Pentagon Papers

These secret US Government documents, illegally copied by Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, were leaked with the first extracts appearing in The New York Times on June 13, 1971. Only on the exact day of the fortieth anniversary of this landmark publication, June 13, 2011, were the entire Pentagon Papers declassified with no redactions and released online. It took until 1995 for Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary from 1960 to 1968, to admit publicly to “deep regrets” that the US “ever got involved or that I supported our involvement”. On December 17, 1965, he secretly told President Lyndon B. Johnson that a military solution was “not certain — one out of three or one in two. Ultimately, we must find… a diplomatic solution”. The military campaign continued with further government mendacity, most notably under President Richard Nixon, more covered-up war crimes, and by 1975 a death toll of almost 60,000 Americans and over three million Vietnamese, two million of them civilians.