Washington, June 13 (AP) Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in US conduct of the Vietnam War, the report is coming out in its entirety, today.
The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon's presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom.
Prepared near the end of Lyndon Johnson's term by Defence Department and private foreign policy analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in US history.
Today the National Archives and presidential libraries are releasing the report in full, long after most of its secrets had spilled.