The leaking of the COINTELPRO papers by the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI opened the eyes of many Americans to what was really going on in their country. It gave citizens a glimpse into the spying techniques of the government as well as how much their voices had been suppressed over the years. The COINTELPRO program was mainly based out of the United States with a lot of the surveillance programs being targeting on American citizens and organizations. There were no documents that had been leaked before the COINTELPRO papers that discussed the activities of the military in Vietnam. This would all change because of a man named Daniel Ellsberg.
In 1967 Robert McNamara decided to catalogue the decisions and events of the US military. This was in order for future military leaders to learn from the mistakes and success of the military operation during the Vietnam War. He never once informed the president, Lyndon Johnson, or other cabinet members of his decision to create the study. A group of thirty individuals called the Vietnam Study Task Force were assigned to collect documents on the war from a wide range of sources including the CIA, the White house and the State departments. The individuals collected for this task force came from all over including a think tank called Rand, which is where Daniel Ellsberg worked. The Pentagon Papers were officially finished in 1969, which consisted of over 7,000 pages of material. This material was given to the Department of Defense and other head officials in the government, but it was decided that this information was too top secret and damming to the US government that it could not be released.
Daniel Ellsberg when he began his work on the Pentagon Papers was a supporter of the war and thought we could win the war. As the years of sorting through documents on the war and working on creating the report, Ellsberg became less and less optimistic that the United States could win the war. When the Pentagon Papers were published the Nixon administration came into office and with the shift in control came a new national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Ellsberg presented the Pentagon papers to Kissinger trying to urge him and the Nixon administration to start pulling back from Vietnam. Even after his efforts and documented evidence that the United States should pull out, the Nixon administration did not which agitated Ellsberg. He decided then that he had to take action into his own hands.
In August of 1969 Ellsberg decided that he wanted to release the Pentagon Papers that he had in his possession to the public. Ellsberg took the documents he possessed from his office at the Rand facility and heading to his friend Anthony’s Russo’s place. The two of them started to make multiple copies of the documents and kept them hidden for future use. Ellsberg began to speak out against the War and decided to release the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Ellsberg continued to release other documents to the press as the United States government started to file injunctions against the papers as well as beginning to try to get Ellsberg arrested on charges of espionage. Ellsberg in the summer of 1971 turned himself into the courts but was released on bond shortly after.
Daniel Ellsberg was then tried for releasing the documents because they could incriminate the United States as well as put military personal in danger. The releasing of those documents only put the government in the hot seat as public saw in the Pentagon Papers that the government had been lying to them for years. The report said that they did not believe that they could win the war as well as saying that the goal of the war was to contain China. All the charges against Ellsberg were dropped due to numerous instances of misconduct on part of the US government. Ellsberg did steal top-secret documents, but these documents helped to further show the suppression and lies that the government had been feeding its people during the Vietnam War.
Anti-War Suppression 