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First Amendment
Right to a Free Press
(fists holding items that are used to create media)
The United States may not revoke
Or abridge a citizen’s rights to
protest, speech, religion, or free press
Behind the Race to Publish the TopSecret Pentagon Papers
In 1971, Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter in Washington, scored the
scoop of a lifetime.
Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst, had become disillusioned with the
Vietnam War and decided to leak a topsecret history of the
decisionmaking behind the conflict. Frustrated by his attempts to have
lawmakers draw attention to the cache, now known as the Pentagon
Papers, Mr. Ellsberg turned to The Times and, later, almost 20 other
newspapers.
The saga, which had dramatic consequences for press freedom and the presidency,
is the subject of the movie “The Post,” which will be released in some
theaters on Friday. Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl
Streep and Tom Hanks, the film depicts the race at The Washington Post
to catch up to Mr. Sheehan’s exclusive.
The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by Robert McNamara, the
Defense Secretary at the time. The study, written by multiple authors,
including Mr. Ellsberg, offered a detailed history of the decisionmaking
behind the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia. It also revealed
the Johnson administration’s lies about that involvement.
Here’s how Mr. Ellsberg got the Pentagon Papers to the public, first through The
Times and later The Post and others.
There, a man named Randy Kehler gave a stirring talk about resisting and
preparing to be jailed. Devastated by the speech, Mr. Ellsberg escaped to
a men’s room where he remained, crying, for more than an hour.
“Then it was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open,” he
wrote. “But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.”
The phrase “we are eating our young” kept entering Mr. Ellsberg’s mind, according
to the memoir. That evening, he realized that he had the power to do
something.
A few weeks later, on the night of Oct. 1, he opened the safe in his office at the
RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institution, and began sneaking
out portions of the 7,000page, topsecret report, which he photocopied
page by page, night after night.
Mr. Ellsberg spent much of 1970 trying to get sympathetic lawmakers to publicize
the report, but by early 1971, he had decided that the news media was a
better option. At the suggestion of the lawmakers and others, Mr.
Ellsberg turned to The Times.
“Only The Times might publish the entire study, and it had the prestige to carry it
through,” he wrote in his memoir.
Mr. Ellsberg said he had worked with Mr. Sheehan before, having leaked topsecret
news to him in 1968.
So, late on March 2, 1971, Mr. Ellsberg called Mr. Sheehan at his home in
Washington and asked for a place to stay. When Mr. Ellsberg arrived, Mr.
Sheehan showed him to the den, and the two men talked through the
night about the war and the Pentagon Papers, according to the memoir.
The Times races to publish
After a few weeks of discussions, the pair arranged to transport copies of the
documents to New York. They were first stored in the Manhattan
apartment of the paper’s foreign editor, James L. Greenfield, who
described the episode in the foreword to the book “The Pentagon Papers:
The Secret History of the Vietnam War.”
Gerald Gold, an assistant foreign editor at the time, got the team a suite at the New
York Hilton Hotel on Avenue of the Americas to use as a makeshift
office. There, he, Mr. Sheehan and Allan M. Siegal, also an assistant
foreign editor, got to work. The adjoining rooms were rented for the staff
to sleep in, and other writers joined the effort, including the veteran
Vietnam reporters Hedrick Smith, E. W . (Ned) Kenworthy and Fox
Butterfield, according to Mr. Greenfield.
“Together they made sure that every sentence written corresponded to a reference
in one of the documents,” he wrote. “Adding one’s own reporting was
unacceptable.”
When the newspaper’s outside law firm, Lord Day & Lord, learned that all 7,000
pages were classified, it warned The Times against publishing them,
refused to represent the paper, and nearly told the Justice Department of
what was coming, according to Mr. Greenfield.
The first story is released
On June 13, 1971, after weeks of diligent preparation, Mr. Sheehan introduced
readers to what the documents revealed.
The story appeared atop the front page of The Times that Sunday, though it was
sandwiched among three other pieces: one on the wedding of President
Richard M. Nixon’s daughter, another on the New York City budget, and
one on tensions between India and Pakistan.
Here is how readers learned about the topsecret documents:
“A massive study of how the United States went to war in Indochina,
conducted by the Pentagon three years ago,
demonstrates that four administrations progressively
developed a sense of commitment to a
non‑Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the
North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration
with this effort — to a much greater extent than their
public statements acknowledged at the time.”
The Times is widely praised for revealing what the Pentagon Papers contained, but
it was not the first to report on their existence. Months earlier, Thomas
Oliphant of The Boston Globe had reported that the few men who had
read the report in full all supported withdrawing from the war.
The administration fights back
The next day, The Times published its second article on the documents — and
heard from an angry Nixon administration.
In a telegram that night, John N. Mitchell, the United States attorney general, asked
The Times to stop publishing information from the topsecret report,
arguing that the newspaper was in violation of a law prohibiting
disclosure of government secrets.
“Further publication of information of this character will cause irreparable injury to
the defense interests of the United States,” he said, according to a
contemporaneous Times report on his letter.
The Times refused and the federal government sued the paper. A federal judge then
issued a temporary restraining order barring the paper from publishing anything
further. The Times complied, but fought to continue the series.
The Washington Post jumps in
When The Times published its first story that Sunday, The Washington Post found
itself with the unenviable task of writing a story sourced completely to a
competitor, according to Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Post at the time.
“The Post did not have a copy, and we found ourselves in the humiliating position
of having to rewrite the competition. Every other paragraph of the Post story had to
include some form of the words ‘according to The New York Times,’ blood —
visible only to us — on every word,” Mr. Bradlee later wrote of the episode.
But Mr. Bradlee’s frustration with what he described as The Times’s “blockbuster”
exclusive would be shortlived.
On Wednesday, Mr. Ellsberg reached out through an intermediary to Ben H.
Bagdikian, The Post’s national editor and a former RAND Corporation colleague,
according to Mr. Ellsberg’s memoir. That night, Mr. Bagdikian flew to Boston.
On Thursday morning, Mr. Bagdikian flew back with a pair of firstclass seats, one
for himself and another for a copy of the Pentagon Papers, according to Mr.
Bradlee.
“With The Times silenced by the federal court in New York, we decided almost
immediately that we would publish a story the next morning, Friday, June 18,” Mr.
Bradlee wrote, adding that he had had to overcome the objections of The Post’s
lawyers.
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Bradlee got a call from William H. Rehnquist, the
assistant attorney general and future chief justice of the Supreme Court. Mr.
Rehnquist asked The Post to stop publishing information from the documents. Mr.
Bradlee refused and The Post, too, was dragged into a legal battle.
A Supreme Court victory
As The Post and The Times waged their legal war against the administration, Mr.
Ellsberg continued to leak the documents to newspapers across the country,
according to his memoir. In the end, he gave copies to nearly two dozen
newspapers.
On Friday, June 25, 1971, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It was argued
the next day and, on June 30, less than three weeks after The Times published its
first story on the Pentagon Papers, the court ruled in favor of The Times and The
Post, allowing them to continue publishing the material.
“In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the
newspapers nobly did that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do,”
Hugo L. Black, one of the justices, wrote in an opinion supporting the publications.
The ruling was a landmark decision for press freedom. It appeared to restrict the
government’s use of the legal concept “prior restraint” to censor stories before
publication. The decision did not, however, prevent federal officials from
continuing to try to limit speech in such ways.
The consequences of Mr. Ellsberg’s leak reverberated well beyond the court, too.
Furious about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Nixon created a team of
“plumbers” to prevent similar leaks in the future. The next year, the team broke
into the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party, setting off a scandal that would
end with the president’s resignation.
Synopsis of “Behind the Race to Publish the TopSecret Pentagon Papers” By
Niraj Chokshidec
In the year 1971, a reporter for The New York Times by the name of Neil
Sheehan had struck gold in the realm of news reporting. Former military analyst,
Daniel Ellsberg, had become disenchanted with the US’ involvement in the
Vietnamese Civil War. So Mr. Ellsberg did what any dissenting government official
would do, leak highly classified US military documents. First he went to
lawmakers to try and draw attention to the situation, but after his attempts failed,
he turned to public news outlets. The most prominent of these news sources to try
to publish these documents were The New York Times . After just a few weeks The
Times published an entire study of the documents, which contained a diagnosis on
how the USA had brought the war to Indochina as a whole. Then next day, Mr.
Sheehan had received a letter from the angry Mr. Nixon and his administration.
Later that evening the United States attorney general asked the New York Times to
stop publishing information on the secret documents, and few days later, The
Washington Post decided to join in and post news articles concerning the Pentagon
Papers as well. The Post and The Times refused the federal request to cut the
publication of these articles, but the news outlets refused, which consequently
caused the US to sue both of the news sources.
The news outlets both argued that the US’ efforts to stop the publication of
the articles was censoring the press and a violation of their First Amendment
rights. They said that the public deserves to know all that goes on within the
governmental sphere and that it was the press’ job to inform them. The Post and
The Times felt that they had to publish these documents to keep the masses
informed on what goes on inside the government and give them the chance to
speak out against them. Evidently the Supreme Court agreed with them because on
June 30th, five days into the case, the court ruled in favor of the news outlets.
Supreme Court justice Hugo L. Black even said, “In revealing the workings of
government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did which the
Founders hoped and trusted they would do.” This ruling was truly a landmark in
press freedom.
The article is a reflection of The First Amendment because it involves two
large news outlets battling for the right to publish sensitive US documents. The
article discussed a dispute between The New York Times and The Washington Post
versus the US Government and the main question is whether the censorship of
those documents was a violation of every US citizens right to free speech and free
press.