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#robert-mcnamara
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The Pentagon Papers
In October 1969, a Defense Department analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica began making photocopies of a 7,000-page classified history of the Vietnam War. He worked nights, with a single accomplice. He took the documents home in stages. He photocopied them on a commercial Xerox machine that his daughter, age 13, helped him operate. Twenty-one months later, the New York Times began publishing them. The Nixon White House obtained the first prior-restraint injunction against an American newspaper in 154 years. The Supreme Court overturned it within fifteen days. The same White House unit set up to stop Daniel Ellsberg from leaking anything else became, eight months later, the unit that broke into the Democratic National Committee at Watergate.
Operation Northwoods
In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff put a document on Robert McNamara's desk. It proposed a series of false-flag attacks against the United States — sunk ships, civilian terror campaigns in Miami and Washington, a faked civilian airliner shoot-down — to manufacture public support for invading Cuba. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed it. Kennedy rejected it within days. The document stayed buried for thirty-five years.
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