The Pentagon Papers: the Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam

Late in June 1971, when the Federal Government had succeeded in delaying the publication of even newspaper synopses and brief excerpts from the secret Pentagon Papers, Senator Mike Gravel convened a special meeting of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds. The Senator had recently received 4,100 pages of the Papers, and on the night of June 29, at that extraordinary meeting, he entered them into the official record of the subcommittee.

That record is published here for the first time, in order that the American public can have access to the full story of American involvement in Vietnam from early 1940s to March of 1968.