When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the world, large sections were printed in newspapers. I never got around to reading the massive thing. I gleaned bits and pieces from the news at the time; stuff about lies the gummint told us about the Viet Nam war and such. Did the PP reveal: the real reason we got into the war in the first place? the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident? how many in the government knew the war was unwinnable? I’d hate to think Ellsberg risked his career for nothing.
You should read them. You might find that the gummint didn’t tell us any more lies then than they still tell us today. Mostly the government just oversimplified a complex situation and avoided discussing aspects of that situation which tended to weaken public support. Just like they did in the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and continue to do today on issues ranging from Iraq to election finance reform.
Did they reveal the real reason we got into the war? Well, if you believe that we just sort of stumbled into the war in response to the actions of others and without a strong policy to guide our moves, then yes. If you’re looking for some sort of conspiracy to get at Vietnams oil or build a pipeline to Laos, then you’ll have to look elsewhere.
As for the Gulf of Tonkin, remember that the Pentagon Papers were written for the benefit of Sec. of Defense McNamara. And if, in fact, there was anything nefarious about the Tonkin incident then it’s safe to say that McNamara was in it up to his eyeballs. Not surprisingly, the Papers accept the official version of Tonkin without question. They do, however have lots of very interesting information on the “behind the scenes” power struggles that went on between the US and SV governments as a result of the incident.
They don’t tell how many people in the government “knew” that the war was couldn’t be won. They didn’t actually say that the war couldn’t be won. As a gross generalization, they did sort of say that nothing that we had done up to that point had been very effective.
My opinion is that the Pentagon Papers simply gave the opponents of the war a huge mass of information which allowed them to pick-and-choose and take materials out of context in such a way as to cast the government in the worst possible light, knowing that few people would ever read the entire thing. (Note that this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.) When you read the entire thing there is nothing particularly scandalous in them, unless you believe that politics is scandalous in general.
If I may quote from the introduction to the Senator Gravel Edition: “There are no military secrets to be found here, only an appalling litany of faulty premises and questionable objectives…”