For many years, the Supreme Court has had controversies on the limits that can be placed on the 1st Amendment guaranty of freedom of speech and press. In 1971, the Supreme Court faced this ongoing issue brought in by The New York Times. The newspaper obtained a copy of documents known as “The Pentagon Papers”- a secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, regarding the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers were prepared at the request of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. As the Vietnam War progressed and the U.S. military residence in South Vietnam increased to more than 500,000 troops by 1968, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (who was a part of the study) came to dissent the war, and decided that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers should be available to the American public. Daniel Ellsberg, secretly photocopied the report and in March 1971 gave the copy to The New York Times, which successively published a sequence of articles based on the report’s findings. The Pentagon Papers arose at a time when the American people questioned the United States involvement in the war, and the government itself. The New York Times feuded for the right to publish the papers under the 1st Amendment. The 1st amendment states the freedom of expression, that being freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition. Freedom of the press states that the government may not restrict mass communication, the exchanging of information on a large scale to a wide range of people. It does not, however, give media businesses, such as The New York Times, any additional constitutional rights beyond what nonprofessional speakers have. On Sunday June 13th, 1971 the New York Times began to publish articles based on a government report entitled “The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process in Vietnam." The New York Times headline on the first story read, "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 decades of Growing