In late 1969...with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague, Anthony Russo...Ellsberg secretly made several sets of photocopies of the classified documents to which he had access; these later became known as the Pentagon Papers. As an editor of the
New York Times was to write much later, these documents "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance".They revealed that the government had knowledge, early on, that the war would not likely be won, and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly. Further, the papers showed the government had lied to Congress and the public.
Shortly after Ellsberg copied the documents, he resolved to meet some of the people who had influenced both his change of heart on the war and his decision to act. One of them was Kehler. Another was the poet Gary Snyder, whom he'd met in Kyoto in 1960, and with whom he'd argued about U.S. foreign policy; Ellsberg was finally prepared to concede that Snyder had been right, about both the situation and the need for action against it.
Throughout 1970, Ellsberg covertly attempted to persuade a few sympathetic U.S. Senators...among them J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern, a leading opponent of the war...to release the papers on the Senate floor, because a Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said on-the-record before the Senate. Ellsberg told U.S. Senators that they should be prepared to go to jail in order to end the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg allowed some copies of the documents to circulate privately, including among scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Ellsberg also shared the documents with
New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan under a pledge of confidentiality. Sheehan broke his promise to Ellsberg, and built a scoop around what he'd received both directly from Ellsberg and from contacts at IPS.
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the
Times published the first of nine excerpts and commentaries on the 7,000 page collection. For 15 days, the
Times was prevented from publishing its articles by court order requested by the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, Ellsberg leaked the documents to
The Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. On June 30, the Supreme Court ordered publication of the
Times to resume freely (
New York Times Co. v. United States). Although the
Times did not reveal Ellsberg as their source, he went into hiding for 13 days afterwards, suspecting that the evidence would point to him as the source of the unauthorized release of the study.
On June 29, 1971, U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds...pages which he had received from Ellsberg via Ben Bagdikian...then an editor at the Washington Post. These portions of the Papers were subsequently published by Beacon Press.
Fallout
The release of these papers was politically embarrassing to not only those involved in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations but also the incumbent Nixon administration. Nixon's Oval Office tape from June 14, 1972, shows H. R. Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon:
- [then cabinet-member Donald] Rumsfeld was making this point this morning. To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. ... It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.
John Mitchell, Nixon's Attorney General, almost immediately issued a telegram to the
Times ordering that it halt publication. The
Times refused, and the government brought suit against it.
Although the
Times eventually won the trial before the Supreme Court, an appellate court ordered that the
Times temporarily halt further publication. This was the first successful attempt by the federal government to restrain the publication of a major newspaper since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War. Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to 17 other newspapers in rapid succession. The right of the press to publish the papers was upheld in
New York Times Co. v. United States.
As a response to the leaks, the Nixon administration began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young under John Ehrlichman's supervision created the "White House Plumbers", which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries.
