On The Pentagon Papers and New York Times v. United States

In 1971 the United States government tried to stop newspapers from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court told it that it could not. The episode of the Pentagon Papers and the case it produced, New York Times v. United States, is one of the great confrontations between the press and the state in American history, and the documents around it are essential reading on the question of how far the freedom of the press extends when the government claims that national security is at stake.

The Pentagon Papers were a classified internal study of American decision-making in Vietnam, leaked to the press by a former defense analyst who had concluded that the public had been systematically misled about the war. When the New York Times began publishing them, the government went to court to stop further publication, arguing that disclosure would damage national security, and obtained a temporary restraining order, a prior restraint, the government forbidding publication in advance. This was the very thing the First Amendment tradition, running back to Milton on these shelves, had identified as the gravest form of censorship.

The Supreme Court ruled, within days, against the government. It held that the government had not met the heavy burden required to justify a prior restraint on publication, and the newspapers were free to continue. The decision did not say the press could publish anything regardless of consequences; the justices wrote separately and disagreed about the precise limits. But the core principle was clear and powerful: the government cannot simply silence the press by invoking national security, that prior restraint carries a strong presumption against it, and that the burden of justifying censorship before publication is extremely high and was not met here.

The case matters for self-government because it concerns the deepest function of a free press, to inform the public about what its government is doing, especially when the government would prefer the public not know. The Pentagon Papers revealed that officials had deceived the public about a war in which Americans were dying. The argument that such revelations endanger the nation is exactly the argument that, if accepted broadly, would let any government conceal its failures and deceptions behind the label of security. The Court's refusal to allow that, in this instance, is a landmark in the protection of the press as a check on power.

The opinions and the surrounding materials are public domain and freely available. They belong in this library with the other press and First Amendment works, from Areopagitica through Make No Law, as a central document in the long argument over the freedom to publish. Read them for the principle that a free press cannot be silenced in advance merely because the government finds what it reports inconvenient or embarrassing, and for the reasoning that has protected investigative journalism ever since.