Mike Gravel obituary
by Michael Carlson from US news | The Guardian on (#5KY9Y)
US senator for Alaska who read out the Pentagon Papers, an official study of the Vietnam war, to put them on the congressional record
Mike Gravel, the iconoclastic two-time Democratic US senator from Alaska, who has died aged 91, was best known for the day in 1971 when, in a meeting of the Senate subcommittee on building and grounds, he read for three hours from the Pentagon Papers, and put the entire document into the congressional record.
The papers, a 7,000-page official study of the Vietnam war, which contradicted virtually everything the public had been told by successive governments, had been leaked to newspapers by one of its authors, Daniel Ellsberg, but the Nixon administration had won an injunction against their publication.
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