ABSTRACT
Having been sworn into office on January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon was presented with an immediate dilemma. He had just finished running on a purposely vague promise to bring about an “honorable end” to the war. Henry Kissinger served as Richard Nixon’s national security advisor as well as, beginning in 1973, his secretary of state. Cambodia, according to Nixon, was “a small country of 7 million people” whose neutrality had been “blatant[ly]” violated by the Vietnamese revolutionaries – this, Nixon said, while the United States had “scrupulously respect[ed] the neutrality of the Cambodian people.” The Pentagon Papers, which was officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” is the colloquial name given to a 3,000-page, top secret Defense Department study with 4,000 pages of accompanying documents that was commissioned by Robert McNamara in 1967.
