Pentagon Papers

The Pentagon Papers is a Department of Defense history of United States political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968, running to 47 volumes of some 3,000 pages of internal analysis and 4,000 pages of supporting government documents, prepared originally for internal government use. Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, photocopied the volumes in 1969 and passed them to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan in 1971. The Times began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971, and after a federal court order temporarily halted its series the Washington Post began publishing its own excerpts on June 18, 1971, with roughly nineteen newspapers eventually drawing on the material. The Supreme Court ruled six to three in New York Times Co. v. United States that the government had not met the burden required to justify a prior restraint on publication, a landmark decision protecting the press's right to publish material revealing that successive administrations had misled the public about the scope of the war.