† wish to express appreciation to Professor Gaddis Smith, Department of History, Yale University, and to my research assistant Steve Charnovitz for their aid in my initial investigation of discrepancies between the editions of the Pentagon Papers.

¹ Gravel, xv-xvi.

² Furthermore it has been alleged that a CIA old-boy net involved in the preparation and dissemination of the Pentagon Papers was using these studies to protect the agency's image and shift Vietnam blame away from CIA, particularly onto the backs of the military professionals, even when the latter had actually been fronting for CIA. The charge is that this old-boy net was deliberately burying the bad record of the counterproductive enthusiasms of CIA's “operators,” under the good record of the prescient scepticism of CIA's “analysts,” Cassandras of whom the agency could now be proud. See Prouty, L. Fletcher, The Secret Team (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 57–61, 189–201Google Scholar, and passim. Prouty is a retired Air Force colonel who in 1955–63 was a liaison officer with CIA for the Air Force and the Pentagon. His account as a whole is so biased that one is tempted to dismiss it entirely; but Leslie Gelb's account of his own stewardship of the project would indeed allow the possibility of some CIA manipulation: “Beyond what we had at Defense [of CIA documents], I made an arrangement with the CIA whereby materials were furnished on request. This did not include a large number of staff papers, but enough to indicate internal Agency differences on some issues. All final products were available (such as National Intelligence Estimates and approved reports).” Gelb, Leslie, “The Pentagon Papers and The Vantage Point,” Foreign Policy, 6 (Spring, 1972), 28Google Scholar.

³ About a year after the publication of the four volumes of the Senator Gravel edition, a fifth volume appeared comprising a helpful 64-page index; a convenient revision of the Tonkin Gulf narrative to incorporate material from Hébert; fifteen “Critical Essays Edited by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn;” and a set of synoptic tables comparing the Gravel and Hébert editions. The synoptic tables are incomplete. Gravel actually has more documents not in Hébert's document books than it claims in these tables. I have chosen in this review not to appraise the “Critical Essays,” because the task of reviewing reviews of the Pentagon Papers is a distinct (probably worthwhile) one that ought to cover many writings besides those assembled by Chomsky and Zinn.

⁴ Schrag, Peter, Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 82, 116–119, 300–303Google Scholar. Also Schrag, Peter, “The Ellsberg Question,” New York Times, 06 17, 1974, p. 31Google Scholar. As a journalist Schrag covered the Ellsberg trial fully and did a vast amount of additional interviewing.

⁵ About the negotiations one should also consult Cooper, Chester L., The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), pp. 289–407Google Scholar.

⁶ Gravel, I, xv-xvi; and “The Pentagon Papers and The Vantage Point,” pp. 25–41.

⁷ For one of the few exceptions and for specific mention of the problem, see Gravel, III, 397.

⁸ Report on the War in Vietnam (as of 30 June 1968), by Admiral U. S. G. Sharp and General W. C. Westmoreland (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1969). This richly detailed document, which was in preparation simultaneously with the original Pentagon Papers and was published two years sooner, has never received the attention it deserves, pro or con.

⁹ Johnson, Lyndon B., The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971)Google Scholar. Gelb's, comment is in “The Pentagon Papers and The Vantage Point,” p. 36Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The New York Times, 07 14, 1971Google Scholar, “op-ed” page.

¹¹ Rostow, W. W., The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History (New York: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar.

¹² McAlister, John T. Jr., Vietnam: The Origins of Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971)Google Scholar; Race, Jeffrey, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Pike, Douglas, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

¹³ Gravel, II, 131. On this point and others mentioned in this paragraph compare Race, pp. 179–180, 207, 251.

¹⁴ Gravel, II, 414.

¹⁵ “The Pentagon Papers and The Vantage Point,” p. 31.

¹⁶ The Pentagon Papers as Published by The New York Times, p. xiii.

¹⁷ Taylor, Maxwell D., Swords and Plowshares (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 401Google Scholar. Taylor's memoir exhibits repeated strong concern about this lag. See, for example, pp. 362, 400, and the concluding chapter.

¹⁸ Hébert, Book 1, I–C, pp. 45–46.

¹⁹ For example: Gravel, I, 131–132, 167, 524.

²⁰ Gravel, I, 553, 557.

²¹ Gravel, I, 136, 531–535, 540–542.

²² Gravel, I, 177, 245, 287.

²³ Gravel, I, 162, 247, 546–547, 569. There is no convincing evidence that Dulles's undoubted faith in the long-run popularity of non-Communist regimes meant that he expected it to be prevalent in Vietnam as soon as 1956. And the futile dickering with Diem in 1955 to hold pre-election talks with the North was clearly for propaganda only. Gravel, I, 239, 287.

²⁴ The most strikingly detailed elaboration of Ameri-can undercover activities by 1961 in Southeast Asia is Gravel, II, 640–649.

²⁵ Gravel, II, 280. Cf. Gravel, II, 414–415. One reason why Gelb and his associates found this search vain may have been the restrictions on their access to the files of CIA (see footnote 2 above); but Gelb himself does not draw the connection.

²⁶ Gravel, II, 791–793.

²⁷ Gravel, II, 51, 103. Cf. Gravel, II, 18, 23.

²⁸ Gravel, II, 165.

²⁹ Gravel, II, 635–637.

³⁰ Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972)Google Scholar. Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969. Gelb, Leslie H., “Vietnam: The System Worked,” Foreign Policy, 3 (Summer, 1971), 140–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Pentagon Papers and The Vantage Point;” “The Essential Domino: American Politics and Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, 30 (04, 1972), 459–475Google Scholar. Ellsberg, Daniel, “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine,” Public Policy, 19 (Spring 1971), 217–274Google Scholar, supplemented by Ellsberg, , Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 124–125, 132–135Google Scholar. Also worth mentioning in this galaxy is Thomson, James C. Jr., “How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy,” Atlantic Monthly, 04 1968, pp. 47–53Google Scholar.

³¹ Gravel, III, 266–267, 300–303.

³² See footnote 8.

³³ Gravel, IV, 320. See also Halberstam, pp. 594–597.

³⁴ On Tet other sources are more complete than the Pentagon Papers, which were reaching the end of their documentation. See Oberdorfer, Don, Tet! (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971)Google Scholar; Hoopes, Townsend, The Limits of Intervention (New York: David McKay, 1969)Google Scholar.

³⁵ For example, Gravel, IV, 193, 231, 235.

³⁶ By 1971 at least, North Vietnam wanted not just “leopard spots” but an easing out of Thieu personally from the presidency of South Vietnam. Prima facie, a face-saving way to get him out would have been to have him defeated by some other anti-Communist in the election of 1971. But for Americans to arrange this thrust against the entrenched Thieu might have required shaking the Saigon governmental apparatus so severely that it might have become too unstuck to be put together by his successor for a continued political or military confrontation with the NLF. Thus a “Diem overthrow” syndrome became salient; remembering 1963–64, the prospect of getting Thieu out via the 1971 election attracted Hanoi and repelled official Washington. The opportunity, such as it was, was allowed to pass. In 1972–73 additional military coercion was required to make “leopard spots” the virtually self-sufficient basis of the final settlement between Washington and Hanoi.

³⁷ Two principal unofficial accounts are now available. They are written by highly competent journalists and based on elaborate interviewing. But without directly confronting one another, they differ so markedly on this subject that one cannot with confidence choose between them or reconcile them. Yet neither author would put an earlier date than late summer 1970 on a private willingness of the Nixon Administration to accept a permanent North Vietnamese military presence in South Vietnam. In other words, the trauma of the Cambodian incursion, at least, was the precondition for the Administration to be willing to make this concession. Szulc, Tad, “How Kissinger Did It: Behind the Vietnam Cease-Fire Agreement,” Foreign Policy, 15 (Summer, 1974), 21–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kalb, Marvin and Kalb, Bernard, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 172–176, 179–185, 299–305, 311, 338–339, 356–359, 372–377, 388–391, 411–415, 421–422Google Scholar. The Nixon Administration's official account is Nixon, Richard, U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970's: Shaping a Durable Peace: A Report to the Congress, 4 (05 3, 1973), 42–66Google Scholar.