The Pentagon Papers, in their original form, were not designed to be a public document. The study had been commissioned in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had by that point begun to entertain private doubts about whether the war he had spent the previous five years escalating could actually be won. McNamara assembled a 36-person Vietnam Study Task Force, drawing on military officers, civilian Defense Department employees, RAND analysts, and academic researchers, and gave them a list of approximately 100 questions to investigate using the classified documentary record of the United States government’s decision-making on Indochina from the end of the Second World War to 1968. The task force took approximately 18 months to produce the resulting 7,000-page report, which was completed in late 1968, delivered to McNamara and his successor Clark Clifford in early 1969, classified Top Secret, and then placed in safes in a small number of offices where it was expected to remain indefinitely. Fifteen copies of the study were produced. One of them sat at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where Daniel Ellsberg — who had personally contributed several months of work to the study in 1967 — had cleared access to read it.
According to Britannica’s biographical summary of Daniel Ellsberg and his transformation from Vietnam War analyst to Pentagon Papers leaker, Ellsberg’s political evolution between 1967 and 1969 was substantial. He had begun his career as a fervent Cold Warrior — a Harvard-trained economist, a former Marine Corps officer, a RAND nuclear-war planner who had spent his twenties and early thirties believing, in his own later description, that working for the president was a “knightly calling” that might occasionally require lying to the public for reasons of state. The two years he spent in South Vietnam between 1965 and 1967, working for retired General Edward Lansdale’s State Department counter-insurgency programme, had changed his view. He had come to believe, by his return to RAND in 1967, that the war was unwinnable. Reading the full Pentagon Papers in 1969 — in particular, reading the cumulative record of what successive presidents had known about the war’s prospects, what they had told the public, and the substantial gap between the two — convinced him that the documentary record itself was the most important thing he could possibly contribute to the antiwar movement. In October 1969, with the help of his former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, he began secretly photocopying the 7,000-page study.
Eighteen months of after-hours Xerox
The mechanics of the copying operation, in 1969, were not what they would be today. Photocopiers were industrial machines, primarily found in offices, and were slow — a single page took several seconds, and the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers therefore required, in cumulative running time, several full nights of continuous machine operation to duplicate. The volumes were classified Top Secret and could not be removed from RAND’s premises without being signed out. As detailed in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Ellsberg Initiative archive of Ellsberg’s papers and the Pentagon Papers operation, the copying happened primarily at the after-hours offices of an advertising agency on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, run by Russo’s then-girlfriend Lynda Sinay, who allowed Ellsberg and Russo unrestricted access to her office’s Xerox machine in exchange for keeping quiet about what they were copying. Ellsberg’s two children, Robert (then 13) and Mary (then 10), occasionally helped with the collation. The full set of documents was duplicated multiple times across the late autumn and winter of 1969. The operation took, by Ellsberg’s later account, several months of consistent night work to complete.
The first 18 months after the photocopying were spent, in retrospect, on a sustained but ultimately unsuccessful effort to release the documents through the United States Senate. Ellsberg had hoped that if a sitting senator read substantial portions of the Pentagon Papers into the official Senate record, the contents would become legally publishable by any newspaper without risk of prosecution. He approached Senator J. William Fulbright (chair of the Foreign Relations Committee), Senator George McGovern, Senator Charles Mathias, and several others. Each declined. None was willing to take the political risk associated with reading classified material into the congressional record during an ongoing war. Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon’s National Security Advisor and who Ellsberg had previously regarded as sympathetic, also declined to engage. By the early months of 1971, Ellsberg had concluded that the Senate route was closed. McGovern, in declining the request, suggested that Ellsberg take the documents to either the New York Times or the Washington Post.
What happened after publication
The New York Times published its first article on the Pentagon Papers on 13 June 1971. The Times had been working with the material for approximately three months by that point — Neil Sheehan and a small team of reporters had sequestered themselves in a block of rooms at the New York Hilton in March 1971 and spent two months reading, summarising, and selecting excerpts from the documents while the Times’ senior editorial leadership debated whether publication of classified material on an ongoing war would result in criminal prosecution of the newspaper itself. As reported in a History.com summary of the Pentagon Papers leak and its legal aftermath, the Times decided to publish on 10 June 1971 against the explicit advice of its outside law firm. The first article appeared three days later. The Nixon administration obtained a federal court injunction against the Times on 15 June, forcing the paper to halt publication after three instalments. The Washington Post — which Ellsberg had also provided copies to as a backup — began publishing its own series on 18 June. The Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Christian Science Monitor, and approximately 15 other newspapers followed in rapid succession. By 26 June, the case had reached the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favour of the newspapers on 30 June 1971, less than three weeks after the original publication. The decision in New York Times Co. v. United States remains, as described in the Miller Center’s analysis of Nixon and the Pentagon Papers and their broader political consequences, one of the most important First Amendment rulings in American constitutional history — a foundational defence of the press’s right to publish classified government material in the public interest. The political consequences for Nixon, however, only began with the Supreme Court ruling. Within weeks of the original leak, the White House had created a secret unit named the “Plumbers” — Egil Krogh, David Young, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy, supervised by John Ehrlichman — with an initial mandate to discredit Ellsberg by any means available. The Plumbers broke into the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on 3 September 1971, looking for material to use against him. They found nothing. The same group of operatives, expanded and rebranded, broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington on 17 June 1972. The break-in was discovered. The cover-up unravelled across 1973 and 1974. President Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974. Ellsberg’s own trial, which had begun in January 1973, was dismissed by Judge William Matthew Byrne on 11 May 1973 after evidence of the psychiatrist break-in and other government misconduct became public. Ellsberg was a free man. He lived another 50 years, was arrested approximately 80 times at antiwar protests, wrote four books, died of pancreatic cancer in June 2023 at the age of 92, and remains, more than half a century after the original publication of the documents he had spent 18 months photocopying in an after-hours advertising agency office on Melrose Avenue, one of the more consequential single private citizens in 20th-century American political history.
