June 13, 1971, Americans across the country opened their newspapers to the first reports based on classified documents leaked by a government insider, Daniel Ellsberg. Consisting of 7000 pages of top secret documents, the Pentagon Papers revealed in cold, analytical detail how four presidential administrations lied to the American public: the reasons for entering the war, the failures of their policies, the low chances of success, and the reasons for staying the course. But for Ellsberg, the facts were overwhelming, the lies, extraordinary, and the dissonance too deafening for him to simply stay the course, as so many other administration officials had done. 

Host/Producer Charles Sennott

Charles Sennott is the founder and editor-in-chief of The GroundTruth Project, a non-profit journalism organization based at GBH in Boston. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Sennott began working with Ellsberg in 2019 on the podcast and on a public history project in partnership with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst which has acquired Ellsberg’s papers. Sennott covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the Boston Globe and the Arab Spring for PBS FRONTLINE. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Liberal Arts at Boston College where he teaches a seminar titled “Truth: A Short History.”