Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers Secret
Ellsberg concludes: "The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it’s a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it's no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public."
The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg exposed were not military secrets. They were historical secrets—a history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam and deceit that Ellsberg believed, if widely known, would undermine the U.S. pretexts in defense of the war's prosecution. Like this one that President Kennedy offered in 1961: "For the last decade we have been helping the South Vietnamese to maintain their independence." No. This was a lie. The U.S. government’s Pentagon Papers history of the war revealed how the United States had sided with the French in retaking its colony after World War II, ultimately paying for some 80 percent of the French reconquest. By t