Former New York Times executive editor A.M. 'Abe' Rosenthal dies at 84

ap on San Diego Union - Tribune ^ | 5/10/06 | Richard Pyle - ap

[blitzgig]

Thanks for the historical background. That was helpful.

[LdSentinal]

RIP.

[noncommie]

The Pentagon Papers represented an enormous information dump. The whole thing was printed as a fat extra section of the New York Times, which few people probably actually read, and as a book, which few people probably read either. They bought it and put it on their coffee tables.

Neither the book nor the newspaper excerpt was 7000 pages long. The part that the leftist media (or, as it was known back then the "only media") printed was a "dump," yes, but even that was very, very heavily culled. The guy who leaked the info did so in a very selective manner.

And, remember, when it comes to propaganda, the TONE is at least as important as the factual distortion. These papers were never mentioned in public without heavy conspiratorial overtones. The message (which in the 70's was practically unnapposed) was that the US government was tEh eViL for keeping secrets in the first place, regardless of what those secrets might have been.

[mware]

RIP Abe.

You are sure to go to Heaven, 'cause you spent your time in hell.

[Cicero]

Oh, yes, I agree. Hardly anyone read even the published materials. All they needed to know was that the media told them it proved that Nixon was corrupt.

Although Kennedy and Johnson were chiefly responsible for the Vietnam War and its mishandling, Nixon got all of the blame for it at that time.

But they did include that one very interesting piece of information--that Kennedy ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. I don't recall anything in the published papers that actually showed Nixon in a bad light, although I'm sure they did the best they could.