Pentagon Papers
The following is an excerpt from Stone (2004) about the Pentagon Papers:
Although most of what was in the study was common knowledge, it shed important light on key aspects of America’s involvement in Vietnam. It documented, for example, that at the end of World War II President Truman had rejected urgent appeals from Ho Chi Minh for American assistance; that while the 1954 Geneva conference was still in session, the United States was actively planning paramilitary operations in Saigon against the North; that President Kennedy’s “advisers” in Vietnam had not merely advised the South Vietnamese but had participated directly in military operations; that the U.S. government had knowingly publicized false South Vietnamese intelligence reports about the extent of Communist infiltration; that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been rammed through Congress under blatantly false pretenses; and that the U.S. government had concealed from the American public the fact that extensive bombing of North Vietnam had done little to impair the Communists’ military capacity, but had killed tens of thousands 0f Vietnamese civilians.
Why wasn’t this paragraph in my U.S. History textbook?
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