During that Autumn of 1972, among the books
I had time to read was a paperback copy of The Pentagon Papers.
To refresh your memory, this was a history
of the U.S. role in Indochina from World War II until May 1968. As noted in an
article by the editors of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, this study had been commissioned in 1967 by U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara, serving under President Lyndon Johnson.
It seems that McNamara had become
disillusioned about the direction of the war and did not support further
escalation. A purpose of the study was to detail the various steps that had
been taken over the years and the changes in policy (the mistakes in judgment
if you will) that resulted in the present situation.
Daniel Ellsberg, a senior research associate
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International
Studies, worked on the project. What resulted was a “47-volume history,
consisting of approximately 3,000 pages of narrative and 4,000 pages of
appended documents.”
The work took 18 months to complete. About
the time it was finished, a new president, Richard Nixon, was in office.
“Ellsberg had been an ardent early supporter
of the U.S. role in Indochina (and this country’s assistance to South Vietnam
in its fight with North Vietnam),” the article stated, “but, by the project’s
end, had become seriously opposed to U.S. involvement. He felt compelled to
reveal the nature of U.S. participation and leaked major portions of the papers
to the press.”
Receiving a copy of the documents was The New York Times. The study, though, had been classified as
“top secret” by the federal government, meaning that possession as well as
publication would put the paper in a collision course with the feds.
After weighing the pros and cons, mainly
the public’s right to know the findings of this study versus legitimate
national security issues (as opposed to government officials seeking to prevent
the revelation of embarrassing information) the newspaper began running a
planned series of articles based on the information. The first one appeared on
the front page on June 13, 1971.
“After the third daily installment appeared in the Times,
the Department of Justice obtained in U.S. District
Court a temporary restraining order against further publication of the
classified material, contending that further public dissemination of the
material would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to U.S. national defense
interests,” the Encyclopaedia Britannica
article noted.
“The Times—joined
by The Washington Post, which also was in possession of the
documents—fought the order through the courts for the next 15 days, during
which time publication of the series was suspended,” the article continued. “On
June 30, 1971, in what is regarded as one of the most significant prior-restaraint cases in history, the U.S.
Supreme Court in a 6–3 decision freed the newspapers to resume publishing the
material. The court held that the government had failed to justify restraint of
publication.”
While it’s difficult to summarize all of
the information contained in these papers, the overall effect was to show that the
facts on how this nation got involved in the conflict and what was actually
occurring differed from the “official version.”
In particular, the incident in the Gulf of
Tonkin when North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly made a deliberate attack
on the naval destroyer, the USS Maddox, wasn’t as clear cut as President Lyndon
Johnson and others in his administration had portrayed it. It was later learned,
according to the study, that the incident had occurred shortly after South
Vietnamese gun boats staged a raid on the North Vietnamese coast and the North
Vietnamese were possibly responding to this raid when they came upon the
Maddox—which happened to be nearby.
President
Johnson called it “open aggression high seas” and used as the basis for his
request to Congress that members approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving
the President broad powers to wage the war and take “all necessary measures to
repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent
further aggression.”
In talking to Congressional leaders the raid
was not mentioned. Maybe, President Johnson believed an unprovoked attack had
occurred. But the study also revealed in that
President Johnson “began planning to wage overt war in 1964, a full year before
the depth of U.S. involvement was publically revealed.”
Eventually, over a half-million American
soldiers were sent to that Southeast Asia nation and the bombing campaign was
widened to include targets in North Vietnam.
As the Encyclopaedia
Britannica article pointed out and as I recall, “The release of the
Pentagon Papers stirred nationwide and, indeed, international controversy
because it occurred after several years of growing dissent over the legal and moral justification of
intensifying U.S. actions in Vietnam.”
To critics of the war, the information from
the Papers was vindication. Nixon and his staff held a different perspective.
“The disclosures and their continued
publication were embarrassing to the administration of President Richard Nixon who was preparing to seek reelection in 1972,” the article stated.
Nixon had earlier in his first term authorized
a covert operation that widened the war to include Cambodia and intensified the
bombing campaign. He was using some of the same rationales for continuing
American involvement as had Johnson. The revealing of this series of “facts”
was not in his interest.
I remember as I read The Pentagon Papers of being upset, but also having a feeling of
disbelief. Here was hard evidence that the public had been misled and
misinformed by governmental officials during the Johnson Administration; a practice
that apparently had been continued by Nixon and his staff.
I
thought about the handful of people who had initially, and bravely questioned
the build-up and of how they had suffered from intense criticism; their
patriotism questioned and the reasoning they put forth arbitrarily dismissed.
Later, as more and more mainstream
politicians advocated a change in policy—including Senators Eugene McCarthy and
Robert Kennedy in their 1968 Presidential campaigns—the public mood began to
shift and support for the war started to ebb. But even so, the divide between
the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ grew wider and passions became more intense.
The right of dissent, of free speech, and
of press freedom came under attack during this period—led by Nixon’s first vice
president, Spiro Agnew.
But in fairness, many of those opposed to
the war—the more vocal and hard-edged partisans—were not civil in their remarks
and dealings. They became increasingly intolerant in their attitude towards those
on the other side of the divide as well as allies in the cause who did not
march lock-step with them or fully share their positions.
The New York Times took a lot of
criticism for its decision to print the Pentagon
Papers, but also gained a lot of praise.
The
irony is that the Nixon Administration, upset with the publication of the Papers, took measures to discredit
Daniel Ellsberg. Their reasoning, I suspect, was that the public—finding fault
with the messenger--might question “the facts” in those documents. The ‘Red
Herring’ approach, if you will.
That effort, followed by other dirty
tricks, led to the break-in of the Democratic Party’s national office in the
Watergate Hotel during the 1972 campaign. As many know, a cover-up occurred;
one that involved the President himself. The details of this illegal activity
eventually came to public notice, not from any governmental official, but from
the diligent work and courage of journalists and their newspapers and TV
network news divisions.
Many people of my generation still harbor
strong opinions of the Vietnam War—one way or the other. That emotional residue
lingers despite all of the years that have gone by; despite all of the water
that’s gone over the dam. I suppose it’ll remain until the last of us who
remember those times has all gone.
But
when all is said and done, we—whatever our viewpoint on the matter--had the
‘right to know’ the “facts,” not some manufactured spin; not some alternate
version tailored to suit a political position. It was true then, it still is.
Thanks to a newspaper, that right was honored.
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