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The Pentagon Papers is the colloquial term for United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, a 47 volume, 7,000-page, top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971, with a focus on the internal planning and policy decisions within the U.S. Government. The study was commissioned in 1967 by Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense. McNamara appointed Leslie H. Gelb, who was also director of policy planning at the Pentagon, as director of the project. Gelb hired 36 military officers, civilian policy experts, and historians to write the monographs that constituted the content of the project. The Papers included 4,000 pages of actual documents from the 1945-1967 period, and 3,000 pages of analysis.

Most, but not all of the Pentagon Papers were given ("leaked") to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times in early 1971 by a former State Department official Daniel Ellsberg, with his friend Anthony Russo assisting in copying them. The Times began publishing excerpts as a series of articles on June 13. Controversy and lawsuits followed. On June 29, U.S. Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds. These portions of the Papers were subsequently published by Beacon Press. The full papers have never been published; they are locked in the classified vault of the LBJ Presidential Library.

The Papers revealed, among other things, that the government had deliberately expanded its role in the war by conducting air strikes over Laos, raids along the coast of North Vietnam, and offensive actions taken by U.S. Marines well before the American public was told about the actions, and while President Lyndon Johnson had been promising not to expand the war. The document increased the credibility gap for the U.S. government, and was seen as hurting the efforts by the Nixon administration to fight the war.

According to Anthony Lewis's contribution in the coursepack from James Goodale's (former inhouse counsel to the Times) law school course on Old Media, New Media the Times received advice from inhouse counsel not to publish. Goodale counseled otherwise. This was an infraction of Freedom of the Press.

One of the "credibility gaps" that the Times wrote of was that a consensus to bomb North Vietnam had developed in the Johnson administration on September 7, 1964, before the U.S. presidential elections. However, according to the same Papers, none of the actions recommended by the consensus on September 7 involved bombing North Vietnam. On June 14, 1971 the Times declared that the Johnson administration began the last rounds of planning for a bombing campaign in November.

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