Doctors have given him between three and six months to live, he said.
They told how U.S. involvement was built up steadily by political leaders and top military brass who were overconfident about U.S. prospects and deceptive about the accomplishments against the North Vietnamese.Neil SheehanSheehan smuggled the documents out of the Massachusetts apartment where Ellsberg had stashed them, and illicitly copied thousands of pages and took them to the Times.
The administration of President Richard Nixon got a court injunction arguing national security was at stake and publication was stopped. The action started a heated debate about the First Amendment that quickly moved up to the Supreme Court. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing publication, and the Times and The Washington Post resumed publishing stories. The coverage won the Times the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
The Nixon administration tried to discredit Ellsberg after the documents’ release. Some of Nixon’s aides orchestrated a break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to find information to discredit him. Ellsberg was charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case ended in a mistrial when evidence surfaced about government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins.“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed ,” he wrote.
“Yet in the end that action — in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon's illegal responses — did have an impact on shortening the war,” he wrote.
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