A military analyst secretly photocopied seven thousand pages proving the government had lied about a war, and handed them to the newspapers. The showdown that followed defined press freedom in America.
The Pentagon Papers were a massive, top-secret government study of America's involvement in Vietnam. They revealed that successive administrations had misled the public and Congress about the war's progress and prospects for years.
Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who had helped write part of the study, became convinced the public deserved the truth. He secretly photocopied around 7,000 pages, a painstaking effort done page by page, and leaked them to the New York Times, which began publishing in June 1971.
The Nixon administration struck back, getting a court order to halt publication, the first time in American history the federal government had stopped a newspaper from printing a specific story. The Times fought, other papers picked up the leak, and the case raced to the Supreme Court.
In New York Times v. United States, decided just days later, the Court ruled 6 to 3 for the press. The government had not met the heavy burden required to justify prior restraint. The papers could publish.
