These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security Archive40 Years Later—Full Declassification of “One of the Worst-Kept Secrets in History”
The upcoming final release of the Pentagon Papers on June 13 actually may contain new information not previously published, according to expert analysis and documentation posted today by the National Security Archive. This new material would go beyond the diplomatic volumes that the U.S. government first declassified in part in the late 1970s.
The public release next week of the full Pentagon Papers—40 years after their leaked publication in the media—is a welcome event on many levels: including closing a bizarre chapter in the annals of U.S. government secrecy practices while opening another window into one of the pivotal episodes of modern world history, the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers are a milestone document in American political history both for their contents and for the legal and political battles that raged over the principles involved in their revelation and the tactics to which the Nixon administration resorted in its efforts to neutralize the leak. In addition, in and of themselves, the contents of the Pentagon Papers have informed histories of the American war in Vietnam for two generations and are likely to return to the fore today with the opening of material previously suppressed in the study
In anticipation of the June 13 public release, the National Security Archive here posts important background materials that users of the newly-declassified portions of the Pentagon Papers—formally known as United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967—will find helpful.
The United States Government is declassifying and releasing the Pentagon Papers on the 40th anniversary of the leak of these same documents by then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg, news of which first appeared in the New York Times of June 13, 1971. In actuality the collection is slightly more than 42 years old, having been turned over to the secretary of defense on January 15, 1969, although most of the work on the Papers had been completed at least a year earlier.
The study United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967 was assembled by a special task force within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Robert S. McNamara ordered compilation of the study late in 1966, and it was assembled on a highly-classified basis by a group under DOD analyst Leslie H. Gelb, who was just 29 years old at the time. (Note 1) Some thirty-six analysts, including Ellsberg, worked on the report, which was intended to illuminate the sequence of steps through which the United States had mired itself in the Vietnam War, and the factors which prevented progress in that conflict and inhibited ending it by means of negotiation. Analysts individually compiled papers and assembled 15 collections of documents. In the end the main body of the study—the portion leaked—was arranged in 43 volumes comprising 4,000 pages of narrative and 3,000 pages of documents. The four “Diplomatic Volumes,” which were written (and released) separately, added another 800 pages.
Continuing secrecy and arbitrary action have marked the long march to the opening of the Pentagon Papers. U.S. Government directives on information classification have set standards for the maximum interval documents can be protected. Only exceptionally sensitive information is supposed to be protected beyond those periods. The Pentagon Papers ceased being sensitive in 1975, when the Vietnam War ended. Some would argue they ceased being sensitive almost four years earlier, when the leak occurred. The Pentagon Papers have nevertheless been kept secret far beyond any of the standards for information protection (The New York Times called the papers “one of the worst-kept secrets in history” (Note 2))—and despite the end of any sensitive national security interest in their continuing classification—at a daily cost to American taxpayers. Through all this time Americans could read most of the Pentagon Papers’ contents in any of several published editions of the leaked materials.
Secrecy persisted in the face of numerous efforts over the years to open the materials. The federal bureaucracy was given multiple opportunities to declassify them on the basis of requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the separate system for Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR). The National Security Archive is aware of FOIA requests in both the 1980s and 1990s which somehow were “lost” in the bureaucracy—no doubt there were others. This researcher himself filed an MDR request for the Pentagon Papers early last decade. That request failed to move forward because the government itself had put the Pentagon Papers on the list of materials to be reviewed by an internal declassification initiative called the “Remote Access Capture” (RAC) program. The RAC review of the Pentagon Papers led to a dead end. The only declassification action taken on the Pentagon Papers over the four decades until today came on the four so-called Diplomatic Volumes, which were released in expurgated form in the mid-late 1970s to Morton Halperin, who had worked on the project in the Pentagon under McNamara, and later joined the ACLU. These volumes were published in 1983 in redacted form, with commentary, by Vietnam scholar George C. Herring. In 2003 the U.S. Government completely declassified the Diplomatic Volumes to the National Security Archive on the basis of an MDR request by this researcher.
This record led to the irony that the Diplomatic Volumes—which Dr. Ellsberg had protected when leaking the bulk of the study—were in the public domain while the Pentagon Papers that were in the open due to the leak remained secret.
Upon entering office, the Obama Administration encountered a backlog of over 400 million pages of still-secret documents that had also passed their reasonable expiration dates. Among other actions, it created the National Declassification Center to introduce uniformity into secrecy policy and issued orders that the backlog be eliminated. The release of the Pentagon Papers represents the most substantial achievement to date of the Obama Administration’s effort to reduce the mountain of no-longer useful secrets. The National Security Archive extends its appreciation to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for this action. We look forward to the opening of the remainder of these materials and others as well.
Our posting consists of both audiotapes and documents that are central to the larger story of the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon administration sought to restrain the press from covering the substantive content of the Pentagon Papers. Here we post audiofiles and transcripts of the telephone conversations in which Mr. Nixon and his associates determined to seek that prior restraint. The resulting court cases against the New York Times and the Washington Post went to the Supreme Court. We are posting a set of the legal briefs that were filed with the Court along with the audiotape of the argument before the Supreme Court. The Government’s claims as to the damage to U.S. national security alleged to be caused by the revelation of the Pentagon Papers were presented in an affidavit from Solicitor General Erwin W. Griswold. We post that memorandum plus an analysis of the specific allegations written by Archive senior fellow John Prados.
In addition, we post the declassified text of a little-known complement to the Pentagon Papers that was compiled at the Department of State. As a result of its participation in creating the Diplomatic Volumes of the Pentagon Papers, the State Department was aware of this secret Pentagon project. Secretary of State Dean Rusk took the opportunity to order a similar retrospective review of the handling of Vietnam intelligence by its Bureau of Intelligence and Research. This broad study had a stature similar to that of the Pentagon Papers and deserves to be examined alongside it. The State Department Papers never leaked and thus are hardly known. They will be completely new to most readers.The Secret Briefs and the Secret Evidence.
Expert commentary from Archive analyst John Prados
Supreme Court Briefs and Opinions.
Streaming audio and transcripts
White House Telephone Conversations.
Streaming audio and transcripts
Memoirs.
Excerpts from Nixon, Kissinger and Haldeman Memoirs
Intelligence and Vietnam.
The Top Secret 1969 State Department Study
