In 1971, parts of a secret Pentagon report began to surface in The New York Times calling the Vietnam War's validity into question. Forty years later, the Pentagon Papers were declassified and released in full Monday. Jeffrey Brown discusses the leak's significance with historian Michael Beschloss and journalist Sanford Ungar.
TranscriptThis report excerpted an
interview that then-editor-of-chief of
US News and World Report magazine David Gergen did with then-Washington Post Company president Katharine Graham for the February 6, 1997 edition of
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "The issue here was the government’s ability to prior restrain a print newspaper. And they felt so strongly about it that I came down on the side of the editors."
Beschloss said: "Almost exactly a year after the Pentagon Papers were published was the Watergate break-in, June of 1972. Richard Nixon has this famous meeting with H.R. Haldeman in which he's using government secrecy to cloak a crime. He is telling Haldeman, use the -- tell the CIA and the FBI to stay the hell out of this."
On the other networks,
CBS and NBC did stories about the release; ABC didn't but had time to do a story about the NBA Finals.
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