Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and classified as "Top Secret - Sensitive," the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers traced the U.S. involvement in Vietnam from the 1940s through the late 1960s. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg made the study available to the New York Times, which struggled for three months over whether and how to publish the report. On June 13, 1971, the Times finally went to press with the government's secret history of its land war in Southeast Asia.

Publication of the Pentagon reports led the Nixon administration to sue the Times for a prior restraint, unleashing a firestorm of publicity and legal wrangling. A mere fifteen days later the Supreme Court freed the Times and the Washington Post, which had also secured a copy of the documents, to continue publishing their Pentagon Papers series.

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Contrary to dominant perceptions, Rudenstine argues that the government sued the Times not because it feared political embarrassment or wished to further its campaign against the press but because it believed the Pentagon Papers contained information potentially harmful to U.S. security and needed time to assess the harm that publication could cause.

Although he firmly supports the newspapers' victory in the case, Rudenstine asserts that the conflict was far more complicated than has been generally recognized and that the Supreme Court's decision was a resounding vindication of a free press. Rudenstine also identifies the Pentagon Papers episode as the critical experience leading to the Watergate break-in and, ultimately, to Nixon's resignation.