In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a staffer working for the Defense Department contractor Rand Corporation, made copies of the multi-volume publication. As an opponent of the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg copied the secret documents (only 15 print versions were in existence) to pressure the new president Richard Nixon. Ellsberg shopped his pirated copy to several government insiders before making a deal with the New York Times and reporter Neil Sheehan to publish excerpts of the document. The first publication appeared 40 years ago July 13, 1961. Publication was halted briefly by a court in junction obtained by the U.S. government, only to resume June 30 when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to allow the Times to resume its publication.
The original 1969 print publication of the Pentagon Papers (which has been published in several forms over the past 40 years) included over 7,000 pages. The new NARA publication is comprised of 48 Adobe PDF files ranging in size from a 13 page section on public statements (1 MB) to a section that includes internal documents from the Eisenhower Administration which is 495 pages long (89 MB). This PDF file structure preserves the original six part structure of the print publication (47 volumes and an index), but limits online users. There are no search or advance browse features. The documents are not hyperlinked or configured to be read or engaged in any way other than the way the original publication intended. Forty years later despite all that technology affords, and all the interest around the Pentagon Papers, we are reading the document just like Ellsburg did in the late 1960s.
Maybe that's appropriate. There’s a logical aesthetic to NARA’s presentation. After all, the Pentagon papers are what they are to us today because of Daniel Ellsburg’s original “digitization.” Of course, Elsburg made a series of analogy copies of the report. He xeroxed the documents. Ellsburg’s described of how he xeroxed the document in his 1972 book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” It's a fascinating description of the mechanics of copying. Spending hours at a time in the middle of the night stooped over a Xerox machine in a California advertising agency owned by a friend, Elsburg copied almost the entire 7000 page report. He described the process of making these copies in chapter 20 of his book.
Lynda showed us around and then showed me how to use the copy machine. It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today’s standards. It could do only one page at a time, and took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tape through holes so they could be taken apart. I tried to open them carefully as I could so it wouldn’t be obvious they’d been undone. I decided at first to make two copies, though it would take longer. The machine didn’t collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy (p. 301).
Later Ellsburg described the mechanics of his copying process.
I wanted to get as much done as I could. I worked all night. To speed up, I tried to program my motions. One hand picked up a page, the other fit it on the class, top down, push the button, wait…life, move the original to the right while picking another page from the pile…This is all very familiar now, but it was a new technology then. It took a little extra time to put the top down and up, and I didn’t know why it had to be done. Did it have to do with the copying quality, or was the light bad for the eyes? Was it dangerously bright? How did it work, anyway? I finally started to copy with the top up---the copies seemed to look all right---hoping that I wouldn’t get a headache or go blind. I tried not to look at the light, or I shut my eyes. But my vision seemed OK, so I stopped worrying (p. 302).
In 2003, James Spader depicted Elsburg in the made for TV movie, The Pentagon papers. This clip dramatizes the xeroxing process.
Additional copies of the Pentagon Papers are in numerous other locations.
Copies of the parts of the documents are available online from the National Security Archive - here in pdf form (589 pages) - Book 1
An online html version is available from the Vietnam Virtual Archive at Texas Tech -
In print, The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times. edited by Neil Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E. W. Kenworthy and Fox Butterfield. Gerald Gold, Allan M. Siegal and Samuel Abt. is available from Quadrangle Books, 1971.
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