The Secret is Out

摘要

In June 1971, the New York Times published the first installment of a classified history of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. Commissioned, for reasons that remain obscure, by the outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND analyst who played a part in crafting the study, to Neil Sheehan, a reporter at the Times who believed that the Pentagon Papers demonstrated that U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was built on a "tissue of lies." Publication of the Pentagon Papers marked a turning point not only in the history of the Vietnam War, undermining the public's faith in government and support for the war effort, but also in the historiography of the war, providing scholars with a documented chronology of the key turning points in U.S. involvement in the conflict. The impact of the Pentagon Papers has long been a part of America's cultural landscape and its contents are an important element in the history of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia.