government pronouncements about the intensive bombing of North Vietnam, which the report stated as having no real impact on the enemy’s will to fight. The report also contradicted official U.S. Kennedy had actively helped overthrow and assassinate South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Some of the most damning information in the Pentagon Papers indicate that the administration of John F. After secretly photocopying large sections of the report, Ellsberg approached several members of Congress, none of whom took action. decision-making regarding Vietnam should be more widely available to the American public. He also believed that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers about U.S. government released all 7,000 pages to the public in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of its leakage to the press.īy 1969, however, Ellsberg had come to believe that the war in Vietnam was un-winnable. involvement in Indochina and had worked on the preparation of the 1967 study.ĭid you know? Though an incomplete version of the Pentagon Papers was published in book form later in 1971, the study remained officially classified until June 2011, when the U.S. Marine Corps officer from 1954 to 1957 and worked as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and the Department of Defense, had been an early supporter of U.S. Completed in 1969 and bound into 47 volumes, it contained 3,000 pages of narrative along with 4,000 pages of supporting documents.ĭaniel Ellsberg, who had served as a U.S. In preparing the study-which was labeled “Top Secret”-the analysts drew on classified material from the archives of the Department of Defense, State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The official title of the study was the “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” though it would later become famous as the Pentagon Papers. political and military involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War II until the present day. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a team of analysts working for the Department of Defense prepared a highly classified study of the U.S.
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