The New York Times began publishing excerpts of what came to be known
as the Pentagon Papers on 13 June
1971. The first article in the series
was titled "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing
US Involvement". The name Pentagon
Papers arose during the resulting media publicity. Street
protests, political controversy and lawsuits followed helping to bring the war
in Vietnam to an end.
On 30 June 1971 the Supreme Court
decided that the press of the nation had been prevented from publishing this
important document. Five days later, as
precisely as I can calculate after the passing of 40 years, my first wife and I
flew from Canada to Australia to take up teaching positions in Whyalla South
Australia and help with the teaching work in the last years of the Baha’i Nine
Year Plan: 1964 to 1973.
Today I was reflecting on the 40th
anniversary of the release of these excerpts of the Pentagon Papers. The National Archives and Records
Administration announced that the Papers would be declassified and released,
all 7000 pages, to the Richard Nixon
Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California yesterday, on 13
June 2011. The papers were also released to the Nixon, Kennedy, and LBJ Libraries,
as well as the Archives office in Bethesda, Maryland. The full release was
coordinated by the Archives' National Declassification Centre as a special
project to mark the anniversary of the report. –Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia,
14 June 2011.
I was really too busy to take it all
in1
back then in the last half of June ’71.
That encyclopaedic history of the war
in Viet-Nam in 7000 pages-47 volumes
written while I was selling ice-cream,
teaching Inuit kids, and then recovering
from teaching Inuit kids, then
driving an
armoured truck, doing security work
and
finally teaching in that primary school
in a
Cherry Valley southern Ontario. They were
all pioneering ventures from home towns
in the Golden Horseshoe so very long
ago.
1 In June 1971 Daniel Ellsberg
leaked this top-secret study of US decision-making in Vietnam. The documents
became known as the Pentagon Papers. At the time, Ellsberg was a top US
military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation & he and the Pentagon
papers were just names in the news.
Ron Price
14 June 2011