This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, June 11, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

This week marks 50 years since the first newspaper articles revealing what would eventually become known as the Pentagon Papers.

We're still feeling the effects of the Pentagon Papers and the juris prudence they inspired.

Cato's Julian Sanchez and Pat Edington detailed the enduring importance of the Pentagon Papers.

Why should people make note of the Pentagon Papers and its aftermath.

Well, it still stands as arguably the most important

First Amendment case in American history.

And it also... case in American history.

And it also was really, I think, kind of the beginning of the end, in fact it was the beginning of the end of the Nixon administration,

because in the quest to go after former Marine Corps officer

turned Rand analyst Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Nixon unleashed his hounds to go after Ellsburg and to get his actually

ordered a break into his psychiatrist office and all the rest of that and so that

puts us on the road essentially to Watergate and Nixon's demise.

So hugely consequential not just because it affirmed the right of the press to publish classified material but it gave us the ability

ultimately to see just exactly how quickly and easily a president can

self-destruct in pursuit of a whistleblower.

Why was the publication of this information so controversial, Julian?

Well so what we now know is the Pentagon Papers, I think, was actually had the rather banal title of the report from the office of the Secretary of Defense on the Vietnam War.

And it was to prepare the history of the conflict in the late 60s to document for future policymakers, but really revealed the extent of deception of the American public across multiple presidential

administrations that the US had been involved earlier in ways that had never been reported in the press in

South Vietnam's internal affairs, that it had engaged in illegal bombings in Cambodia and Laos that even as Johnson was pledging on the

campaign shall no wider war plans were being made to in fact escalate the war in Vietnam.

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