Editing Robert McNamara (section)

====Pentagon Papers origins====
{{main|Pentagon Papers}}
McNamara commissioned the Vietnam Study Task Force on June 17, 1967. He was inspired by the [[#Antiwar confrontation|confrontation at Harvard the previous November]] as he had discovered that the students he had been debating knew more about Vietnam's history than he did.{{sfn|Langguth|2000|p=538}} The task was assigned to Leslie Gelb and six officials whom McNamara instructed to examine just how and why the United States became involved in Vietnam, by answering his list of 100 questions starting with American relations with the Viet Minh in World War II.{{sfn|Langguth|2000|p=539}}{{sfn|Gelb|2005}} McNamara expected them to be done by September 1967; they finished by January 1969.{{sfn|Gelb|2005}} Though Gelb was a hawk who had written pro-war speeches for the Republican Senator [[Jacob Javits]], he and his team, which grew to 36 members by 1969, became disillusioned as they wrote the history; at one point when discussing what were the lessons of Vietnam, future general [[Paul F. Gorman]], one of the historians, went up to the blackboard to write simply, "Don't."{{sfn|Langguth|2000|p=540}} The team counted Gelb, Gorman, Melvin Gurtov, Hans Heymann, Richard Moorstein, [[Daniel Ellsberg]], [[Richard Holbrooke]], [[John Galvin (general)|John Galvin]], [[Paul Warnke]] and [[Morton Halperin]] among its members.{{sfn|Gelb|2005}}{{sfn|Kaufman|2001}}{{sfn|Sheehan|1971}}

By January 1969, ''The Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force'', as the Pentagon Papers were officially titled, was finished but widely ignored within the government.<ref name="National Archives 2011">{{cite web  | title=The Fully Declassified Pentagon Papers | website=National Archives | date=August 15, 2016 | url=https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers | access-date=June 27, 2023}}</ref>{{sfn|Langguth|2000|p=540}} Gelb recalled that he presented the Papers to McNamara early that year, but McNamara did not read them then, and Gelb did not know as late as 2018 if McNamara ever did.{{sfn|Gelb|2005}}{{sfn|Gladstone|2018}} Intended as the official record of US military involvement in Indochina, the final report ran to 7,000 pages<ref name="The New York Times 2011">{{cite web | title=After 40 Years, the Complete Pentagon Papers | website=The New York Times | date=June 8, 2011 | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/us/08pentagon.html | access-date=June 27, 2023}}</ref><ref name="National Archives 2011"/> and was classified as "Top Secret – Sensitive."{{sfn|Langguth|2000|p=539}} 

The report was ultimately leaked in 1971 to ''The New York Times'' by Daniel Ellsberg, a former aide to McNamara's Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton.<ref name="National Archives 2011"/> The leaked study became known as the [[Pentagon Papers]], revealing that McNamara and others had been aware that the Vietnam offensive was futile.<ref name="The New York Times 2011"/><ref name="National Archives 2011"/> Subsequent efforts by the [[Richard Nixon|Nixon]] administration to prevent such leaks led indirectly to the [[Watergate scandal]]. In an interview, McNamara said that the [[Domino Theory]] was the main reason for entering the Vietnam War. He also stated, "Kennedy hadn't said before he died whether, faced with the loss of Vietnam, he would [completely] withdraw; but I believe today that had he faced that choice, he would have withdrawn."{{sfn|Morris|2003}}