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. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Madeleine Gold said.

After Neil Sheehan, a reporter for The Times, was given 47 volumes of top-secret documents, filling 7,000 pages, he and Mr. Gold checked in to a hotel suite in Washington to evaluate the material. 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.