I think it’s been misunderstood. Again, another aspect of the Pentagon Papers, it’s been misunderstood this whole time. It’s almost always described as an attempt to smear my reputation or to stigmatize me in some way. Now, I was already an American citizen facing 12 felony counts, a possible 115 years in prison. So they weren’t working with a new surface here entirely. I had been stigmatized quite a bit by that time. But that wasn’t the aim, actually, at all of their sending it in.
As Krogh indicated — and people miss this — what they were worried about was what else I knew — namely, what else I knew and could document that went beyond the Johnson administration into the Nixon administration. The Pentagon Papers themselves ended in 1968, before Nixon came in, so they didn’t incriminate him, except for his role in the ’50s supporting the French — and proposing nuclear weapons at that time, by the way. But he wasn’t mainly involved. And so, when they came out, in fact, he was very calm about it, and properly so. “This will show,” as Kissinger said, “that it’s really the Democrats’ war, after all.” And they realized
— source democracynow.org | May 01, 2023