Content area
Full text
Inside the Pentagon Papers. Edited by John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii, 248 pp.
When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the secret Pentagon study on the Vietnam War to the New York Times in 1971 in an effort to expose the truth about the government's dissembling on the conflict, he initiated a chain of events that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Yet, as John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter argue in Inside the Pentagon Papers, the ramifications of Ellsberg's decision go well beyond the Supreme Court decision and the Watergate scandal that derived from the episode. Through an examination of the backstory of the affair, the resulting court cases, and a careful dissection of the documents, assumptions, and facts, Prados and Porter provide a concise yet incisive reappraisal of the Pentagon Papers and the continuing importance of the fundamental issues of the affair today. They argue persuasively that the government's assertions of "irreparable damage" to national security and diplomatic negotiations were not justified.
The book derives from materials gathered for a June 2001 conference on the Pentagon Papers organized by the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA). Prados, a prolific author and director of a project on declassification of Vietnam-era documents at the National Security Archive, and Porter, the director of communications and publications for the VVA, have assembled an impressive array of information for their introductions to the documents (many recently declassified), previously unpublished telephone transcripts, and...