📷 One Morning, March 1968
An American company entered the small village of My Lai in Quang Ngai province, Vietnam. Over four hours that morning, several hundred villagers died. They were old men, women, and children. None were armed. The army reported the operation as a success and buried it for over a year. The truth came out in November 1969, after a journalist dug it up.
This was where the war had arrived. People already sensed it. Something had gone wrong.
🏫 The People Who Took to the Streets
The resistance began in the classroom. In the spring of 1965, professors and students gathered at campus after campus to debate the war through the night. Soon those voices reached the street.
On November 27, 1965, twenty-five thousand people gathered before the Washington Monument. The pediatrician Benjamin Spock stood at the podium. Few in America did not know his book on raising children. Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King, spoke beside him. The folk singers Joan Baez and Phil Ochs sang. The march passed the White House and went on to the Capitol.
With each passing year the numbers grew. The protests became not the affair of one city but of the whole country.
🕵️ The Answer Already Chosen
The government had already chosen its answer. Johnson believed a foreign hand had to lie behind all these people. He demanded that the CIA produce proof that Moscow or Beijing was funding the protests. It was less an order to find than an order to prove. So, in the fall of 1967, a secret program to surveil American citizens began. It broke the charter that confined the CIA to foreign targets.
Agents infiltrated the universities. The names of antiwar figures piled into an index of hundreds of thousands. The FBI did the same. The army held files on a hundred thousand civilians.
But however hard they searched, no foreign hand appeared. The CIA reported to the White House: no communist funding, no direction, no evidence. Johnson would not accept it. Nixon took his place and asked again for the same report. The answer was the same. So was the refusal to accept it. Only the surveillance went on, until 1974. Helms later admitted that the sweeping watch had been meant to convince the president that no foreign hand existed. The answer had been there from the start. Power simply did not want it.
📂 The Record in the Safe
In that same period, one man was doing something else. He was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. By 1965 at the latest, he had concluded the war could not be won. Yet he kept that judgment to himself.
In June 1967, he secretly commissioned a study. He wanted to leave a record of how America had come to this war. He told neither President Johnson nor Secretary of State Rusk. A sitting defense secretary, behind his own government's back, dissected the failure of the war his government was fighting.
Thirty-six analysts worked for eighteen months. The result was forty-seven volumes, seven thousand pages. It was finished in early 1969, and no one read it. The record that would later be called the Pentagon Papers sat locked in the safes of a few officials.
⛓️ The Young Man Who Chose Prison
Among those who worked on the study was Daniel Ellsberg. He was one of the very few to read the whole report. He had once been a hawk who supported American involvement.
In August 1969, at a meeting, he heard a speech by Randy Kehler, a young man who had refused the draft. Kehler said calmly that he would soon go to prison. He was glad, he said, that his friends were already there. Ellsberg left the auditorium, sank to the floor of an empty restroom, and wept for over an hour. What changed him was not the words but the life behind them.
That fall, Ellsberg began copying the documents with his colleague Anthony Russo. First he tried Congress. He handed the papers to senators like Fulbright and McGovern, but none would act. On March 2, 1971, he gave forty-three of the forty-seven volumes to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
📰 June 13, 1971
On Sunday morning, two articles ran side by side on the front page of The New York Times. One was a photograph of the wedding of Nixon's daughter Tricia. The other was the first report on the Pentagon Papers. At first Nixon dismissed it. The lies it recorded belonged to his predecessors. That indifference did not last.
📜 A War Built on Lies
What the documents revealed was twofold. First, the war had been built on lies. Second, the government had kept sending soldiers while knowing it could not be won.
America had quietly widened its operations. It bombed Cambodia and Laos and raided the coast of North Vietnam. None of it was reported. The documents held the government's own judgment that bombing the North would not break the enemy's will.
Why America was there was written down too. In 1965 a memo by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton set the aims in numbers. Seventy percent was to avoid a humiliating defeat. Twenty percent was to keep South Vietnam out of Chinese hands. Only ten percent was for the South Vietnamese themselves. The point was not to help a friend, but to save face.
🗳️ The Lies of Four Presidents
The lies had four owners.
Truman hid the beginning. From 1950, America funded France's colonial war. The involvement was earlier than anyone knew.
Eisenhower broke a promise. The 1954 Geneva Accords set reunification elections two years on. If held, Ho Chi Minh would surely win. America saw to it that the elections never came. It spoke of self-determination and with its hands held it back.
Kennedy knew of an ally's death beforehand. In November 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president America had installed, was toppled by a coup and killed. The documents showed the Kennedy administration had known of the plan in advance.
Johnson's lie was the sharpest. On the 1964 campaign trail he said again and again, "We seek no wider war." He promised, "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." He cast his opponent as the one who wanted to bomb. But the plans to bomb North Vietnam had been drawn up long before the election. Even the draft of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been written months before the Tonkin incident, waiting for a pretext.
⚖️ The Hand That Tried to Stop It
The government had to stop it. The day after the report, Attorney General John Mitchell demanded it cease. When the New York Times refused, he won an injunction, and after the third article the reporting stopped. It was the first time the federal government had barred a newspaper in advance in the name of security.
But Ellsberg had already spread copies in many places. On June 18, The Washington Post took it up. When the government blocked one, another broke the story. In the end nineteen newspapers held the documents. Stopping one was hopeless from the start.
The case reached the Supreme Court quickly. On June 30, 1971, the Court ruled six to three against the government. It had not met the burden to justify prior restraint. Hugo Black wrote that freedom of the press is protected for the governed, not the governors, and that those in power must endure a press they find uncomfortable.
Having failed to stop it by law, the government changed its method. The White House assembled a covert unit, called the "Plumbers" for sealing leaks. They broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to find his weaknesses. The same men later entered the Watergate building. It emerged that Nixon had approved it. In August 1974, he resigned. The hand that tried to stop it brought down the one who tried.
🌫️ Afterward
The paths of the commissioner and the leaker diverged.
McNamara was long silent. He left the Pentagon in 1968 for the World Bank. When the study he had commissioned arrived at his office, he said he did not want to see it. He wrote "we were wrong, terribly wrong" only in 1995. He died in 2009.
Ellsberg did not stay silent. His charges were dismissed in 1973 over the government's crimes. He stood all his life on the side of resistance and disclosure. He defended the whistleblowers who came after. He died in 2023.
One man buried the truth, and one man drew it out. The same seven thousand pages settled on two lives with opposite weight.
This essay draws on David Rudenstine, The Day the Presses Stopped (1996); Sanford Ungar, The Papers and the Papers (1972); Robert McNamara, In Retrospect (1995); and the case New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
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