What became known as the Pentagon Papers—three thousand pages of historical narrative and four thousand pages of government documents—was shocking to all but the most hardened antiwar cynics. The expansion into genuine warfare began, the Times summarized, “despite the judgment of the government’s intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Viet Cong insurgency in the South…. The bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months.” To catalog the number of times Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon looked the American people squarely in the
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