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The release of the Pentagon Papers was a watershed moment in the history of media. In addition to its implications about the worldwide Cold War—as well as the Civil Rights movement in America and the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia—the affair provided a vivid, real-world example of the philosophical questions regarding the balance between a government’s ability to provide security and a free society’s right to information about that government.
Officially titled “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense,” the Pentagon Papers were a study conducted by the United States Department of Defense chronicling American political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945-1967. The study, completed in 1968, was highly classified and not meant for publication.
Daniel Ellsberg was a State Department diplomat who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. As a key contributor to the Pentagon Papers, he had the high level of clearance necessary to access the complete documents. After growing disillusioned with the conflict, Ellsberg and colleague Anthony Russo secretly made copies of the papers in late 1969.
After failing throughout 1970 to convince sympathetic US Senators to release the papers on the Senate floor—because Senators could not be prosecuted for anything said on-the-record before the Senate—Ellsberg leaked the papers to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
After much legal battling between the US Attorney General and the Times and the Washington Post, the US Supreme court ruled in favor of the two newspapers on June 30, 1971, allowing them to continue publishing the Pentagon Papers.79 The US government published its unclassified version of the Pentagon Papers about three months later.
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In the middle of a war, did the American public have the right to know the contents of the Pentagon Papers? Why or why not? Was there room for compromise between the issues of security and the right to know? What are some recent examples of security vs right to know issues? Are there any hypothetical situations where security would be so paramount that the right to know should be abrogated? If so, what would they be? |
79 Gold, Susan Dudley. The Pentagon Papers. p. 116-118
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