Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret  

In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson "lied and lied and lied." Nixon lied.

 

Ellsberg concludes: "The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it's no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public."   

 

In June of 1971, Ellsberg surrendered to federal authorities at Post Office Square in Boston. Forty-two years later, few of the historical secrets that Ellsberg revealed----especially those that focus on the immediate post-World War II origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam----appear in the school curriculum. Read more.

 

"Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the
Pentagon Papers a Secret" is the newest article in the Zinn Education Project's column
called If We Knew Our History, posted on GOOD magazine and Common Dreams.
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