12/25/2023 0 Comments Pentagon papersBy that time, Lyndon Johnson had declined to run for re-election, Richard Nixon had won the presidency, and another 27,000 Americans had become casualties in Vietnam.ĭoD employees and consultants such as RAND Corporation comprised the team which wrote the Pentagon Papers. McNamara resigned before the study was completed, and it was delivered to Clark Clifford, his successor, in 1969. What is known however is that he never informed his boss, President Lyndon Johnson (at least there is no record of his having done so), nor did he tell Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the study was being done. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, formerly an executive with the Ford Motor Company, commissioned a study of America’s history of involvement in Southeast Asia for reasons which remain unclear five decades later. The numbers of American dead increased daily, and equal time was given to the protests against the war, across America and around the world. The images they saw, of American boys dying, American aircraft being destroyed, Vietnamese children fleeing for their lives, Buddhist monks immolating themselves, were in stark contrast to the reassurances from the Johnson Administration that the United States was winning the war in Southeast Asia. Americans received a dose of news about Vietnam with their dinners each weeknight. There were three major television networks at the time, all of which broadcast a nightly news program every evening, and all of which gave liberal amounts of time to the fighting in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was America’s first televised war. Why the study was completed remains a subject of debate McNamara gave several reasons for why he initiated the Pentagon Papers without telling Johnson or Rusk. Dean Rusk, President Johnson, and McNamara in 1968. Here are some facts about the Pentagon Papers and the furor they caused. The released study, dubbed the Pentagon Papers by the press, was a bombshell, further widening the rift in American society over involvement in Vietnam, and over the conduct of the US government in general. In 1971 it was copied and leaked to The New York Times, revealing to the American public for the first time the level at which the US government had lied regarding the conduct of the war, the reasons for American involvement, and the fact that the United States had systematically enlarged the scope of the conflict. The study, which was conducted within the Pentagon and civilian contractor organizations, was classified as Top Secret. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense to Kennedy and Johnson, commissioned the Pentagon Papers as a comprehensive history of American involvement in Southeast Asia. He later revealed that he knew the American effort in Vietnam was doomed to fail and he wanted a documented record of what caused that failure to leave to future generations. Over the years McNamara’s claims about his motives for requesting the work changed. McNamara was a hawk regarding the United States involvement in the War in Vietnam and the study was commissioned as what he called an “encyclopedic history” of the Vietnam War. He also describes the complex interaction between the various forms of opposition to the war as it continued under Richard Nixon, and how the president's fury with Ellsberg's own act of dissent led to Watergate and to the added bonus - in addition to Ellsberg's own acquittal - of Nixon's resignation.In June 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara created a working group he designated as the Vietnam Study Task Force. He paints a striking picture of intelligent people persevering and tinkering with a war policy that could never be successful, given the inherent limitations of the U.S. The bulk of the book, however, is a candid and detailed account of Ellsberg's own involvement in the Pentagon's policymaking during the critical years of the Johnson administration and the early deliberations of the Nixon administration. Ellsberg draws attention to the need for public servants to guard against government mendacity and speak out against reckless policies instead of confining their doubts to safe internal channels. Ellsberg's memoir recounts the story of how he came to leak the Pentagon Papers (the history of the American intervention in Vietnam) to The New York Times in 1971 and how his subsequent trial unfolded.
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