They have been locked in a vault at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum since 1969. On Monday the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of the Vietnam War, were finally made public.
Parts of the top-secret report were leaked to the New York Times in 1971. The LBJ Library also released some of them in 2002. However, this is the first time the public can read through the full report.
While archivists do not think there are any smoking guns in these papers, they are sure it will give a more detailed look at why the U.S. made certain decisions during the Vietnam War.
It is a 47-volume report that could shed more light on one of the most controversial wars in U.S. history.
Monday morning, archivists at the LBJ Library showcased the original and copied set of the Pentagon Papers. In 1967, then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara appointed a special task force. Using classified documents from the CIA, White House, and State Department, that task force was instructed to study how the U.S. made strategic decisions in the Vietnam War and U.S.-Vietnam relations.
The 7,000-page report was actually compiled in secret. Even President Johnson had no idea it was being done.
“These papers shed a light on the way they were thinking back then,” said Vietnam veteran Edward Lozano.
Seeing the report in black and white was an emotional journey for Lozano. He served a year in Vietnam. His brother, who is terminally ill, was a medic in the field.
“He did more for those troops; he patched them up and sent them back out, carried them out in pieces and body bags,” Lozano said. “These papers, I'm going to take pictures of some of them if I can and send them to him and say, 'Here, this is why.'”
Lozano wishes the report had been released many years ago so he and other Americans might understand why certain decisions were made.
“The fact that it exists and it's been kept from us for so long, that's an atrocity. We all went thinking we were defending our country against communism,” Lozano said. “We as Vietnam vets should have been allowed to see and to know what was behind some of the decisions they made.”
President Johnson wanted to release the full report to the public. He was meeting with then-President Nixon to declassify the documents to help justify the government's decisions during the war. Unfortunately, Johnson died before those arrangements could be made.
A full copy of the report was also released at the National Archives in Washington, the John F. Kennedy library in Boston, the Richard Nixon library in California, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
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