There were no computers and not enough photocopiers - only mountains of paper. In the end, their makeshift office grew to nine rooms. Siegal, another assistant foreign editor, began the project. He arranged for a suite at the New York Hilton Hotel on Avenue of the Americas, where he, Mr. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of The Times, voting 6 to 3 to allow the resumption of publication. The documents demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson administration “systematically lied” to Congress and the public about “a subject of transcendental national interest and significance,” The Times said in 1996.Īfter two more articles appeared, the government won a court order restraining further publication.
The Times published the first of a series of articles on the papers on June 13, 1971. Once they had determined its usefulness, they flew to New York to brief top editors, buying a seat for the documents so they could keep them in sight. Gold checked in to a hotel suite in Washington to evaluate the material. The cause was heart failure, his daughter Madeleine Gold said.Īfter Neil Sheehan, a reporter for The Times, was given 47 volumes of top-secret documents, filling 7,000 pages, he and Mr. Gerald Gold, an editor for The New York Times who helped supervise the herculean task of combing through a secret 2.5-million-word Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to produce articles showing that officials had lied about the war, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Melville, N.Y.