Pentagon Papers

Senator J. William Fulbright, the long-standing Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ultimately held hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In his 1989 book, The Price of Empire, he accuses the Johnson Administration of misrepresenting actual events.

Only when we began those later hearings on the Tonkin Gulf did it really begin to dawn on me that we had been deceived. In the beginning--before Vietnam, that is--it never occurred to me that presidents and their secretaries of state and defense would deceive a Senate committee.

Senator Fulbright draws a sobering conclusion from the hearings he conducted:

I thought you could trust them to tell you the truth, even if they did not tell you everything. But I was naive, and the misrepresentation of the Tonkin Gulf affair was very effective in deceiving the Foreign Relations Committee and the country, and me, because we didn't believe it possible that we could be so completely misled.

Many more people were massively injured and killed before the war was finally over. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, whose village was bombed in 1972 by a South Vietnamese pilot with bad information, pierced the hearts of people around the world when they saw her terror-filled face and her napalm-burned body. (She is still alive today and is living in Canada.)

Many other "bright shining lies" were revealed during, and after, the Viet Nam war. In the wake of those lies, President Richard Nixon resigned and America's soul was shaken to the core.

But looking back on those turbulent times, and the firestorm the Pentagon Papers generated, one needs to recall another fact. Thirteen days after the story made the papers, North Vietnam put peace discussions with Kissinger on hold. Some historians believe the release of the Pentagon Papers could not have come at a worse time. The verdict of history may be that war in Vietnam continued another 18 months because of it.