As a contractor to the government at the Rand Corp., I had in my authorized possession 7,000 pages of a study that later became known as the Pentagon Papers. It was a top-secret history of U.S. decision making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. The war was still going on, and the same patterns of deception of Congress, deception of the public, violation of treaties and reckless disregard for the national interest and the lives of Americans by the Nixon White House that were documented in the study persisted. Thirty thousand American lives had already been lost, and millions more Vietnamese had died. I was trying to minimize the number of names that would ultimately be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, so I gave the report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Subsequently, that committee requested and was refused official access to the study by the Defense Department -- four different times. Was I authorized to give it to the committee? No. Every page was stamped "Top Secret -- Sensitive." And no executive branch official would authorize provision of the study to Congress, even on a top-secret basis, although it was available to me at the private, nonprofit Rand Corp.

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