The New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Department of Defense study leaked by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, exposing how successive U.S. administrations had misled Congress and the public about the scope and prospects of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration sought a court injunction to halt publication, triggering a landmark First Amendment battle that reached the Supreme Court within weeks.
Daniel Ellsberg spent nights photocopying thousands of pages inside a Los Angeles think tank, sneaking the classified Pentagon study out folder by folder past guards who never checked what he was carrying. A former Marine and Defense Department analyst who had grown disillusioned with the Vietnam War after years of firsthand exposure to its planning, Ellsberg believed the American public deserved to know what he already knew: that the government had lied, repeatedly and systematically, about the war's chances of success and the true scale of U.S. involvement.
When the New York Times published its first story on June 13, 1971, under reporter Neil Sheehan's byline, the revelations detailed secret bombing campaigns, rigged assessments, and a pattern of deception spanning the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Nixon White House, though largely unimplicated in the specific findings, viewed the leak as a dangerous precedent and rushed to federal court, obtaining an unprecedented injunction to halt further publication after just three installments.
The case, New York Times Co. v. United States, reached the Supreme Court within two weeks. On June 30, the Court ruled 6-3 that the government had failed to justify prior restraint, allowing publication to resume. The episode cemented the press's constitutional shield against government censorship and, combined with the later Watergate scandal, badly damaged the credibility of the Nixon administration even before its own crimes came to light.
Key people: Daniel Ellsberg, Neil Sheehan, Richard Nixon