Thirty years ago this month, President Nixon picked up his
Sunday New York Times on June 13, 1971 to see the wedding picture
of his daughter Tricia and himself in the Rose Garden, leading the left-hand
side of the front page. Next to that picture, on the right, was the
headline over Neil Sheehans first story on the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam
Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.
Nixon did not read the story (so he says on tape in his 12:18 p.m. phone
call with Alexander Haig).
On Monday evening, June 14, Attorney General John Mitchell warned the
Times
via phone and telegram against further publication; and on Tuesday June
15, the government sought and won an restraining order against the Times
an injunction subsequently extended to the Washington Post when
that paper picked up the cause. The epic legal battle that ensued
culminated on June 30, 1971 in the U.S. Supreme Courts 6-3 decision to
lift the prior restraints arguably the most important Supreme Court case
ever on freedom of the press.
The National Security Archive has now posted on its Web site the following
documentation
from the Pentagon Papers case to our knowledge the first time this
material has ever been published together:
1. Audio and transcripts of ten telephone and meeting
conversations from the recently-released Nixon tapes, recorded on Sunday,
June 13, Monday, June 14, and Tuesday, June 15, detailing the reactions
of President Nixon and his aides to the Pentagon Papers publication and
Nixons decision to take legal action against the New York Times.
2. The Supreme Courts decision(s) from June 30, 1971 (each Justice
felt the need to weigh in).
3. The brief for the government to the Supreme Court.
4. The brief for the New York Times.
5. The brief for the Washington Post.
6. The amicus brief of 27 members of Congress.
7. The audio from the Supreme Court tapes of the actual oral arguments
presented by Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, Times attorney Alexander
Bickel, and Post attorney William Glendon.
8. The transcript for the oral argument, since the argument, on
Saturday, June 26, lasted two hours and 13 minutes.
The court material covers the end of the Pentagon Papers case. But it is
on the beginning of the case that we now have genuinely new evidence, in
the form of the Nixon tapes declassified earlier this
year pursuant to the lawsuit by University of Wisconsin historian Stanley
Kutler and the Public Citizen Litigation Group.
This Electronic Briefing Book also features, for the first time published
anywhere, the audio and transcripts of Nixons conversations
on June 13, 14 and 15 after publication of the Pentagon Papers began. Archive
research associate Eddie Meadows copied the recordings at the National
Archives and painstakingly transcribed them, as part of our long-term documentation
project on Vietnam, under the direction of Archive fellow John Prados.
This briefing book also includes the relevant excerpts
from the following memoirs:
1. Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset
& Dunlap, 1978)
2. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1982)
3. H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries (New York: Berkeley Books,
1995)
The Secret Briefs and the Secret Evidence:
In coming days, this Electronic Briefing Book will add copies of the
specific documents in the Pentagon Papers that were cited by the government
in various public and secret legal papers as creating immediate harm to
U.S. national security. Archive senior fellow John Prados has carried
out an exhaustive cross-referencing project using the recently-declassified
secret briefs submitted by the government to the courts, together with
each of the various editions of the Papers, including the New York Times
paperback version (highly condensed and selective), the multivolume Government
Printing Office version (officially declassified), Senator Mike Gravels
edition read into a Senate subcommittee record and subsequently published
by Beacon, and the four negotiating volumes (which Daniel Ellsberg did
not leak) declassified in 1977. Stay tuned for an illuminating
documented discussion of secrecy and lies.