In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a highly respected, veteran Cold Warrior who conducted classified defense research for the Defense and State Departments, engineered the unauthorized release of over 7,000 pages of classified documents on the history of American involvement in Vietnam. These historic documents came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers.”
The ensuing controversy generated not only a major Supreme Court decision reaffirming the freedom of the press, but also frightened President Richard Nixon into forming the infamous “Plumbers Unit,” whose illegal break-ins at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel would ultimately bring down Nixon’s presidency.
How Daniel Ellsberg transformed from the officious conformist of 1960 to the anti-war firebrand of 1971 is the subject of his new book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. In it, Ellsberg offers his readers several books in one: a coherent account of the disastrous progress of the Vietnam War from an insider’s viewpoint; an affecting story of his emotional journey from “good soldier” to righteous rebel; and, toward the end, stunning new evidence of the cynical treachery of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Few people so highly placed as Ellsberg had as much direct experience with the actual conduct of the Vietnam War. The purported attacks on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin that brought about the Congressional resolution used by Lyndon Johnson to escalate the war occurred on his first day in the Department of Defense. Responsible for routing the cable traffic, he was in a position to see how suspicious the sequence of events turned out to be. Later, attached to the State Department, he put his Marine background to practical use, accompanying troops into the field on combat missions to see firsthand the brutal, frustrating agony of the war on the ground. Finally, he helped compile the massive, secret history of the war that he would “leak” to such extraordinary effect.
Ellsberg was also the consummate intellectual bureaucrat. The reader has to be astounded at the amount of paper this guy could push. For instance, flat on his back, recovering from an attack of hepatitis contracted in the filth of a Vietnamese rice paddy, he puts a typewriter on his stomach and pounds out a 35-page single-spaced memo on his field notes. Then, consider the massive Pentagon Papers project itself. Only a mind with a truly cosmic capacity for detailed drudge work could plow through 7,000 pages of obscure jargon, see the sinister patterns emerging, and then spend night after sleepless night making multiple copies of this magnum opus on primitive, painfully slow copiers. Normally, workaholism on this scale does to the conscience what an 18-wheeler does to a squirrel, but Ellsberg gave up his career and risked his freedom to release to the American public what their leaders had chosen to ignore and suppress for 25 years.
A task and a decision so monumental didn’t come about overnight, of course. Ellsberg’s understanding of the Vietnam situation was a matter of intellect, but his actions had to be driven by his feelings. Without getting melodramatic, he describes how the women in his life engaged and sensitized his emotions enough for him to gain an empathy encompassing everyone he saw suffering from the war: confused and frightened American soldiers, beaten and jailed anti-war protesters, and napalmed Vietnamese. Still, he tried to “work within the system” until the vicious designs of Kissinger and Nixon galvanized his compassion for suffering and his outrage with lies.
Ellsberg knew Henry Kissinger, and when Nixon took office in 1969, he actually thought he could educate Nixon’s new National Security Advisor and emissary to the North Vietnamese about the irrefutable evidence that disengagement from Vietnam was the only rational policy. Instead, Kissinger demanded “threat scenarios”: “I can’t negotiate without threats,” he tells Ellsberg, and then he conspires with his boss to prolong and expand the war at the cost of 20,000 additional American lives, plus untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
Secrets amply demonstrates that there is plenty of blame to go around concerning the Vietnam debacle. Yet the final pages of the book, replete with unexpurgated transcripts of newly released Nixon tapes, provide one of the most damning accounts of the Nixon administration ever presented, and that in itself is quite an achievement.
Ultimately, the really big secret in Secrets is simply that thousands of people, from the bottom to the top of the American government, knew that Vietnam was a stupid, murderous mess, but only Ellsberg had the guts to make nearly 25 years’ worth of unequivocal evidence public. I’ve heard Ellsberg make self-deprecating reference to himself as a “highly paid clerk,” but he proved that even clerks can be heroes, too.
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2002.
