The Pentagon Papers
How It's Used
"We may one day feel the same about Guantánamo and the Patriot Act, but not all wrongs are immediately remedied. In 1971, Attorney General John Mitchell tried to use the contentious Espionage Act of 1917 (which, largely forgotten, had never been revoked) to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers. It is still law today." —no author, "Books Briefly Noted," The New Yorker, October 18, 2004 in a review of Geoffrey R. Stone's Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. "Ever since the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, which involved leaked information about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, leaks have become a prominent feature of the Washington landscape." —Gabriel Schoenfeld, "The Bush Secrecy Myth," The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2008. "The late Erwin Griswold, who argued the government's case as solicitor general in the notorious Pentagon Papers trial, later admitted that claiming executive privilege had been a mistake. Rather than to prevent a grave danger to national security, he confessed in a 1989 op-ed in The Washington Post, the claim had been raised to cover up a government embarrassment." —Ronald Goldfarb, "State Secrets? Let the Court Weigh In," The Washington Post, February 22, 2009, p. B02. "When a young Providence Journal reporter was poised to reveal the all-male membership of the Narragansett Lions Club last year, it didn’t sit well with at least one member. As the subsequent story recounted, Democratic Town Committee chairman Gene Wills visited the ProJo’s Wakefield news bureau and warned the scribe not to mention the absence of women, implying that doing so might cost him his job and diminish advertising for his employer.
"Wills probably didn’t know that the target of his message, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the 25-year-old son of New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., is part of a publishing dynasty that has faced requests to suppress information in matters ranging from the Bay of Pigs to the Pentagon Papers." —Ian Donnis, "Quietly building his journalistic credentials in Rhode Island, 25-year-old Arthur Gregg Sulzberger could one day vie for the top job at the New York Times," The Boston Phoenix, February 2, 2006. Links Related on eAlmanac
The First Amendment
The Pentagon
Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Pentagon Papers
Product Links
"The Pentagon Papers" by George Herring
"Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by Daniel Ellsberg
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