Daniel Ellsberg Spent a Year Photocopying 7,000 Classified Pages on a Rented Xerox

In 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commissioned an internal historical study of how the United States had ended up in Vietnam. The classified result, completed in 1969, ran to 47 volumes and roughly 7,000 pages, divided between 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of supporting documents. McNamara had asked 36 analysts — half military officers, half civilians — to answer 100 questions. Reading the finished study left several of them, including the RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg, with the conviction that successive U.S. presidents had escalated the war while privately knowing it was unwinnable.

Ellsberg started photocopying the volumes at night in October 1969. He used a Xerox machine at the office of his colleague Anthony Russo's girlfriend's advertising firm, taking each volume out of the RAND safe and returning it before morning. The process took about a year. He then offered the papers to The New York Times through Neil Sheehan and gave Sheehan 43 of the volumes on March 2, 1971.

The Times began publishing on June 13, 1971, under the headline "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement." The Nixon administration obtained a federal injunction halting publication after just three articles — the first time in U.S. history a federal court restrained a newspaper. The Washington Post picked up where the Times had left off and was injuncted as well. The Supreme Court took both cases on an emergency schedule. On June 30, 1971, the Court ruled 6–3 in New York Times Co. v. United States that the government had not met the heavy burden required for prior restraint; publication resumed within hours. Ellsberg's own criminal charges were dismissed in May 1973 after revelations about Nixon's "Plumbers" breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. The full Pentagon Papers were declassified on June 13, 2011 — exactly forty years to the day after the first article.