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FAQs

What did Daniel Ellsberg reveal in publishing the Pentagon Papers? ›

Impact. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had expanded its war with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by the American media.

The Pentagon Papers revealed that Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson had continued to send American soldiers to fight in a war that could not be won. To justify these actions, presidents, military leaders, and other government officials had lied to the public. The Geneva Convention had been violated.

Trial and dismissal. On June 28, 1971, two days before a Supreme Court ruling saying that a federal judge had ruled incorrectly about the right of The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston.

After articles about the papers were published, Ellsberg surrendered to the authorities on June 28, 1971. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the newspapers' right to publish the articles, the Nixon administration brought criminal charges against Ellsberg and Russo.

Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst who worked on them, leaked them to the press, and The New York Times published them in 1971. The Pentagon Papers revealed that American leaders misled Congress and the American people about the war. The papers revealed that the US military expanded its operations in the Vietnam War.

The New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, on June 13, 1971.

Often referred to as the “Pentagon Papers” case, the landmark Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), defended the First Amendment right of free press against prior restraint by the government.

As a result, the newspapers could continue to print the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers Case reaffirmed a value at the core of the First Amendment—the freedom of the press to criticize the government and check abuses of power.

A number of events—particularly the surprise Tet Offensive, and later the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers—helped to confirm public suspicion that there was a significant "gap" between the administration's declarations of controlled military and political resolution, and the reality.

According to the leaked documents, U.S. intelligence spied on U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres because it believed Guterres was too soft on Russia. The leaks also revealed other U.S. espionage activities – including against allies such as Jordan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkey, Ivory Coast and Colombia.

When were the Pentagon Papers declassified? ›

Credit: the National Archives and Records Administration. On May 4, 2011, the National Archives and Records Administration announced the declassification of the Pentagon Papers. June 13, 2011, forty years after its first publication, the complete study arrived at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force", was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967.

Final answer: The release of the Pentagon Papers significantly inflamed the antiwar movement in the U.S. and further discredited the government. Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, faced legal consequences, but his charges were dismissed due to government misconduct.

The Pentagon Papers were a secret government study that revealed the United States' true motives and actions during the Vietnam War. They exposed the government's deception in escalating the war and showed that they had knowledge of the war's unlikelihood of success.

The US army had superior conventional weapons but they were ineffective against a country that was not industrialized and an army which employed guerrilla tactics and used the dense jungle as cover.

Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.

The Vietnam War severely damaged the U.S. economy. Unwilling to raise taxes to pay for the war, President Johnson unleashed a cycle of inflation. The war also weakened U.S. military morale and undermined, for a time, the U.S. commitment to internationalism.