Essay --

On Friday, 19, 1971, Cornelius Neil Sheehan of the New York Times accepted copies of a Defense Department study labeled Top private Sensitive regarding U.S. foreign affairs in Vietnam. At that time, the U.S. was deeply tough in the Vietnam War, with no foreseeable end. Sheehan had received the documents, entitled United States Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, from Daniel Ellsberg, a defense analyst formerly employed at RAND Corporation. As Sheehan and his colleagues examined the study, an stock sparked over whether the papers would ever be released. Some argued it was treasonous to expose stories based on deprecative parts of a 7,000-page, 47-volume, top-secret political science study. Others believed that it was the duty of the Times to release the truth about what truly was chance in Vietnam. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the newspaper, was far less than eager about publication. He was uneasy about a dissertation so obviously critical to national security.Finally, on June 11, Sulzberger called Times executives to his office and announce he had mulish to go ahead as planned. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times ran the stories cover up by four presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. Less than third weeks after the release of the stories, the Supreme Court would issue a divide ruling.In any case involving classified government material, the right of the deal to go through the information must be weighed against the function of the government to foster its citizens. In this particular case, the right of the people to know what has been hidden from them by countless officials for dozens of years severely outweighs the responsibility of the government to value old ... ...r 7, 1964, that air raids would be necessary to win the Vietnam War. Apparently, the Nixon Administration reached a similar conclusion, because toward the end of the war, because right after the Pentagon Paper were released President Nixon staged an extensive bombing campaign on the North Vietnamese. The study likewise revealed that President Johnson secretly paved the way for ground combat in Vietnam. Based on the evidence, it seems that Johnson, or at least his administration were implicated in escalating the war in Vietnam, not ending it, as they had announced to the public. The entirety of the Pentagon Papers suggests that the United States escalated the Vietnam War, instead of trying to bring it to an end. It was the responsibility of the press to exercise its right of free speech, and the right of the public to know that the government they trusted had lied.