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1971. The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers.
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I doubt many here know what the heck the Pentagon Papers were, so I thought I'd expand on this a bit, as it's really a fascinating little nugget of history.
In the late 60s, America was of course tied up in the Vietnam War. The Defense Department commissioned a comprehensive review of US-Vietnam relations from '45 to '67. The review was completed in '68. One of the contributors to the report was Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst with the Rand Corporation.
The report was classified top secret, and was not intended for publication or distribution.
In 1971, the New York Times began running excerpts from the report on its front page. The revelations caused a furor. A number of items in the report clearly showed that many senior politicians, including candidate LBJ and then President LBJ, had lied to the public about matters relating to Vietnam. The Nixon Administration brought a lawsuit seeking to stop publication by the NYT, a case that quickly rose to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Administration also threatened anyone involved with felony treason under the 1917 Espionage Act.
To ensure open debate, then Democratic Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record, where they enjoyed absolute privilege under the Constitution.
The upshot of this massive furor was a Supreme Court case that found expansively in favor of freedom of speech rights by newspaper publications and an American public that turned even more viciously on the Vietnam War.
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Originally Posted by H.R. Haldemann, to Nixon, in the White House Tapes
To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong. |
In response to the leaks John Ehrlichman would form what would become known as the "White House Plumbers", who would then play a prominent role in the Watergate fiasco.
Ellsburg, meanwhile, got off scot free after being indicted. In its absolute zeal to erase him, the federal government, under intense pressure from the White House, had managed to break every rule ever written for prosecutorial conduct, including illegal wiretaps and breaking into the offices of Ellsburg's psychiatrist in an attempt to find his file. The judge tossed the case out on its ear.
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Originally Posted by United States District Court Judge Matthew Byrne, Jr.
The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case
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