The Pentagon Papers: A Critical Evaluation

Abstract

The Pentagon's study, United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, provides such a mass of significant data as to ensure its enduring usefulness to anyone with a serious interest in the United States' long involvement in Indochina. This enormous collection of documents and commentary undoubtedly deepens our understanding of the political premises and strategic objectives that have underlain the Indochina, and especially the Vietnam, policies of four American administrations. And, on the military level at least, these papers marshal a large body of important documentation and analysis bearing on discussions and decisions within the several administrations concerning U.S. efforts to achieve these objectives. Since an account of these aspects of the three printed versions of the Papers and a breakdown of their coverage is being published in a companion review article, I shall focus largely on other matters, confining myself primarily to a discussion of some of the Pentagon study's major shortcomings. Neither the original nor the published versions of the Papers provide a comprehensive or balanced account of U.S. involvement in Indochina. Much significant documentation has been left out, particularly that relating to the political side of American intervention, and in a number of important instances coverage of the covert level of U.S. operations-military as well as political-is absent. The narrative and analyses in some of the sections are unbalanced and occasionally rest on faulty scholarship. In commenting on these matters I will be giving the closest scrutiny to those sections of the Papers dealing with the period from 1954 through 1960, the ones for which I have had access to the complete text and footnotes of the original study. (They were given to me by the court in connection with testimony I was preparing for the Russo-Ellsberg trial.) Before embarking on such a critical evaluation, however, I