Pentagon Papers

Pentagon Papers Reaction

When I first learned about the Pentagon Papers, I asked myself, “Why would the government even decide to make this report?” I got my answer early on in the play. The Pentagon Papers were compiled because the Executive Branch wanted future generations of Americans to be able to read the Papers and learn from the mistakes of previous generations. The document was highly classified partly because it was not a report of how the U.S. got into the Vietnam War, but it really was a report of how the U.S. Government consistently lied to its citizens.

One of the first things said, in the play, about the Pentagon Papers, was that President Nixon was not mad that the papers came out, but he was furious that the New York Times had somehow got a hold of them and was publishing parts of the classified document. President Nixon only wanted to pursue the matter further because it was a highly classified document and not because of its contents. That could lead one to think that it was alright for the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish parts of it, since the details of the Papers were not an issue to the President. Writers for the two newspapers had many years of experience with world affairs, and they made decisions each day whether it was okay to write about a certain story. People sometimes do not know that newspaper writers have access to many classified documents, but many times do not publish the story because it may endanger the country. The courts brought up the Espionage Act in the New York Times’s case. The act did not exactly fit the times though, since the information the Pentagon Papers contained ended in 1968.

The most interesting parts of the play were the excerpts from the Pentagon Papers themselves. From the Papers, Americans learned that the U.S. played a role in the coup to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, killing its leaders Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. The U.S. had been backing the South Vietnamese at the time. Americas also learned that the U.S. had a part in the problem with the free elections. The U.S. was pushing for free elections, but was also secretly stopping them from happening. It did this because there were rumors that the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would win the election. The lies that came out led many Americans to distrust the U.S. Government, and that same feeling has stayed with Americans into the 21^st century.

I assume that the play was historically correct, and if it was, the U.S. government had absolutely no proof that the contents of the Pentagon Papers would have threatened the United States’s national security. The biggest piece of evidence, about the Gulf of Tonkin interception and how the U.S.’s secret of code deciphering would get out, was already in a Senate committee’s report. Every piece of evidence the U.S.’s lawyer brought out was shut down by the Washington Post’s lawyer. Many of the points brought up by the U.S., could already be obtained by the American population.

The end of the play was most interesting. It said that a government official was quoted saying, “Most documents are over-classified. The real concern is to cover the government from embarrassment, not to keep the country safe.” If this was the feeling of the government at the time, the New York Times and the Washington Post should be commended on the bravery they had shown. Without them we may never have been able to find the courage to stand up to what is wrong with our government. The play used an interesting quote, “We can’t gain freedom, we can only lose it.” This quote has a powerful message. It implies that Americans, or any free country for that matter, must protect their freedom by standing up to what is wrong. Sometimes the wrong doers may not even realize they are harming their country.

Grade Received: 10/10