Pentagon Papers Spill Vietnam's Secrets
Good morning, it’s June 13. On this date in 1971, the New York Times began publication of the Pentagon Papers – an event with even more resonance today.
What came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers” began in June 1967, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a secret study of the history of the Vietnam War. McNamara had been one of the war’s architects, but this project showed that he had second thoughts fairly early in the game.
In his memoirs, McNamara claimed dubiously that his motivation was to help historians, and that it was never really that big a secret. But McNamara never mentioned the project to President Johnson or Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and he conspicuously went outside normal Pentagon channels to produce it, tapping into a vein of sympathetic scholars, many of them Harvard men.
When the report came to light, Johnson and Rusk – both out of office by then -- figured that McNamara’s original intention had been to give it to Robert Kennedy for use against Johnson in the 1968 primaries. That race never materialized, but the 7,000-page report survived. It was officially called “US-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: History of US Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy.”
One of the former Harvard PhDs who worked on it was Daniel Ellsberg, who by 1971 had completed his metamorphosis from DOD analyst to anti-war activist. Only 15 copies of the report had been made, but Ellsberg obtained access to one of them – it was in the custody of the RAND Corp., a private contractor with many defense contracts – and he surreptitiously copied the entire report and snuck it out of RAND.
Ellsberg shopped the classified report around town, including to eventual 1972 Democratic Party presidential nominee George McGovern, but found no takers in government. Neil Sheehan, a former UPI war correspondent who covered defense and diplomacy for the New York Times, was another matter. Sheehan knew a good story when he saw one. So did his editors, and Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, the paper began publishing excerpts. Soon, the Washington Post would join the Times.
Among other things, the Pentagon Papers, as they came to be known, showed that the shock professed by the Kennedy administration regarding the overthrow of South Vietnam’s President Diem was more than disingenuous: a top secret cable from U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge suggested that the administration was behind Diem’s assassination.
As for LBJ, the papers revealed that even while deriding 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater as a warmonger for advocating a greater U.S. military presence in Vietnam, the Johnson administration was already deeply into planning for a vast escalation.
At the White House, the initial instinct of the wily Richard Nixon was to downplay the significance of the Pentagon Papers. After all, they mostly cast the spotlight on his predecessors’ perfidy, not his own. But on that fateful Sunday, Henry Kissinger forcefully argued the opposite, railing against “this wholesale theft and unauthorized disclosure.”
Unfortunately for Nixon's legacy, Kissinger’s argument prevailed over the president's gut feeling. The administration became obsessed with the leak and went to court to try and stop publication. When he lost in the Supreme Court, Nixon directed the men around him to find extra-judicial ways to stop leaks.
“The Plumbers” were born, along with the seeds of Watergate.
