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Lies were the foundation of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Four successive presidential administrations deceived the public, members of Congress, and those who served in the U.S. military about the costs of the war and the likelihood of success.

The government's self-serving rationale was later revealed in a 1965 document: 70% of the U.S. ambition was "to avoid a humiliating US defeat." Another goal was "to emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used."

The decades of deception began unraveling with the historic leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The papers, classified "top secret" and officially called the "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force," chronicle America's historic military loss, and "foreshadow the mind-set and miscalculations" that influenced America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decades later.

The leak was a watershed moment in 20th-century American history that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedom, the founding of the White House "plumbers" unit that would culminate in the Watergate break-in scandal, and President Richard Nixon's eventual resignation.

Perhaps an equally important legacy is that leaking information the government purports is classified can be an act of patriotism.

The leak
Leaking the papers to the press wasn't Daniel Ellsberg's first choice. Ellsberg, who had worked on the report, initially tried to convince several anti-war senators to enter the study into the Congressional Record so it might become public, or to hold hearings on the findings. But none did.

Ellsberg eventually determined that the only way for the public to see the report was to go to the press. And in March 1971, he began leaking portions of the study to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

The Times' first report on the Pentagon Papers appeared on its front page on June 13, 1971, right next to an article about the wedding of Nixon's daughter.

Nixon claimed he didn't read the first article, perhaps because the study concluded in 1968, a year before he took office. But the president, whose administration was already antagonistic toward the press, quickly became obsessed with the idea that it might lead to leaks that would reveal his own activities.
Supreme Court and the Espionage Act
The Times published two additional articles before the Nixon administration, citing vague national security concerns, asked the Supreme Court to issue a prior restraint injunction to prevent further publication.

In under two weeks, the case moved from a district court to an appeals court and, ultimately, to the Supreme Court. During this time, The Washington Post began publishing its own series on the Pentagon Papers, and the court agreed to hear the cases jointly.

The Nixon administration's hypocrisy towards the press throughout the Pentagon Papers trial is well explained in an affidavit submitted by Times' Washington bureau chief, Max Frankel.

Frankel noted that "the Government and its officials regularly and routinely misuse and abuse the 'classification' of information, either by imposing secrecy where none is justified or by retaining it long after the justification has become invalid, for simple reasons of political or bureaucratic convenience. To hide mistakes of judgment, to protect reputations of individuals, to cover up the loss and waste of funds, almost everything in government is kept secret for a time."

In other words, the root of the Nixon administration's anger was not that the secrets had been divulged but that they had not been divulged in a way advantageous to the president.

The court ruled 6-3 that publishing excerpts of the papers could continue. In so doing, it placed the First Amendment and press freedom over the government's classification claims.

The Nixon administration didn't stop after failing to censor the press. It also went after Ellsberg, charging him and his colleague Anthony Russo under the Espionage Act - not for leaking information to damage the United States, but for informing the public about the government's activities. It was the first time a source for a journalist had been charged under the law.

The administration also targeted the Times' Sheehan under the Espionage Act. It convened a grand jury and investigated the reporter for over a year, but, as former Times Vice Chairman and General Counsel James Goodale notes, the government had to abandon the case "thanks to the efforts of many First Amendment lawyers and the witnesses' outright refusal to testify." Unfortunately, the Sheehan grand jury records are still secret 50 years later.

Nixon's paranoia ultimately undermined the case against Ellsberg. He formed the "plumbers" unit to investigate and stop any leaks, and one of their first steps was burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for evidence.

Members of the unit later participated in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, which came to light during the Watergate investigation, as did the break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, forcing the judge to dismiss the case.

Ongoing secrecy
While much of the study was published in the early 1970s, secrecy surrounding the entire study persisted for four decades.

Agencies kept thousands of pages needlessly secret, refusing to respond to declassification requests about the material, even after the solicitor general who argued the case for the government before the court, Erwin Griswold, admitted that the case for secrecy was baseless.

"I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat," Griswold said, going on to note, "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another."

The secrecy was so nonsensical that when Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, tried to curate a historically accurate Watergate exhibit (which the Nixon Foundation complained was "unfair and distorted"), he was told that even the blue cover of the report was classified.

The full 7,000 pages weren't available in their entirety until the National Archives and Records Administration coordinated their release in 2011. Even then, NARA staffers had to spend months negotiating with "about a dozen government agencies" to declassify the remainder of the study.
The legacy
As monumental as the Pentagon Papers were, Times editor R. W. Apple argued that their release did not have an impact on the way "the government conducts its business."

Of the government's refusal to learn from past mistakes, Ellsberg said, "It seems to me that what the Pentagon Papers really demonstrated 40 years ago was the price of ... letting a small group of men in secret in the executive branch make these decisions - initiate them secretly, carry them out secretly and manipulate Congress, and lie to Congress and the public as to why they're doing it and what they're doing - is a recipe for, a guarantee of Vietnams and Iraqs and Libyas, and in general foolish, reckless, dangerous policies."

We are still paying that price. But it would be considerably steeper without whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and those who follow in his footsteps to expose the truth behind the government's self-serving secrecy.

Daniel Ellsberg was a co-founder and board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) for over a decade. He died on June 16, 2023, at the age of 92.

More resources

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How a leak revealed that lies were the foundation of U.S. policy on Vietnam

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"Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did."
-Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House, 1887

Journalist Nellie Bly may be best known for her well-documented 72-day trip around the globe in 1890, inspired by the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days. She was also a pioneer in the field of investigative journalism, a suffrage advocate, and later, an inventor. In 1887, under the name Nellie Brown, she had herself committed to an asylum in New York for ten days so she could expose the horrible conditions there. Her report on the asylum, and later reports, inspired change and she helped to pave the way for women in journalism. Her work inspired other "girl stunt reporters" and through their work they redefined journalism for the modern age.

Bly was known in newspapers as the original muckraker . She gave a voice to the plight of working women and displayed tenacity at a time when there were few female role models. Bly, whose birth name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran , was born in 1864 in Cochran's Mills, a part of Burrell Township in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. She was offered a journalist position at the after she r esponded to an article published in the newspaper condemning women who pursued education or vocation. The put out a call for the writer of the response signed "Lonely Orphan Girl," and Cochran subsequently joined the staff in 1885.

Women writers typically used pen names during this time period and the Cochran was given the non-de-plume Nellie Bly, a misspelling of the title of the song " " by Stephen Foster, who was also from the Pittsburgh area. Her pieces for the Driven to work on more stories that could change lives for women, she left for New York after several years of working for the Dispatch covered taboo (at the time) subjects such as divorce and harsh conditions in factories for women workers. When the newspaper started losing funding from advertisers because of her controversial articles, Bly was demoted to work on stories about social engagements and fashion. Dispatch. According to Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist by Brooke Kroeger, Bly left the following note to her former employer:

"I am off for New York. Look out for me. BLY."

She landed a job at mental institution on Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World in 1887. H er first assignment was to feign insanity in order to be admitted to the Women's Lunatic Asylum, a Blackwell's Island (now known as Roosevelt Island) in New York City. The World's managing editor at the time, Colonel John A. Cockerill, along with Pulitzer, promised to secure her release.

Using the alias Nellie Brown , Bly successfully duped Matron Mrs. Irene Stenard and residents of The Temporary Home for Females, Policeman T.P. Bockert, Justice Duffy of the Essex Market Police Court, and medical experts at Bellevue Hospital. Physicians at Bellevue sent her to Blackwell's and there she fooled even fellow newspaper reporters who came to see this mysterious woman.

"But here let me say one thing: From the moment I entered the insane ward on the island I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in normal life. Yet, strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be by all except one physician, whose kindness and gentle ways I shall not soon forget." - The Anderson Intelligencer, October 20, 1887.

During her 10-day stay in the asylum, Bly witnessed horrifying conditions of neglect and abuse of the patients, some of whom were mentally ill and needed professional care, and others who were sent there by family members or were suffering from physical ailments.

"The clothing was insufficient, the food was execrable, the behavior of the nurses coarse and brutal."
- October 19, 1887The Wheeling Intelligencer

Bly's subsequent expose originally appeared in the as a two-part illustrated series-t he first on October 10, 1887 entitled "Behind Asylum Bars." Her exposure of the abuses on Blackwell's Island was one of New York's most extraordinary sensations of the time and readers rushed to read the next installment of the "interesting story" published in the October 16, 1887 issue entitled "Inside the Madhouse."

Her reporting placed her on the titled World's permanent staff and the series was also published as a Ten Days in a Mad-House that same year Bly's fearless investigation brought about much-needed reforms for inpatient treatment at the asylum and her work forever changed the field of journalism. The budget appropriation for the Department of Public Charities and Corrections was increased from $1.5 million to $2.34 million and $50,000 was specifically designated for Blackwell's asylum. Seven years after the expose was published, the asylum closed.

For more, check out the for researching the investigative journalist in the Chronicling America* digital collection of historic newspapers. Nellie Bly: A Resource Guide which compiles digital materials at the Library of Congress, links to external sites, and a select bibliography and the Nellie Bly Topics Page guide

Want to learn more? Join us for our hybrid (virtual and in-person) , a historical fictional account of Bly's experience on Blackwell's Island. Treger will also talk about how she used the resources at the Library of Congress to research this spellbinding story. Made at the Library presentation featuring novelist Louisa Treger who will discuss her book, Made at the Library is an event series highlighting works inspired by and emerging from research at the Library of Congress. Featuring authors, artists, and other creators in conversation with Library experts, this series takes a deep dive into the process of working with the Library's collections.

*The Chronicling America historic newspapers online collection is a product of the National Digital Newspaper Program and jointly sponsored by the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Be sure to follow Chronicling America on Twitter @ChronAmLOC and click here to subscribe to Headlines & Heroes -it's free!

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"Behind Asylum Bars:" Nellie Bly Reporting from Blackwell's Island.

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"Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did." In 1887, investigative journalist for the New York World newspaper Nellie Bly went undercover to expose the dreadful conditions at the Women's Lunatic Asylum, a mental institution on Blackwell's Island.

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Today, we celebrate the 154th birthday of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. Better known by her nom de plume Nellie Bly (taken-and misspelled-from the title of a Stephen Foster tune, "Nelly Bly"), she was the pioneering, if not the very first, American investigative journalist.

Bly was born in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. In 1889, she made a famous, widely reported and intrepid 72-day trip around the globe. It was the fastest journey of her era and one that shattered the fictional record of Jules Verne's wanderer, Phineas Fogg, in his novel "Around the World in 80 Days."

Medical historians and patient advocates, however, rightly revere Bly for her infamous exposé of the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's (now Roosevelt) Island in the East River.

First reported in October 1887 on the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's flagship newspaper, the New York World, Bly subsequently published her daring dispatches as a book, "Ten Days in a Mad-House." It is a slim volume that remains a classic in the annals of psychiatry and a cogent warning against inhumane treatment of the mentally ill. It proved so embarrassing to the city aldermen that they appropriated an extra "$1,000,000 per annum" to correct many of the abuses Bly exposed.

The fascinating question to answer, of course, is how did she do it?

Bly began her journalistic career in 1880 at the age of 16, writing "women's columns" on home, hearth, gardening, society and childrearing for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Soon enough, she convinced her editor to investigate such vanguard topics as how divorce affected women. Too impatient to be restricted only to domestic matters, she spent six months in Mexico as a special correspondent. Soon after her return, she flew the constraining coop of Pittsburgh, leaving behind a note, "I am off for New York. Look out for me. -Bly"

After talking her way into the city room of the New York World, she impressed the editors there enough to leave with a plum assignment: "I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein."

Getting committed proved rather easy, even if neither Bly nor her editors had a clear plan of getting her released once the story was filed. She took a room at a cheap boarding house, "Temporary Home for Females, No. 84 Second Avenue," under the name Bly Brown and began questioning and imitating the women who seemed most insane to her. Soon enough, it was Bly who was deemed crazy. The matron of the house enlisted a few cops to escort Bly to the Essex Market Police Courtroom, where an impatient judge named Duffy pronounced her insane and ordered her to the famed insane ward at Bellevue Hospital, the city's largest charitable hospital. A few days later, she boarded a ferry boat filled stem to stern with unwashed and uncomprehending women for Blackwell's Island, "an insane place," one ambulance driver told her, "where you'll never get out of."

Taking careful notes of both her own experiences and those of her fellow inmates, Bly painted a dire picture in which 16 doctors were assigned to the care of some 1,600 inmates. "Excepting two," she recorded, "I have never seen them pay any attention to the patients." She also questioned the judge's ability to pronounce a woman insane "by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas of release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything for the answer will be that it is their imagination." She also reported on the cultural insensitivity and language barriers experienced by immigrant women who spoke little or no English and a host of hostile and abusive treatments, from mandatory cold baths to confinement in small, damp, vermin-infested, locked rooms.

After a few days on Blackwell's Island, Bly dropped her act of "acting crazy" and tried to present herself in a more fit mental state. Such efforts were all for naught until the New York World sent an attorney to arrange for her release. Two days later, on Sunday, Oct. 9, 1887, the World ran the first installment of her story, titled "Behind Asylum Bars," and Bly became an overnight sensation. The psychiatrists who had erroneously diagnosed her as insane offered profuse apologies, even as the remaining stories were widely syndicated across the nation.

Not only did the New York City municipal government appropriate more money to the care of the mentally ill on Blackwell's Island, a grand jury was impaneled to investigate the abuses and poor treatments Bly uncovered at the asylum. Approximately one month after her articles ran in print, many of the most glaring problems she reported had improved: better living and sanitary conditions were instituted, more nourishing meals were provided, translators were hired for the foreign born who were not necessarily mentally ill but simply could not understand their keepers, and the most abusive nurses and physicians were fired and replaced.

Bly sailed from one journalistic triumph to the next, including her whirlwind trip around the world in 72 days in 1889 (a journey she primarily made while traveling by herself rather than with a chaperone), a series of dispatches from the Eastern Front during World War I, and reports on the women's suffrage movement. In 1895, at age 31, she married the 73-year-old millionaire Robert Seaman, who ran the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, which made steel milk cans, stacking garbage cans and boilers. Due to her husband's failing health (he died in 1904), she retired from journalism and took over the reins of the company.

Bly died of pneumonia at the age of 57 in 1922. One can only speculate what further triumphs and good deeds this remarkable woman might have achieved if only she lived a few years longer.

At the very least, she helped change the plights of the mentally ill in America-an issue, sadly, that still requires attention to this very day.

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How Nellie Bly went undercover to expose abuse of the mentally ill

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Today, we celebrate the 154th birthday of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. Better known by her nom de plume Nellie Bly (taken-and misspelled-from the title of a Stephen Foster tune, "Nelly Bly"), she was the pioneering, if not the very first, American investigative journalist. Bly was born in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh.

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“I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.”
—Bob Woodward, investigative journalist who along with Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, sitting in for Terry Gross. Fifty years ago this week, The New York Times published the first in a series of articles based on a classified Defense Department study that was leaked to the paper by Daniel Ellsberg. The study came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. It chronicled decades of failed U.S. policy in Vietnam and ways the American public was misled about how the war was conducted. The first article by Times journalist Neil Sheehan was published on June 13, 1971, when President Nixon was in office. He learned about it in a phone call with Al Haig, who was then an assistant to national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: OK. Nothing else of interest in the world?

AL HAIG: Very significant, this goddamn New York Times expose of the most highly classified documents of the war.

NIXON: Oh, that. I see. I didn't read the story, but do you mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

HAIG: Sir, the whole study that was done for McNamara and then carried on after McNamara left by Clifford and the peaceniks over there. This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I've ever seen.

NIXON: Well, what's being done about it then? I mean, I didn't - did we know this was coming out?

HAIG: No, we did not, sir.

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: There are just a few copies of this.

NIXON: So what about the report? What about the - let me ask you this, though. What about the - what about Laird? What's he going to do about it? Now, I just start right at the top and fire some people. I mean, whoever - whatever department it came out of, fire the top guy.

HAIG: Yes. Well, I'm sure it came from Defense. And I'm sure it was stolen at the time of the turnover of the administration.

NIXON: Oh, it's two years old, then.

HAIG: Sure it is. And they've been holding it for a juicy time. And I think they...

DAVIES: After several articles appeared, the Nixon administration secured a court injunction preventing the Times from publishing further stories. Ellsberg then gave a copy of the classified report to The Washington Post, which started publishing its own series five days after the first article had appeared in the Times. In a landmark First Amendment ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually found the government had not met the burden required to restrain the papers from publishing the stories.

The meetings between Ellsberg and The Washington Post were dramatized in the Steven Spielberg film "The Post." In this scene, Ellsberg is hiding out in a motel room with piles of paper strewn about, meeting with Post editor Ben Bagdikian. Matthew Reese plays Ellsberg. Bob Odenkirk plays Bagdikian

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE POST")

MATTHEW RHYS: (As Daniel Ellsberg) The study had 47 volumes. I slipped out a couple at a time. Took me months to copy it all.

BOB ODENKIRK: (As Ben Bagdikian) What the hell?

RHYS: (As Daniel Ellsberg) Well, we were all former government guys, top clearance, all that, McNamara wanted academics to have the chance to examine what had happened. He would say to us, let the chips fall where they may.

ODENKIRK: (As Ben Bagdikian) Brave men.

RHYS: (As Daniel Ellsberg) I think guilt was a bigger motivator than courage. McNamara didn't lie as well as the rest, but I don't think he saw what was coming, what we'd find. But it didn't take him long to figure out - well, for us all to figure out. If the public ever saw these papers, they would turn against the war - covert ops, guaranteed debt, rigged elections. It's all in there. Ike, Kennedy, Johnson - they violated the Geneva Convention. They lied to Congress. And they lied to the public. They knew we couldn't win and still sent boys to die.

DAVIES: Ellsberg, then a national security analyst with top secret clearances, was arrested and tried under the Espionage Act. A judge dismissed the charges when it emerged that officials in the Nixon administration had directed covert actions to discredit or silence Ellsberg, including tapping his phone and breaking into his psychiatrist's office to obtain compromising information. I interviewed Daniel Ellsberg in 2017 about his book, "The Doomsday Machine." It's about his days before the Vietnam War, when he worked on American nuclear war strategies in the '50s and early '60s.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

DAVIES: Well, Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to FRESH AIR. You became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and other publications. And you tell us at the beginning of this book that you copied not just the Vietnam study, but a lot of other material from your staff at the RAND Corporation about U.S. nuclear war plans. What were you going to do with that material?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I planned to release that as soon as the Pentagon Papers, as they came to be known, had had whatever effect they could have on the Vietnam War. The nuclear information, I thought then and now, was actually more important. But the bombs were falling in Vietnam at that time, and I wanted to shorten that war as much as I could.

DAVIES: You went to work for the RAND Corporation, where you worked on high-level military strategy. Explain what the RAND Corporation was and what kind of work you did.

ELLSBERG: RAND, which stands for R&D - research and development - was really essence on research for the Air Force, set up as a nonprofit corporation to do long-range research. And, in particular, when I came there in 1958 for the summer and then later permanently in 1959, our obsession really was trying to plan our strategic forces in such a way that they couldn't be destroyed in a first strike by the Soviet Union. Those were the years that we all believed in RAND and in the Air Force that there was a missile gap in favor of the Russians and that a Russian surprise attack was a real possibility. And the idea was to assure retaliation for that. So it was to deter it so that no war would occur.

DAVIES: You know, this wasn't just a job for you, was it? I mean, it was kind of a special place to be. And it wasn't just a nine-to-five paycheck thing for you, was it?

ELLSBERG: Not at all. I was working in the summer, especially when I arrived to get up to speed, probably 70-hour weeks there reading top secret or secret material. Most of it was secret, actually, in RAND. And working on trying to avoid a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, so nothing in the world seemed as important. In effect, we felt we were trying to save the world, although weren't very confident we'd be able to do it.

DAVIES: So you focused in your research and in your work at RAND on decision-making in circumstances where information is incomplete or ambiguous. And you wanted to study how commanders in the military at all levels, right down to pilots, would make decisions on whether to attack Soviet targets in certain circumstances. And the research is fascinating, as you describe it. What kind of access did you, as the civilian, have to military personnel?

ELLSBERG: Well, and a civilian consultant to the commander in chief Pacific - Admiral Harry D. Felt at that time - I was doing a study for the Office of Naval Research and looking at the actual reaction that could be expected at various levels to various execute messages, messages to go or - there weren't messages to not go, actually. There was no stop message. A little footnote here, but once a go message was received at any level, there was no provision whatever for stopping that or rescinding it or bringing it back.

DAVIES: This is one of the jaw-dropping things as we read the book. If there was a launch, there was literally no way to recall a bomber. You can't recall missiles. But, you know, things that had pilots - jet fighters and bombers - there was no way to send them - to bring them back?

ELLSBERG: Once they'd gotten an authenticated message that they would execute the war plans. But the startling thing that I discovered at every level was that the general image that people had then and to this day, that a message with the right code could only come from the president himself, was never true. That was always a myth, at least it was from the late '50s, when President Eisenhower had delegated authority - his authority - to launch nuclear weapons to theater commanders in case there was an outage of communication or Washington had been destroyed or even the president had been incapacitated, as President Eisenhower was a couple of times. That's almost essential, that there be a delegation like that in a nuclear era. Otherwise, a decapitating attack, as they called it, an attack on the command and control system, would paralyze us. A single bomb on Washington would paralyze our retaliation. Well, that could never be allowed, and it never has been allowed.

DAVIES: So not just the president, but theater commanders have the authority under some circumstances to launch a nuclear attack. And these are experienced, high-level commanders. But what you found - I know that when you looked in the Pacific - is that these theater commanders had to be in communication with dozens and dozens of bases throughout the Pacific. And the question arises then, what about a base commander who has a number of fighter pilots or some aircraft? Under what circumstances might they proceed on their own to launch an attack? What did you find?

ELLSBERG: Well, again, if they were out of communication with their superiors, a lot of them had authorization in the Pacific, I found, in the early '60s. As far as I know, that continued. I don't know if it's true today, and we ought to find out. But actually, there were people even at a lower, as at a single base - you probably read an anecdote I had about Kunsan in Korea, in South Korea, the base possibly closer to communist territory of any of our bases in the world. And the commander there clearly believed that he had the authority simply as a base commander to send his planes off if he thought they were endangered. So at that point, had there been what he thought was an attack - for example, an accident on some other base that he heard about or a crisis that was going on - he felt - he told me that he would send his planes off.

DAVIES: There is a remarkable chapter in your book called "Questions For The Joint Chiefs," when you write that President Kennedy coming into the White House - he did not have, nor did anyone on his team, have a copy of, essentially, our plan for nuclear war, the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan and that when they asked for it, they were - you know, that the military was sort of reluctant. And then they gave a briefing, but not the actual plan itself. You had a copy. You examined it. And you wrote some questions. You - what troubled you about the plan that you saw?

ELLSBERG: Well, many things. It was a very strange plan. I'm not the only one who's called it the worst plan in human history. This was the plan for general war. It was an all-out attack on every city in the Soviet Union and China and attacks, in effect, in most of the Eastern Bloc because of air defenses and command and control that kept for no reserves, created fallout that would kill perhaps 100 million people in West Europe for our own weapons if the wind were in the right direction for that and many - and a hundred million in other contiguous areas of the Soviet Union, like neutrals like Austria and Finland and Afghanistan actually, but also several hundred million in the USSR and China, several hundred million killed. That added up to an intention in a U.S. first strike, if we preempted or if we escalated a war in Europe, to 600 million dead that they were calculating.

DAVIES: We're listening to my interview with Daniel Ellsberg. He'll tell us more about how he leaked the Pentagon Papers after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "THE PAPERS")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my conversation from 2017 with Daniel Ellsberg. Fifty years ago this week, the first in a set of stories which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers was published in The New York Times.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

DAVIES: You're best known, of course, for leaking the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department study of the Vietnam War. And you had spent many years for the government in Vietnam examining the war, concluding that it was futile, that there was no way to win it. And, you know, you had spent many years as a young man as a real patriot. I mean, you truly believed in the country. You believed in the security clearances, right?

ELLSBERG: Pardon me. I think - I'm going to make it clear, but I wouldn't even want the question - to raise that question in a way. I am a patriot.

DAVIES: I understand.

ELLSBERG: I have never changed in that.

DAVIES: And forgive me for putting it that way. I mean, you...

ELLSBERG: Yeah.

DAVIES: ...You are devoted to doing the right thing for your country. But at that time, you were - you respected all of the high-level security clearances that you had. And it must have been hard for you to take the step of taking this top secret document and making it public. What did it take to get you to make that step?

ELLSBERG: Without young men going to prison for nonviolent protest against the draft, men that I met on their way to prison, no Pentagon Papers. It wouldn't have occurred to me, simply, to do something that would put myself in prison for the rest of my life, as I assumed that would do. So obviously, that was not an obvious decision to make, except once I'd seen the example of people like Randy Kehler (ph), and Bob Eaton and others and David Harris, who did go to prison to say that this war was wrong, the Vietnam War was wrong, and that they refused to participate in it.

DAVIES: How hard was it to actually copy the material?

ELLSBERG: Well, in those days, it was one page at a time. We didn't have these zip zip multipage collators and what not, machines that they have now or the - of course, the digital capability. So it took me a long time, months actually.

DAVIES: So you would stay at night in the office copying and then come back to work during the day?

ELLSBERG: Yes.

DAVIES: Did night watchmen ever come upon you or anything?

ELLSBERG: Well, twice in that office, which was a small advertising office owned by a friend of a friend, really. Twice during that period, police came to the door because she had turned the key the wrong way and set off the burglar alarm. And on one of those occasions, my children were there. That was the one time police came in and found my son running the Xerox machine. No, I think I was running the Xerox machine. And he was collating or might have been the other way around. He was then 13. And my daughter, who was 10, was cutting off top secret from the tops and bottoms of the pages with the scissors.

The reason they were there was that I expected to be in prison very shortly. I'd hoped to get the papers out quickly, and that didn't happen in the Senate. But I wanted them to know that their father was doing something in a businesslike way, a calm, sober way that I thought had to be done. And I did let my older son know in particular that it might, in fact, would probably result in my going to prison. And that was an example that I was - actually wanted to pass on to my children, that they might be in such a situation.

DAVIES: So it was very clear that Nixon regarded you as a really dangerous man because, you know, he had information - you leaked these secrets, and there was information about his own internal thinking about Vietnam. And it was the actions of, you know, operatives of the Nixon administration that led to the dismissal of charges at your trial, because we learned that they, in fact, they planned a break-in at your psychoanalyst's office and some other things too. What else did they do?

ELLSBERG: Well, Bernard Barker - Macho Bernard Barker of the Bay of Pigs, a CIA asset - said that his mission was to break both my legs. But I don't think that would have shut me up totally in the hospital bed. I think they probably wanted something to happen to my jaw. But they were going to attack me in the course of a rally that I was speaking to on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1972 And they brought 12 of these CIA assets, mostly Bay of Pigs veterans, up and was shown my picture and said I was to be incapacitated totally.

And when their prosecutor told me this later, I said, well, what does that mean? Kill me? He said, the words were to incapacitate you totally. But you have to understand these guys never use the word kill - use neutralize - all right? - terminate with extreme prejudice. They use a lot of euphemisms, CIA people, for assassination.

DAVIES: You know, you - your trial ended when the government actions taken against you were exposed, and there was a - the charges were dropped. You took action to disclose government secrets then that you felt the American public needed to know. And I'm wondering what your attitude is today towards classified information and how you regard the actions of, you know, Chelsea Manning, say, and Edward Snowden.

ELLSBERG: You know, I said earlier, without draft resisters like Randy Kehler or Bob Eaton, no Pentagon Papers. Well, I was very gratified to have Edward Snowden say on a Skype meeting - a couple of times, actually - say that without Daniel Ellsberg, no Ed Snowden. That was very nice to hear because I'd never gotten feedback like that. I'd been urging people to use their judgment and their conscience for decades at that point, and it just hadn't happened - to put out information that the public needed to know, and it just hadn't happened.

For example, in the Iraq War, I think that if there had been an Edward Snowden or - and now that I've met him - at a higher level with greater access than he had - or a Chelsea Manning with greater access than she had in the - 2002, there would have been no Iraq War, no ISIS, no - nothing that we've seen later. That was a mad venture based on terribly unreal - totally unrealistic beliefs.

And I think that if the information had been put out, Congress would not have gone along with that war as they did - just as I'm very sorry to say if I'd put out the information in my safe in the Pentagon about our widening war that was projected in 1964, Senator Wayne Morse, one of the two senators who voted against that widening - the Tonkin Gulf Resolution - told me, if you'd put that out, there would have been no vote in the committee. It would have not passed the committee. And if they bypassed that to go to the floor of Congress, it would not have passed.

So he's telling me that I had had the power to avert the Vietnam War. I think that's true not only of me. That's a heavy burden to bear. I share it with a thousand others who had that kind of access. You know, when I said that Roger Morris had - did have the access to the nuclear target folders in 1969, and Nixon feared that I had those from Morris, I didn't because he didn't put them out. And later, Roger told me that was the failure of which he is most ashamed and that he most regrets in his life. He said, we should've thrown open the safes and screamed bloody murder because that's exactly what it was.

DAVIES: My interview with Daniel Ellsberg was recorded in 2017. Coming up, we'll hear about how the Nixon administration attempted to stop The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers with an interview from our archives with Ben Bradlee. Also, we'll remember actor Ned Beatty, known for his roles in the films "Network," "Deliverance" and "Superman." And our TV critic David Bianculli will review the new show "Physical." I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. We're talking about the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam based on classified documents exposed by Daniel Ellsberg. The documents were first revealed in a series of articles by The New York Times 50 years ago this week. But the Nixon administration tried to prevent further revelations from coming out. To pick up the story, let's listen to an excerpt of an interview Terry did with Ben Bradlee, who, with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, made the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. Terry spoke with Ben Bradlee in 1995. He died in 2014 at the age of 93. Here's Terry.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: Bradlee was the executive editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1991. The biggest story covered under Bradlee's watch was Watergate, which forced the resignation of President Nixon. The first big risk Bradlee took was publishing the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret documents that revealed the history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The New York Times had already published several installments. But the Justice Department got an injunction against the paper, preventing it from publishing further excerpts. Then the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the Post. I asked Bradlee why it was important for the Post to publish the Pentagon Papers.

BEN BRADLEE: Failure to publish after The New York Times had published would have relegated The Post to a status of a kind of a pro-government establishment organization which didn't want to take on the government, didn't want to fight for its constitutional rights. And it seems to me, it would have forever relegated us to a sort of second-class citizenship. It wasn't my decision. But, I mean, I wanted to publish from day one, moment one. It was Katharine Graham's decision. And she was - it was a great decision. And it made all future decisions of an editorial nature at The Washington Post kind of automatic and easy.

GROSS: What were the risks?

BRADLEE: Well, there were some interesting risks because if we had been - this was a civil suit. If we had been enjoined - mind you, no newspaper in the history of the country, which was then 190-some years old, had ever been stopped from publishing something it wanted to publish beforehand, prior restraint. So that was a wonderful principle to fight for.

The other thing is that if we had been convicted of that, if the judge had stopped us from publishing something, the Nixon administration was - it was quite obvious - was going to go after us on criminal violations - violating the code against publishing confidential and national security matters. If had we been convicted of that - you cannot own television stations if you are a convicted felon, and that would have been a felony. And we had about a $100 billion of television stations that we would have lost.

The Post had just gone public in the New York Stock Exchange. Shares in The Post were offered for sale for the first time to the public. And that was seriously threatened. So it was no casual decision that was involved.

GROSS: There's a great story you tell about a phone call that I think really took a lot of chutzpah (laughter) to get...

BRADLEE: Who, me?

GROSS: ...(Laughter) To get a friend of yours, who is a judge, on the phone so you could get his advice. But, of course, he was arguing a case in court at the time. Tell us what you did.

BRADLEE: Well, he wasn't a judge. He was a lawyer.

GROSS: I mean a lawyer. I meant a lawyer.

BRADLEE: It was Edward Bennett Williams who was the famous defense attorney and a friend of mine for already 20 years. And he was - he would have defended us had he been in Washington, but he was trying a case in Chicago. I called up the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Hoge, and said, I need to get a message to Edward Williams - Edward Bennett Williams in such and such a courthouse immediately. And the message was, please, call me, urgent. And in a matter of minutes, Williams called me back.

And I talked for about 12 minutes and said, this is what we've got. This is what we want to do. These are the documents. This is what The New York Times has done. This is what the court with First Circuit New York had enjoined them from. And we want to publish. And I want you to tell me whether you think we should and why.

And he sort of was silent for a split second - a split minute and finally said, you got to publish it. You've just got to do it because it wasn't in a sense of Plessy v. Ferguson that we had the right to blah, blah, blah. But he just sensed in his guts that to become an important player in the American scene, we had to do it

GROSS: So how much of the decision to publish was so that The Post could become a more respected player and how much of it was all the lofty principles about freedom of the press?

BRADLEE: That's a good question, too, because, you know, in the last - it was 7,000 pages, although we only had 4,000 of them. We got them at 10:30 in the morning, and we published at 10:30 that night the - our first story. No one ever read the Pentagon Papers. They really didn't, you know? We could only read - each of us read sections of it. Then we - for about eight hours we read and then had a news conference and decided what we could publish.

The - what mystified us all was that the Pentagon Papers ended with matters - with the decision-making process in Vietnam before President Nixon took office, and, therefore, he was talking about the Johnson administration and the Kennedy administration and the Eisenhower administration. That's what the Pentagon makers - Pentagon Papers were about.

So I think, you know, it was - it dealt with the origins of the most important event in the middle of the 20th century, and, therefore, it had an intrinsic importance to it. But we also - it was a principle that is really fundamental to a free press. We've got to be able to publish what we want then get punished if we did wrong then get pursued by - privately by people that we may have libeled or publicly for violating the law.

GROSS: Now give me a sense of what your style was like when you were making your case to Katharine Graham and to the lawyers. Did you make speeches about freedom of the press? Did you insult your opponents in the newsroom? What was your style?

BRADLEE: No, I had no opponents in the newsroom. I had the lawyers to worry about.

GROSS: The lawyers - yeah, OK.

BRADLEE: We were - we had - it was - all of this was taking place in my house in Georgetown. We had two fairly large rooms. And one of them was sort of a temporary city room where a bunch of reporters and a couple of news aides and a copy editor or two were actually reading the documents, making up their mind what story to run, what story could they get into shape to run that night. And in the other room, we had the lawyers and the representatives of the owners and a couple of editors from the editorial page. And I shuttled between the two trying to make up my mind and learn the content and then trying to steer the conversation to the verdict I wanted.

There was no point in trying to say we've got to do it and threaten to quit because then if you - even if you won that, you'd win it leaving a - great scars and wounds in personal relationships. So we had to do it sort of gently and listen to everybody and listen to their arguments, try to understand them and then try to counter them.

GROSS: Do you thrive on making these complicated decisions or were these, like, Maalox moments for you?

BRADLEE: (Laughter).

GROSS: You'd be reaching for the medicine?

BRADLEE: Well, there's a wonderful quality of journalism. If you make a mistake, it's out there for everybody to see.

GROSS: Yeah.

BRADLEE: And it stays there and, you know, it goes right - bang - into the history books. And it's - there are no known device that you can erase a daily newspaper (ph). I love it.

GROSS: (Laughter).

BRADLEE: Yeah. I do love the - that sense that you're dealing with important issues and that you're going to be fair and you're going honest (ph), but you're not going to back down.

DAVIES: Ben Bradlee was the executive editor of The Washington Post at the time The Post published the Pentagon Papers. Terry Gross interviewed him in 1995. He died at age 93 in 2014.

Coming up, we remember the great character actor Ned Beatty. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SOLANGE'S "WEARY")

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How The Pentagon Papers Changed Public Perception Of The War In Vietnam

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, sitting in for Terry Gross. Fifty years ago this week, The New York Times published the first in a series of articles based on a classified Defense Department study that was leaked to the paper by Daniel Ellsberg.

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Vietnam War, (1954-75), a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the "American War" in Vietnam (or, in full, the "War Against the Americans to Save the Nation"), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict ( see Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. By 1969 more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. Over the following years, additions to the list have brought the total past 58,200. (At least 100 names on the memorial are those of servicemen who were actually Canadian citizens.) Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam on a smaller scale, South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.

Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia, but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines, and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. A mass exodus in 1975 of people loyal to the South Vietnamese cause was followed by another wave in 1978 of " boat people," refugees fleeing the economic restructuring imposed by the communist regime. Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war. The two countries finally resumed formal diplomatic relations in 1995.

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Vietnam War (1954-75), conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. It was part of a larger regional conflict as well as a manifestation of the Cold War.

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Access through your institution

Tuttle, William M.; Barton-Kriese, Paul

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin addressed the Ohio County Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He said, "While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." Later, McCarthy revised his figures downward to fifty-seven, but the shocking allegations were that the secretary of state knew of these persons, and that they continued nonetheless to shape U.S. government policies.

Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2023

Encyclopedia

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Eric Nalder is chief investigative reporter at The Seattle Times.

Among some 50 journalism awards, he shared a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories about oil tankers and a 1993 Investigative Reporters and Editors award for an expose on a U.S. senator. That expose was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the Public Service category. His book Tankers Full of Trouble won the 1995 Investigative Reporters and Editors book award.

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