Pentagon Papers

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The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. Released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, it was made public on the front page of The New York Times starting on June 13, 1971. When U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell sought an injunction to stop the Times from publishing further material, Ellsberg forwarded a copy he made to The Washington Post, which started publishing them on June 18, 1971. A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that Lyndon B. Johnson's administration had "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress". The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks, none...

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