In 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commissioned a 47-volume, 7,000-page classified study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, secretly photocopied portions with former colleague Anthony Russo in late 1969 and gave them to The New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. The papers showed that successive administrations had misled the public and Congress about the war’s origins, escalation, and prospects, including assessments that the conflict was unlikely to be won with the resources being committed.
The Nixon administration sought to suppress publication and discredit Ellsberg. After The New York Times began publishing on June 13, 1971, the Supreme Court allowed publication to resume on June 30 in New York Times Co. v. United States, a landmark press-freedom ruling. White House aides Egil Krogh and David Young, supervised by John Ehrlichman, created the “Plumbers”; on September 3, 1971, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and others burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, seeking compromising information. Ellsberg and Russo faced charges carrying maximum sentences of 115 and 35 years, respectively, but Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed the case on May 11, 1973, after evidence of the burglary, illegal wiretapping, lost records, and improper conduct involving the prosecution emerged. The operation helped connect the leak investigation to the Watergate scandal.
