The curious thing about the Pentagon Papers is that everyone bought a copy of the book for their coffee table, but as near as I can tell, hardly anyone actually read it.
It was pretty boring.
The propaganda meme was that it showed that Nixon and the Republicans were responsible for some sort of mess in Vietnam.
I actually took the trouble to read the whole thing at the time, as it was published as a supplement to the NY Times. The only really interesting point, IMHO, was that John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to assassinate our ally, Ngo Dinh Diem. He did so, I think, because Deim was a Catholic, and because the press presented him as a horrible dictator who was responsible for Buddhists setting themselves on fire. Kennedy didn’t want to be thought of as doing a favor for a fellow Catholic, since he was still busy living his Catholicism down. So he went with the Buddhist meme and had Diem assassinated.
Needless to say, that did huge damage to the war effort. South Vietnam never really recovered as a useful military ally, so our troops had to do all the work.
Somehow or other, the press managed never to mention this awkward fact, even though it was certainly the biggest revelation in the entire secrets leak.
Thank you for your insight.
Eventually Ellsburg will die and I will go to his gravesite with 500,000 really angry Vietnamese and we will properly endorse it ~