Their 7,000 pages chronicled, in cold, bureaucratic language, how the United States got itself mired in a long, costly war in a small Southeast Asian country of questionable strategic importance. Officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” the papers filled 47 volumes, covering the administrations of President Franklin D. The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents - which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.ĭaniel Ellsberg, an analyst on the study, eventually leaked portions of the report to The New York Times, which published excerpts in 1971. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. Lies like McNamara’s were the rule, not the exception, throughout America’s involvement in Vietnam. “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers.” “The VC have the initiative,” the information said. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was “bad and deteriorating” in the South. “In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men,” he said. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.
McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.īrandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S.
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