The leaking of the Pentagon Papers as well as the documents on COINTELPRO exposed the United States government in way that had never happened before. The government began to scramble to defend against these through any measures that they could think of. One of the most notable of these defenses came after the releasing of the original Pentagon Papers in 1971. The documents that were released in the Pentagon Papers were classified documents that the government did not want out in the public.
After Daniel Ellsberg released the documents to the New York Times, the paper debated on whether or not to publish the material. It came down to a decision that they would be doing the American people a disservice as a top news outlet to not release this information to the public. After publishing the documents on June 13th, 1971 the paper was met with a demand by the secretary of defense to not publish any more documents and to turn over any remaining documents over to the government. The Times quickly replied by saying that they had no interest in complying with this request. This led to an effort by the government to suppress the rest of the documents
Henry Kissinger and the new Attorney General John Mitchell led an effort to suppress the New York Times and make it so they could not publish more reports from the Pentagon Papers. This was the first time in recent United States history that the government had actively filled an injunction against a newspaper or media outlet. The government took their case to a municipal court in New York City where Judge Murray Gurfien granted a temporary injunction against the New York Times. The implications of this injunction on the American people and on their First-amendment rights were insurmountable. If the government was allowed to censor the American public and suppress their freedom for information, what wad next?
Not only was the New York Times brought to court, but the Washington Post was also brought into the proceedings. Due to an inconsistency at the lower courts regarding the injunction, the preceding’s moved up to the Supreme Court.
The injunction had been put in place on June 15th, 1971 and the final decision on the matter came on June 30th, `1971. The Supreme Court decided that the Nixon administration had not provided amble information or evidence in order to fill a permanent injunction against the papers with six Supreme Court justices agreeing on the decision. The men above were part of the team of lawyers that fought for the times and for the first-amendment rights of the media and of the people of the United States. The government could not and would not take away the right to free press and free speech away from the American people. In the words of Neil Sheehan one of the reporters on the case, “The documents are the written words of the men who set the armies in motion and launched the warplanes, the written words are immutable, engraved now in the history of the nation for all to examine” (Times Insider).
Anti-War Suppression 
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