The Pentagon Papers essays

The Pentagon Papers essays On June 13 1971, governmental accountability and the American peoples faith in their government was lost as the New York Times published the top secret - sensitive Pentagon Papers. Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and written by Daniel Ellsberg, this 7 000-page document outlines the American Involvement in Vietnam from the 1940s to the late 1960s. It included specific details on everything from the CIAs involvement in the early 1950s up to Nixon and Kissingers discussions on using nuclear weapons during the later stages of the war. This paper will outline expert opinion on this document, some will be for the value of the papers and others will discount their true value. However the main purpose is to give a well rounded view of whether national security or public awareness takes precedence in an extremely volatile situation, such as the Vietnam War. The key to understanding the Pentagon Papers, is understanding two key men Robert McNamara and Daniel Ellsberg. It was McNamaras mind which envisioned them and Ellsbergs hand which opened them to the public; however these two arent as different from each other as they may seem. Robert McNamara was secretary of defense for both the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies; he was also keen to understand how the entire Vietnamese situation came about from 1945 onwards. This is considered by many to be the primary reason for the compilation of the Pentagon Papers, McNamara has stated he wanted to preserve the information for scholars to study in future years . McNamara could see the war was going badly and he may have also wanted background into a conflict that had been boiling over since well before the Kennedy Administration. He commissioned the document in June 1967 citing that he wanted an encyclopedic history of the Vietnam war written within the department of defense and put Leslie Gelb in charge of...