Pentagon Papers

1. A classified study of the Vietnam War that was carried out by the Department of Defense. An official of the department, Daniel Ellsberg, gave copies of the study in 1971 to the New York Times and Washington Post. The Supreme Court upheld the right of the newspapers to publish the documents. In response, President Richard Nixon ordered some members of his staff, afterward called the “plumbers,” to stop such “leaks” of information. The “plumbers,” among other activities, broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for damaging information on him.

Example Sentences

Worse yet, all too many of those weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to extinguish life on earth in what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who long ago released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, once described as a “single, immense hammer-blow to be executed with the automaticity of a mousetrap at almost any provocation.”

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Daniel Ellsberg’s leaks of the Pentagon Papers occurred more than 50 years ago.

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For federal prosecutors in L.A., hanging over the case was the memory of a recent humiliation: the collapse of the Pentagon Papers trial, as a result of the Nixon administration’s attempt to bribe the presiding judge with a job.

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When asked to name personal highlights of LATW, Loewenberg mentioned her experience of taking the docudrama “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers” to China when President Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping happened to be holding a bilateral meeting in California.

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The Nixon administration convened a grand jury to indict New York Times reporters Neil and Susan Sheehan for obtaining and copying the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg.

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