Pentagon Papers on Vietnam released

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in the United States's conduct of the Vietnam War, the report was published in its entirety yesterday, including the 11 words that were not published at the time of the leak.

The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon's presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom. Prepared near the end of Lyndon Johnson's term by defence department and private foreign-policy analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in American history.

The National Archives and presidential libraries are releasing the report in full, long after most of its secrets have been spilled. Mr Ellsberg said the chances of finding great new revelations are slim.

The release is timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of reports about the findings, on 13 June 1971. The papers showed that the Johnson, Kennedy and prior administrations had been escalating the conflict in Vietnam while misleading Congress, the public and allies.