In the now-famous case of
New York Times Co. v. United States, the
Times and the
Washington Post joined forces to fight for the right to publish, and on June 30 the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the government had failed to prove harm to national security, and that publication of the papers was justified under the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press.
In addition to publication in the
Times,
Post,
Boston Globe and other newspapers, portions of the Pentagon Papers entered the public record when Senator Mike Gravel of
Alaska, an outspoken critic of the
Vietnam War, read them aloud in a Senate subcommittee hearing.
These published portions revealed that the presidential administrations of Harry S. Truman,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson had all misled the public about the degree of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, from Truman’s decision to give military aid to France during its struggle against the communist-led Viet Minh to Johnson’s development of plans to escalate the war in Vietnam as early as 1964, even as he claimed the opposite during that year’s presidential election
Pentagon Papers - Vietnam War - HISTORY.com