d. Pentagon Papers
In 1971, the trial and conviction of William Calley for his role in the My Lai Massacre cast the war in an especially unfavorable light. The same year, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a leaked set of documents produced by the Defense Department under President Johnson. The papers proved that the Johnson administration had lied about the goals and progress of the Vietnam War. Nixon sought a court injunction to prevent their publication, and when that tactic failed he authorized a campaign to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-war former military analyst who had given the documents to the Times. Using a team of “plumbers” that had been established to prevent leaks and politically sensitive information, White House officials orchestrated a burglary at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in an unsuccessful attempt to find embarassing information with which to silence Ellsberg.