What Were The Eleven Words the Government Intended to Censor from the Pentagon Papers

The National Security Archive

www.nsarchive.orgby Nate Jones

Available to the public since 1971

The Pentagon Papers have been available to the public for 40 years.  Despite this, the federal government recently spent substantial human and monetary capital reviewing and re-reviewing every page, line, and word, of the Pentagon Papers, which Daniel Ellsberg originally leaked in 1971.
Earlier this summer, the National Archives announced that it had finally finished its review of the Papers, and that only eleven words needed to remain redacted.  At a Public Interest Declassification Board Meeting, the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, even joked that historians could “play Mad Libs” with the missing eleven words.  (This reference has since been scrubbed from Nara’s blog, but not from Steve Aftergood’s “Secrecy News.”)
In response, I joked at the meeting that I would simply check the already available Gravel edition of the papers and –not wanting to get in trouble– fill in the Mad Lib with the 90-year-old invisible ink recipe the CIA had just declassified.  My “secrecy humor” got just a tepid response from the crowd.
And I was only partially correct.  The eleven words were actually published in the House Armed Services edition of the papers –which had been reviewed and redacted by the DOD in 1972– not the Gravel edition.  (See here for an analysis of the different releases of the Papers.)  Just before the Paper’s “official” publication, an alert archivist at the Johnson Presidential Library discovered that the eleven-word “needle” in the “haystack” of the Pentagon Papers had actually already been declassified.  John Prados of the National Security Archive, another archivist wrote in an email, would quickly find the eleven words and “parade this discovery like a politician on the 4th of July.”  It looks like that expansive (and expensive) declassification review was unnecessary, after all.

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