On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing the top secret history of the Vietnam war commissioned by Robert McNamara that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. The documents had been secretly copied and provided to the Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a former intelligence analyst with the State Department and RAND Corporation who obtained them under authority of his "Top Secret" clearance. Efforts by the administration of President Richard Nixon to halt the publication and to discredit Ellsberg were part of a pattern of activity that ended in a constitutional crisis and Nixon's resignation.
"Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" is Ellsberg's personal story of his years studying the war in Vietnam, including his time travelling "in-country" with civilian advisors and embedded with active combat units, and why he believed publication of the history was essential. The narrative is often overweighted with personal details and colored by his political opinions. It is still an insight into the mind of an insider who starts as a "team player" and becomes an active dissident exposing government secrets.
Read more ...
Ellsberg opens his book with an anecdotal memoir of his early years, which included service as a Marine infantry officer, and post graduate studies of game theory at Harvard. His involvement with Vietnam began in 1964, when he joined a team analyzing information about the United States support of the government of South Vietnam. He tells of his review of highly confidential assessments for the President of the United States (POTUS) from senior advisors concluding that the Vietnam war could not be won by the United States, that escalation would lead to massive U.S. casualties and that it would be unable to withdraw without national humiliation. The assessments were surrounded with supersecrecy that Ellsberg attributes to the desire to preserve a fiction that POTUS had few real alternatives to escalation.
Ellsberg provides anecdotes of his travels in the countryside around Saigon with John Vann, the civilian affairs advisor to the commander of III Corps, and his anecdotes of a "pacification" effort in the VC-controlled district around the village of Rach Kien. At the time, Rach Kien was described as an area in which U.S. forces had never before tried to operate. Ellsberg patrolled with infantrymen up to their necks in the fetid rice paddies, and described the guerrilla "hit and run" tactics by which a handful of VC could impede U.S. progress. The U.S. eventually abandoned efforts to "pacify" Rach Kien. Years later, Ellsberg saw a report about a new attempt to "pacify" Rach Kien. At the time, it was described as an area in which U.S. forces had never tried to operate.
The story of Rach Kien illustrates a recurring theme of Ellsberg's story: his theory that the mistakes in Vietnam resulted from the inability or unwillingness of those making the decisions to learn from history or critical analysis. He points to the political fate of Robert McNamara, whose advocacy of a negotiated exit strategy within the White House "marked the beginning of the end of his influence with the president and of his tenure." Secrets, p. 182.
Ellsberg describes the major "lesson of Vietnam" as: "the impact on policy failures of internal practices of lying to superiors, tacitly encouraged by those superiors, but resulting in a cognitive failure at the presidential level to recognize realities. This was part of a broader cognitive failure of the bureaucracy I had come to suspect. There were situations -- Vietnam was an example -- in which the U.S. government, starting ignorant, did not, would not learn. There was in Vietnam a whole set of what amounted to institutional 'antilearning' mechanisms working to preserve and guarantee unadaptive and unsuccessful behavior. There was the fast turnover in personnel and the lack of institutional memory at any level. * * * There was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing 'progress' rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning." Ibid at 185-186.
In the history of the earliest years of the Vietnam conflict, Ellsberg saw "realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public." In the administrations of both Kennedy and Johnson, Ellsberg concluded, "it was the president who was deceiving the public, not his subordinates who were deceiving him." Id. at 193.
In 1968, after the surprise Tet Offensive, Ellsberg first leaked confidential documents, the top secret "Wheeler Report," which found its way to Senator Fulbright. The Wheeler Report, according to Ellsberg, indicated secret plans to escalate and dramatically expand troop forces in Vietnam. Following the leak, Sen. Fulbright publicly warned the White House against further escalation of the war without express approval from the Congress.
From this incident, Ellsberg concluded that "the president's ability to escalate, his entire strategy throughout the war, had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on his ability to deter unauthorized disclosures -- truth telling -- by officials." Id. at 204. Ellsberg also decided that disclosures that diminished that ability could be "patriotic and constructive." Id. at 206.
In 1968, Richard Nixon had just been elected president on a promise to end the war "with honor," but Ellsberg's insider contacts led him to conclude that Nixon intended to continue support of the war indefinitely. Ellsberg had reached the deep seated personal belief that the continuation and escalation of the Vietnam war was not only a political mistake and strategically destructive but also profoundly immoral, even criminal. He and others at the State Department were concerned that the secret McNamara study (the Pentagon Papers), which was ended in 1969, might become an embarrassment and a target for quiet destruction. To preserve the history, Ellsberg took a complete copy to his new job at RAND.
As the war continued, he leaked more of the Papers to senators, hoping that public knowledge of the history would diminish or eliminate the ability of the White House to continue and expand the war. They were reluctant to publish them, and Senator Fulbright asked Ellsberg, "isn't it after all only history?"
Ellsberg next went to the New York Times, which began publishing the Papers on June 13, 1971. The Oval Office Tapes for June 14, 1971, writes Ellsberg, revealed H.R. Haldeman's concern with publishing the history: they suggested that (in Haldeman's words): "you can't trust the government, you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment; and the -- the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong." Id. at 413. An attempt to enjoin publication ended on June 30 with the Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
Ellsberg was charged with violation of the Espionage act (18 U.S.C. §793) and for theft and conspiracy. President Nixon wanted to also destroy Ellsberg's credibility in the press, which led to the June 1971 burglarization of his psychiatrist's office by "White House Plumbers" Howard Hunt and J. Gordon Liddy. That the Plumbers were working for the White House was revealed in 1973, as part of the Watergate investigation triggered by the Plumbers' botched 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate. As more information emerged, the judge in Ellsberg's case ruled that the overall pattern of the government's conduct offended a sense of justice and precluded a fair trial for Ellsberg. He dismissed all criminal charges against Ellsberg, with prejudice, on May 11, 1973.
As the trial ended, the Oval Office Tapes later revealed Richard Nixon's personal reaction to the fact that the "sonofabitching thief is made a national hero and is going to get off on a mistrial. And the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents. * * * They are trying to get at us with thieves. What in the name of God have we come to?" Id. at 457.
On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the office of President of the United States in the wake of revelations of his personal involvement in the Watergate cover-up.
See also, from the National Security Archive at George Washington University: The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes (The Nixon Tapes and the Supreme Court Tape).
And, at Mount Holyoke College, Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Summary and Chapter I.
And also, David Rudenstine, "The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case" (1998)
And, Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize winner: "A Bright Shining Lie : John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam" (1989)
Reading: Ellsberg, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" (2002)
Posted by dougsimpson at June 6, 2004 10:53 AM | TrackBack