A defense analyst secretly photocopied 7,000 pages and handed them to the press

In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who had helped write a classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, secretly photocopied the entire study and leaked it to the New York Times. The Pentagon Papers showed the government had long misled the public about the war's chances, and the Supreme Court sided with the press when the Nixon administration tried to block publication.

— Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers — Viking, 2002
Go deeper: get the book →