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 of which were reported in the mainstream media. For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; these charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.
In June 2011, the documents forming the Pentagon Papers were declassified and publicly released.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara created the Vietnam Study Task Force on June 17, 1967, for the purpose of writing an "encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War". McNamara claimed that he wanted to leave a written record for historians, to prevent policy errors in future administrations, although Leslie H. Gelb, then director of Policy Planning at the Pentagon, has said that the notion that they were commissioned as a "cautionary tale" is a motive that McNamara only used in retrospect. McNamara told others, such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, that he only asked for a collection of documents rather than the studies he received. Motives aside, McNamara did not inform either Rusk or President Lyndon Johnson about the study. One report claimed that McNamara had planned to give the work to his friend, Robert F. Kennedy, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. McNamara later denied this, though he admitted that he ought to have informed Johnson and Rusk.
Instead of using existing Defense Department historians, McNamara assigned his close aide and Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton to collect the papers. Many of them were based on papers from Richard Helms, head of the Central Intelligence Agency. McNamara wanted the study done in three months. McNaughton died in a plane crash one month after work began in June 1967, but the project continued under the direction of Defense Department official Les Gelb.
Thirty-six analysts—half of them active-duty military officers, the rest academicians and civilian federal employees—worked on the study. They worked to produce 47 volumes answering a list of 100 questions that McNamara (via his secretaries) had sent them, which included questions such as "How confident can we be about body counts of the enemy? Were programs to pacify the Vietnamese countryside working? What was the basis of President Johnson's credibility gap? Was Ho Chi Minh an Asian Tito? Did the U.S. violate the Geneva Accords on Indochina? Can we win this war?" Some of the analysts included Daniel Ellsberg, Morton Halperin, Paul Warnke, future generals Paul F. Gorman and John Galvin, historian Melvin Gurtov, economists Hans Heymann and Richard Moorstein, and future top diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who drafted a volume.
The analysts largely used existing files in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To keep the study secret from others, including National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, they conducted no interviews or consultations with the armed forces, with the White House, or with other federal agencies.
McNamara left the Defense Department in February 1968, and his successor Clark Clifford received the finished study on January 15, 1969, five days before Richard Nixon's inauguration, although Clifford claimed he never read it. Gelb said in 1991 that he presented the study to McNamara in early 1969, when the latter was president of the World Bank, but McNamara did not read it then, and as late as 2018 Gelb did not know if McNamara ever read the study later in his life.
The study consisted of 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of original government documents in 47 volumes, and was classified as "Top Secret – Sensitive". ("Sensitive" is not an official security designation; it meant that access to the study should be controlled.) The task force made 15 copies; the think tank RAND Corporation received two of the copies from Gelb, Morton Halperin and Paul Warnke, with access granted if at least two of the three approved.
Organization and content of the documents
The 47 volumes of the papers were organized as follows:
I. Vietnam and the U.S., 1940–1950 (1 Vol.)
B. The Character and Power of the Viet Minh
II. U.S. Involvement in the Franco–Viet Minh War, 1950–1954 (1 Vol.)
A. U.S., France and Vietnamese Nationalism
B. Toward a Negotiated Settlement
III. The Geneva Accords (1 Vol.)
A. U.S. Military Planning and Diplomatic Maneuver