over the deceit, though it was clear the deceit preceded his administration by more than a decade. Lost in the argument over patriotism and treason was the clear fact that America had started a war which it was losing, and American soldiers were dying as a result.

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13. Ellsberg became a pariah and a hero at the same time

For opponents of the war in Vietnam, the revelations of the Pentagon Papers were a godsend. Therein was documented proof, prepared by the same military that was prosecuting the war, the American political and military leadership was lying about the war. Daniel Ellsberg became overnight a hero of the anti-war movement in the United States and around the world. Most of the focus of public attention was on the current state of the war, and the Nixon Administration, which had not been included in the report of the war as the events covered occurred before Nixon took office, nonetheless felt the heat over previous government deceptions.

To the pro-war hawks and conservative supporters of continued American expansion of the war, Ellsberg and his supporters were guilty of treasonous betrayal of the United States during a time of war (though officially it was not a time of war). To them, the problem revealed by the Pentagon Papers was the infiltration of less than committed or patriotic people in the Department of Defense and its major contractors, including RAND. Security was inadequate. When the Pentagon Papers were introduced on the floor of the Senate (entering them into the public record) they became a source of further divisiveness between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

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14. Ellsberg was arrested and charged with treason in 1971

Shortly after he delivered copies of the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post, Daniel Ellsberg began living in motels, moving about frequently to avoid the FBI, which wanted him for questioning. On June 23 Ellsberg agreed to an interview with CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite; on June 28 he surrendered to the FBI in Boston, near his home. On the same day, E. Howard Hunt, who would later gain fame for his role in Watergate, suggested to the President’s top aide, Charles “Chuck” Colson, that Ellsberg be “neutralized”. In order to gather derogatory information on Ellsberg, Hunt suggested raiding the office of the former’s psychiatrist.

By the end of December Ellsberg (and his assistant Anthony Russo) were under indictments containing multiple counts. In July 1972 the trial was halted by Supreme Court stay when it was learned that the government had used illegal wiretaps to record conversations between the defendants and their legal teams. In December, 1972, a mistrial was declared in the case against Ellsberg and a new trial was scheduled for the spring of the following year. By that time, furor over the content of the Pentagon Papers had largely died down, as the Nixon Administration prepared for its second term and the continuing drawdown of American troops in Vietnam.

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15. The Pentagon Papers transformed the Nixon Administration

When the Pentagon Papers were first revealed to the public via The New York Times, Richard Nixon’s reaction was anger at what he considered traitorous behavior on the part of the revelation, but his inclination was to do nothing. Nixon thought that the revelations were damaging to his predecessors in the White House, and that publication would do his administration no harm. It was his top aides, chiefly Henry Kissinger, who persuaded him otherwise, and led to the attempt to stop publication in court. When that failed, the administration went further, in activities which would eventually tie the Pentagon Papers to Watergate.

Within a week of the publication of the papers the White House established a covert group called the Special Investigations Unit. It was known colloquially as The Plumbers. The unit’s first illegal activity was a botched burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an act reported to John Ehrlichman, who informed Nixon that there had been an operation, “…which, I think, is better that you don’t know about”. The conversation, as with so many others of the Nixon Administration, was recorded on the secret taping system installed in the Oval Office by an increasingly paranoid President, at the time he was still running for re-election.

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16. The courts dismissed the case against Ellsberg

Whatever else the White House Plumbers were, they evidently were bumblers when it came to the crime of burglary. When Ellsberg’s trial (he faced over 100 years in prison if convicted) began in the spring of 1973 it was revealed that two of the already convicted Watergate burglars, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles in an attempt to obtain further evidence to support the government’s case. The filing cabinet which they rifled today sits in the Smithsonian Institution. The Judge, US District Court Judge William Byrne, ordered the information shared with Ellsberg’s defense lawyers.

He then dismissed the case presented by the prosecution, citing government misconduct. “The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case”, he wrote in his decision. The increasing pressure on the Nixon White House helped lead to the decision not to pursue further legal actions against Ellsberg, Watergate having supplanted the Pentagon Papers in the attention of the American public. It was later revealed that senior Nixon aide John Ehrlichman had met with Judge Byrne and offered him the position of FBI director, which the Judge turned down while the Ellsberg case was pending.

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17. Watergate ended public interest in the Pentagon Papers

The true depth of the false information about the Vietnam War fed to the American people (and the civilian government in many cases) was only beginning to be discussed and disseminated when it was overtaken by the election of 1972, and then the revelations of Watergate. Richard Nixon, who had a credibility problem throughout his political career, was not responsible for any of the deception described in the Pentagon Papers. But he nonetheless became harmed politically, as the occupant of the White House at the time they were revealed, and by the bumbling responses of his staff.

The White House plumbers created themselves in order to find leakers of classified information. Their creation was due in part to Henry Kissinger’s belief that Daniel Ellsberg was one of the “most dangerous” men in the country. The plumbers, shortly after breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, became involved with the Committee to Re-Elect the President, reduced to the excruciatingly appropriate acronym CREEP. It was they who were caught breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex, initiating the events which brought down the Nixon presidency.

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18. Nixon believed the Pentagon Papers proved the existence of a left-wing conspiracy

As noted earlier, the Pentagon Papers did not contain information detrimental to Richard Nixon, nor his presidency. Instead, there is much within them to indicate that the administrations of the four preceding presidents, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, had deliberately and systematically deceived the American people over American involvement in Southeast Asia. But it was Nixon’s reactions to the Papers which linked him with them in the minds of the public, and which began the decline of his presidency, even as he was withdrawing American troops from South Vietnam.

Many of Nixon’s decisions were made based on the advice and counsel of his closest aides. Henry Kissinger in particular was adamant about stopping publication in the first place, and prosecuting Ellsberg for espionage. Both acts linked the Nixon Administration with the Papers, and both made it appear, especially to Nixon’s enemies, that he was trying to use the departments of government to hide something. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon’s true enemies were not the newspapers which published the study, but the members of his own staff who controlled the administration’s response.

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19. Nixon’s staff escalated the public knowledge of the Pentagon Papers

Although Nixon was disinclined to pursue any action against The New York Times when publication began (before the Washington Post published them) he spoke with his then Attorney General, John Mitchell, on June 14, 1971, the day of publication of the second installment. Nixon was still hesitant to do anything to impede publication and stated that he wanted to pursue finding and arresting the leaker, but under prodding from Mitchell agreed to send a message to the Times. Mitchell left the President with the impression that the message would be a telegram requesting that the paper cease publishing information which was still classified.

Instead, Mitchell sent the Times a message which demanded a cessation of publication and return of the classified papers and all copies, under the threat of prosecution of the newspaper and the individuals involved with publication under the 1917 Espionage Act. The paper said it would publish until a court decision said they could not. Meanwhile, Kissinger joined the fray, concerned what the Pentagon Papers revealed concerning American-China policy for decades would erode his negotiations with the Chinese at the time. Kissinger also knew that Ellsberg, who had once worked for him, was well aware of other damaging reports which would discredit the United States, and wanted him silenced immediately.

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20. Under Nixon, deception of the American people over Vietnam continued

Although the Pentagon Papers did not cover activities of the Nixon Administration regarding the Vietnam War, early in his presidency he authorized further expansion of the war, to be conducted covertly, while the American public was informed otherwise. Nixon authorized the execution of Operation Menu in early 1969. The operation was the extended carpet bombing of Cambodia using, for the first time, B-52 heavy bombers. The bombing was ordered in March and by May 1969, The New York Times had the story, and in an article published on May 9 citing unnamed sources revealed the operation to the American people.

Some of the same people in the Department of Defense responsible for the Pentagon Papers were working on the Cambodian operation, and Nixon suspected one of them, Morton Halperin, an aide to Henry Kissinger, of being the source of the story. Halperin’s phones were tapped, illegally, at Nixon’s order to the FBI. It was the first illegal telephone surveillance ordered by the Nixon Administration on the grounds of “national security” and the taps remained in place for nearly two years. The bombing raids in Cambodia drove the North Vietnamese forces they were targeting westward over the next four years, and the bombers flew deeper into Cambodia to follow them.

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21. The New York Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1972

Thanks to the secret taping system Richard Nixon installed in the Oval Office it is possible today to listen to a recording of the President summing up his view of the Pentagon Papers in a conversation with aides on May 11, 1973. “The son of a bitching thief is made a national hero and is going to get off on a mistrial, and the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents”, the President grumbled, followed by the comment, “What in the name of God have we come to?”. At the time, the Watergate scandal was digging deeply into his administration.

By then the American people and press were more absorbed in the Watergate investigations and the legal battles over Ellsberg’s actions, rather than the content of the Pentagon Papers, which had revealed the truth of America’s early involvement in the war. The war itself remained controversial, usually over the lines of how fast the United States could get out. The actions of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, and to some extent even Johnson, were no longer considered germane to the central issue, which was withdrawn.

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22. How much damage did the Pentagon Papers do to the United States?

In the long run, the Pentagon Papers did little to change the political situation in the United States as it regarded the Vietnam War. Hawks remained hawks and demanded the heads of Daniel Ellsberg and the reporters and editors who published the documents. Peace advocates continued to condemn America’s “illegal war” and demand an immediate ending to it. The government continued to expand the war, into Cambodia and Laos, while informing the American people that gradual American withdrawal and “peace with honor” was coming. The long-suffering Vietnamese people continued to suffer.

The entity which was most damaged by the release of the Pentagon Papers and the legal squabbles which surrounded them was the Nixon Administration, and as in other areas of his troubled and troubling presidency, most of the wounds suffered were self-inflicted. Had Nixon allowed publication to go forward unimpeded the papers would have exposed the duplicity of previous presidents while allowing him to compare his efforts for peace and Vietnamization of the war effort favorably in comparison to his predecessors. Instead, he bore the bulk of the damage for America’s long involvement in Vietnam.

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23. The Pentagon Papers list the chronology of the United States escalating the war

Beginning on November 26, 1963 – the day after the funeral of John F. Kennedy – and continuing through 1964, there were a series of steps completed by the United States with the expressed intention of luring the North Vietnamese into escalating the war, allowing an appropriate response by the United States military. The steps were taken with the upcoming 1964 presidential election in the United States under constant consideration. The insurgency by the Viet Cong was exaggerated, the weakness of the government of South Vietnam was exploited, and US advisors stepped up their activity in prodding the North Vietnamese.

There was also an expansion of air reconnaissance over Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, conducted by US airplanes, intended to provoke a response. The same applied to Naval patrols along Vietnam’s coastline, which eventually led to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The entire chronology, and the supporting Department of Defense analysis and summary, indicts the Johnson Administration for deliberate expansion of the war, timed to take place after the 1964 election, and rebuts President Kennedy’s autumn 1963 statement to Walter Cronkite, “…after all, it’s their war”.

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24. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended military action in October, 1964

In October 1964, just weeks before the election, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to the National Security Council and the President, “strong military actions are now required in order to prevent the collapse of the US position in Southeast Asia”. It was in the fall of 1964 that President Johnson allowed American advisors, in company with South Vietnamese troops, to cross into Laos on the ground in order to destroy supplies meant for the Viet Cong, or the means of transporting them. By the end of 1964, often these raids included only one Vietnamese soldier, the rest being CIA and US military personnel.

The same timeframe saw an expansion of the US operations known as FARMGATE, essentially a reconnaissance, supply, and bombing operation using unmarked and obsolescent American airplanes (such as WW2 vintage B-26 bombers) flown by Vietnamese crews accompanied by American advisors. By the end of 1964, most FARMGATE flights were conducted by all American crews, sometimes accompanied by mercenaries from other western countries, with one Vietnamese crew member. In describing the thinking at one conference in which these and other American actions were approved, the Pentagon Papers read, “Our point of departure is and must be that we cannot accept overrunning of Southeast Asia by Hanoi and Peiping”. [Beijing]

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25. The Pentagon Papers contain the thoughts and discussions among the policymakers of American history in the mid-20^th century

Throughout the entire collection of documents which comprise the Pentagon Papers, the thoughts and suggestions of America’s post-World War II political and military experts and their lower-level staff are listed in detail. Presidents do not appear often, and when they do it is as an expression of approval or disapproval of the recommended action, questions regarding a report, or intention regarding strategy. The papers are littered with the names of second-half 20^th century American history. Dean Acheson, Henry Cabot Lodge, George Marshall, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor and many others. They offer a straightforward description of how American involvement developed into a trap for itself.

The Pentagon Papers have long been available in print in numerous volumes, some abridged, some with commentary. They offer a comprehensive and highly detailed presentation, step-by-step, explaining how the United States descended into the quagmire of Vietnam. Much of the presentation is not pretty to American eyes when the level of deceit by the government is considered. Late in the period of the war they cover, the military was also deceiving the government it served. They were made available online on the National Archives website, with each volume a separate PDF file, in 2011. They were also released to Presidential Libraries allowing all Americans to read them for themselves.