Today, journalists expect a Pulitzer for a snarky tweet. The Papers helped convince Americans the Vietnam War was wrong, their government could not be trusted, and The People informed by a free press could still have a say in things. United States, and the Times won the Pulitzer Prize. The Supreme Court on Jhanded down a victory for the First Amendment in New York Times Company v. In a legal battle too important to have been written first as a novel, the NYT fought back. history a federal judge had invoked prior restraint and shattered the First Amendment. A federal court ordered the Times to cease publication after an initial flurry of excerpts were printed, the first time in U.S. No one had ever published such classified documents before, and reporters feared prosecution under the Espionage Act. government history of the Vietnam War, to the Times. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret U.S. The anniversary is worth marking, for reasons sweeping and grand, and for reasons deeply personal. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.It was a humid June on the east coast 50 years ago when the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. He was indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of having stolen and held secret documents.ĭaniel Ellsberg: “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. There is a difference between what the President says and what the government actually does, and I have confidence that they are going to make the right decision, if they have all the facts.”Īnnouncer: Two days before the Supreme Court decision, Daniel Ellsberg, an MIT Senior Research Associate, surrendered to federal authorities in Boston and admitted giving the papers to the press. This is the same thing that's been going on over the last two-and-a-half years of this administration. You see I was being called a trigger-happy, warmonger, bomb happy, and all the time Johnson was saying, he would never sent American boys, I knew damn well he would.”Īnnouncer: Birch Bayh was one of the Senators who thought the publication of the Pentagon Papers was the right thing to do.īirch Bayh: “The existence of these documents, and the fact that they said one thing and the people were led to believe something else, is a reason we have a credibility gap today, the reason people don't believe the government. In fact, I knew about ten days before the Republican Convention. As I say, he knew at the time that American boys were going to be sent. It was the President's opponent, Barry Goldwater, who was an advocate of that very position.īarry Goldwater: “During the campaign, President Johnson kept reiterating that he would never send American boys to fight in Vietnam. One of the more enlightening facts disclosed by the papers was the point that the decisions to bomb North Vietnam was made by President Johnson before the 1964 elections. I just didn't feel there was any breach of national security, in the sense that we were giving secrets to the enemy.”Īnnouncer: The argument moved swiftly to the Supreme Court, which ruled six to three that the first amendment guarantee of a free press outweighed the government's claim to potential harm to national security. That people had the right to know.’ Times publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.Īrthur Ochs Sulzberger: “Newspapers, as our editorial said this morning, we're really a part of history that should have been made available, considerably longer ago. The Times said, ‘What was revealed, had to be revealed. decision making process on Vietnam policy, better known as the Pentagon Papers.Īfter the government said the publication of this material would cause irreparable injury to the defense interest of the United States, a federal judge ordered the Times to temporarily halt the publication of the papers. For on that day, the New York Times began publishing top secret, sensitive details, and documents from 47 volumes, that comprised the history of the U.S. Announcer: Patricia Nixon wedding was dutifully reported the next day in newspapers in all over the nation, but on that Sunday, June 13th, one paper had something on the front page that no other paper had.
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