(Bumped and slightly reformatted - Meteor Blades)
The Pentagon Papers and the Overlooked 1968 Leaks
In 1969, former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg and colleague Tony Russo began photocopying a top-secret, 7,000-page study that examined escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam over the course of 23 years and through four presidential administrations. The McNamara Study, later known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed a systematic pattern of presidential lying to the public and to Congress about the aims, methods and failures of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia. For two years Ellsberg attempted unsuccessfully to persuade various members of Congress to make the documents public; finally, in 1971, he turned the papers over to the New York Times, which published the first installment on June 13, 1971.
The Nixon administration obtained an injunction against the
Times, and Ellsberg began supplying portions of the Pentagon Papers to other newspapers, several of which also were served with injunctions. Over the course of several weeks, while Ellsberg evaded the FBI in order to get the rest of the document out, 19 newspapers took part in publishing the whole of the study. Ellsberg then surrendered to authorities and in 1973 went on trial for 12 felony counts of espionage, conspiracy and theft that could have resulted in 115 years in prison. Charges against him were finally dismissed on the grounds of gross governmental misconduct when during the course of the trial it emerged that the White House had authorized a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by the "plumbers" who later broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate (a revelation that led to spectacular headlines such as "Watergate Meets the Pentagon Papers!"). Ultimately, the break-in at the psychiatrist's office and the subsequent destruction of related evidence by the Nixon administration made its way into the formal Articles of Impeachment that led to Nixon's resignation.
For more than 30 years, Ellsberg has continued to pursue a life of political activism, and in 2002 Viking published his Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
This is the first of a six-part series of conversations with Ellsberg that were conducted earlier this month. My questions are in boldface, Ellsberg's responses are in lightface. Topics and dates of future postings can be found at the end of this interview.
A thought came into my head in the form of a rule: No one is ever going to tell me again that I have to lie, that I have a duty to lie, that it's all right just because someone's telling me to do it. No one is going to say that and have me believe him, or think I have to obey him. I'm not going to listen to that anymore. It no longer has any authority for me.
Lying to the public, about anything, but above all on issues of life and death, war and peace, was a serious matter; it wasn't something you could shift responsibility for. I wasn't going to do it anymore.
It came to me that the same thing applied to violence. No one else was going to tell me ever again that I (or anyone else) "had" to kill someone, that I had no choice, that I had a right or a duty to do it that someone else had decided for me.
--Daniel Ellsberg
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
I was so moved in your book by the passage where you recount the sudden realization that you will not lie for anybody ever again because they tell you too, you will not kill. I read that and thought: Well, isn't this what human beings should be saying all along? But, no. It's a huge revelation to you.
No, this is what humans do. I read the first parts of the study in 1967, so strictly speaking, I knew that period directly and then I learned some more about 1961 and 1960. But when I read it in its entirety - 23 years of a long whole history - it changed me in a way that reading just one volume would not have done. And that is: It suddenly cured me of the overriding ambition to work for presidents.
The system seemed so corrupt at that point and so out of control that for the first time ... My identity had been totally bound up with the executive branch. I couldn't imagine working for Congress, for example. And I had no impulse toward the courts or the press. But the executive branch - I believed what the people with Bush believe. I then believed that it's for the president to decide this stuff even though he may make mistakes. But he'll make fewer mistakes than somebody who has less knowledge or less concern for the national security.
Now I knew already that Johnson had abused that terribly. And now in 1967 I was reading that Kennedy had greatly misled the public on this issue. But that alone, I think, wouldn't have kept me from hoping - like a Powell or a McNamara or a Clifford - that the day may come when another president will want my advice and I want to be available for him and to have some influence on events at that time.
But I was reading about four presidents and I knew about the fifth: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon. I looked at that and said: My identity is no longer bound up with presidents. In fact, I don't think that's the way for a patriotic citizen who knows what I now know to best serve his country. And that's a very unusual place to come to.
It sounds like a total reshaping of your identity. You were in your late 30's, early 40's?
In 1969, I was 38.
You've put all that time into your career and suddenly everything you've thought about yourself is brought into question.
Keep in mind too, it wasn't just a revelation about ... well, this line of work isn't what I thought it would be. We were being led to greater disaster. I could very well see that the war could become larger.
Henry Kissinger said on April 27, 1972, "Well, we could hit the dikes. How many would that kill? Two hundred thousand?" Nixon said, "No, I'd rather use a nuclear weapon." What if Kissinger, instead of saying, "I think that would be just too much." ... what if he'd said, "You're right, Mr. President" - which is what he always wanted to say and which he did say, nine times out of ten. "That's brilliant. You're brilliant, Mr. President, this is the time for it. This is the time."
I think he could have gotten away with it. In the offensive of 1972, he couldn't have gotten away with using it on Hanoi, but if he'd used it on North Vietnamese troops in a threatening way, I think he could have gotten away with it. Now there would have been a big protest. Say it stopped the offensive and he could say it was successful. Would that have led to impeachment? No, that would not have led to impeachment. Would Nixon have lost the election for that reason? I'm sorry to say I don't think so, if it seemed to stop the offensive.
What happened was, they stopped the offensive with B52's, without using nuclear weapons. But that's how close we were.
The turning point for you seemed to be not the release of the Pentagon Papers, but the early act of copying them. You were taking documents to be copied out of RAND for the first time illegally. You didn't seem like you were sure what you were going to do with all this, you just knew this could prove useful. That, to me, seemed to be the real first step.
Yeah, from then on I knew I was now subject to legal penalty whatever I did. So it was just a marginal effect of illegality. Although, of course, at every point when you make it more likely that they find out, the next time you go out or anything you do, you're still having to grab the electric wire.
I was very struck by that two-year period when you had the Pentagon Papers but weren't doing anything with them yet - I mean, you'd given them to several senators but nothing was happening on that front. It seems to me you had an extremely practical, pragmatic approach to how you wanted the papers to have the greatest effect. You didn't seem willing to martyr yourself, ruin your career, raise all this, unless you really gave it your best shot at being effective.
I think you could be led astray on your line of reasoning there. Certainly I was not simply out to go to jail or to have a trial. I know at the time I didn't expect much from my trial, I would have been glad to miss the trial. In other words, if they'd dropped it, I would have felt on balance, that's fine, I have other things to do. I didn't feel we'd make a lot of headway in a trial. And you know, 30 years have gone by since then and I feel that all the more. I don't expect things from a trial. I like civil disobedience actions, but in a trial you usually don't get out of it what you put into it in the way of time and effort and money.
That was a difference I had with my co-defendant, Tony Russo, who had great hopes from the trial. I never really believed that that would amount to anything.
Except your trial -
Right, it turned out that had the trial not been on - I'm talking just about the coverage of the trial itself - it turned out that the trial was absolutely crucial to the actual effect that it had. But that was because it made it legally obligatory for the president finally to reveal stuff they had done against me criminally, which tore it open. Had the trial ended much sooner we would never have learned about the plumbers. The fact that there was a trial on made them disclose the illegal stuff they'd done against me. It was an indirect effect.
But it was a spectacular indirect effect.
There's no question that had we ended it earlier, Nixon might have stayed in office. But that was an effect we could not have anticipated.
Here's the point I want to make. First, if you look at publicity that the action got, then of course, thanks to Nixon's injunction and the fact that 19 newspapers in all conducted civil disobedience (whether they thought of it in those terms or not, that's what they were doing), it was effective.
Most of those other papers [after the New York Times injunction] were moving in the face of the attorney general and the president both saying this is dangerous to national security and illegal. And that has every look of an act of civil disobedience by every practical point of view. I'm sure the newspapers did not want in their own minds to recognize any analogy to people who were draft resisters or people who were demonstrating. They thought of them as rabble and subversives. But the newspapers were engaging in this massive act of civil disobedience. There has been nothing like it institutionally that I can think of.
So that gets as much attention as you can dream of, thanks to the president. Does it affect policy? I would say that in 1971 when it came out, and in 1972, its effect looked like zero to me. And that's what I told people, the effect on policy as far as I can see is zero and that's what I was trying to do. I wasn't trying to get a lot of attention; I was trying to get the war ended.
The effect of the Pentagon Papers themselves had a lot of effect on public opinion but that did not affect policy. The public was already mainly against the war and this just made that majority larger. But Nixon wasn't paying attention, going by the majority.
This is something that's relevant right now. I would say now in a practical sense, the American people had as much democratic influence over the invasion of Iraq. Meaning zero. They were so misled on that one, and Congress was so misled it's useless to say that they participated in that decision-making. Yes, a relatively democratic country can behave as it if it were a dictatorship. The president can get his way.
How surprised were you then by the lack of effect on policy of the Pentagon Papers?
The answer is, not particularly. I was disappointed, of course, and sad, desperate, but not terribly surprised. You could say I was surprised by the amount of attention we got from the public and from the press. I didn't foresee that - it was at the outer limits of what I foresaw. But in terms of actually affecting the war? By 1970 and 1971 or 1972 it's simply wrong to say - as I heard you imply earlier - that I was holding my fire or that I was encouraged by the prospect of a sizable effect.
I did not expect there was much chance that this would have an effect because it was history and it was history about the Democrats. And once Nixon had staked his own flag on the war, which was November 3, 1969, a month after I started copying the Pentagon Papers, from then on I put the odds on the Pentagon Papers having a big effect low and steadily lower. Every month that went on, it got a little lower.
But a long-term effect?
I thought we had a long-run effect in educating people, but that's not why I was doing it. We'd have the advantage of revealing imperial operations in a way that we haven't seen for thousands of years, except with the Nuremberg documents and those deal only with the Nazis. That's good for the long run. And it could have had a lot effect if people had used this on Iraq War Powers authorization, a very big effect on how Congress is lied to and why Congress has to take control again of the decision and have hearings, investigate and make them make their own decisions.
The Pentagon Papers are extremely relevant to that, and I'm not sure they've ever really been exploited from that point of view.
Even in 1969, I didn't really feel that the Pentagon Papers had more chance of ending the war than our letter from RAND. The letter from RAND, small thing that it was, got a lot of attention and it was relevant. It had a plan in there: End the war in 12 months. I tried to get prestigious people, which I failed to do, but at least the experts at RAND could say, get out. That struck me as a real addition to the discussion, and it was.
The Pentagon Papers, it seemed to me, was not as promising as that. But I did both. One was going to put me in prison, the other wasn't. But I didn't limit myself to the one that was not going to put me in prison, and I didn't limit myself to the one I thought most promising.
What would have happened if Nixon had totally ignored the printing of the first installment?
Nothing would have happened.
Nothing. He was designing his own demise by his overreaction.
Totally. In essence, that's what I'm saying. People who judge either my expectations or the relevant effect by the newspaper publicity I think are misjudging if they're trying to understand my motivation. I wasn't going just for a lot of publicity, I was going for an effect. I didn't expect much effect. I hoped there would be some, but I didn't have high hopes of it. And as far as I could see there wasn't any, which was a disappointment but not a shock.
Had he ignored it - by the way, you know, they all agreed in the first day or two, this is a Democratic fight, let's just ignore it - if they'd stuck with that, the Pentagon Papers would have sunk like a rock pretty much. They were just too long, too much to read, people wouldn't have paid that much attention.
The truth is, after November 3, 1969, I really never did think it would have a significant effect. I was sort of always open to doing it, and when occasions arose, I kept trying. But I wasn't even focused that much on the Pentagon Papers. I was focused on other things.
But now where they really went wrong - it wasn't foolish, what I didn't know at the time, was their worry about what else I had on them. Putting out the Pentagon Papers did lead them to think that if I had something else, I would put it out, I couldn't be trusted not to put it out. That caused them to take criminal actions against me, which had a major effect.
If they knew that all I'd copied was the Pentagon Papers, there was no need for the plumbers and they wouldn't have taken these actions against me. They wouldn't have tried to beat me up in May 1972 and Nixon would have stayed in office and the war would have gone for at least another couple of years.
And they obviously felt it was serious enough that they were going to make a big deal of it, an example out of you.
A major part, I have to admit, I'll concede this too ... the scale of the Pentagon Papers seemed so large that it was hard for them just to ignore it. They did have several choices at the time. Basically, to pursue it with an injunction was a major political error that Mitchell made. It's usually attributed to Kissinger, but it was really Mitchell. And the other was to go after me criminally. And they never doubted that they wanted to do that although Erlichman and some others advised them not to do it and that advice should have been followed for political reasons.
What other strategies were you pursuing at the time?
The truth is, I can't look back and say that I did have any strategy that had any real promise. It would be true to say - and I'll give myself credit for this - that I, like a lot of other Americans, was doing what I should have been doing then, and that was everything I could think of that might possibly have some effect. And I was not taking account by that time of what the cost would be for me. And that of course cuts down the number of Americans who were acting that way, but there were still thousands, thousands of people, who were choosing to go to prison without any expectation that doing that would have any very big effect.
I didn't think of what I was doing as having any greater prospect than any of those people, and that was pretty small. If you look at the book then, you might say, well, I'm doing all this strategizing, but the truth is it was just a matter of trying to think of things that might help, none of which had any very big effect
Well, then ultimately it comes down to individuals feeling that they've got to do something, they've got to keep trying something. Even if it's not going to work ... for your own self-opinion, you try.
I would not have done something as clearly dangerous as the Pentagon Papers if I just couldn't think of any way to help. And there were times really when I felt that way. So I didn't do much. I let it drop for several months at a time. Then something else would come up and I'd say, oh, my God, I've got to do something about this. Is it worth looking at this again? Or I would think of a new way to get them out or something.
But try with Congress, lobbying, a resolution, a letter, a demonstration, the People's Peace Congress. an MIT conference, the People's Peace Treat Conference, getting arrested with Howard Zinn at the Boston Federal Bulding.
Perhaps it's never just one big thing that gets the ball rolling anyway. Like it wasn't just you releasing the Pentagon Papers. And it wasn't just Kent State and it wasn't just people showing up making them back down from going into China. It was a combination of individuals doing their own thing.
That's very well put. I'll make one last point on that. In the Milgram experiment - totally applicable to Abu Ghraib, by the way - what Milgram found was if you had a bunch of people who were supposedly all doing the same thing and agreeing on it, if they saw one person disobey the experimenter, refuse to give the shocks, that greatly increased the chance of other people stopping. If two people did it, the chances dramatically increased. Meaning if one person does it, people think ... maybe I shouldn't do that, I don't want to stick my neck out. One person doesn't have the dramatic effect, but it has some effect. Two or three people? You say, wait a minute. This is something that you can do. And they all stop.
That's why administrations want to come down so hard on the first person to do it, to stop there being a second or third person because that could open the dam. That's why I get 12 felony counts for 115 possible years in sentencing. What the hell was that about? They really overreached on that one. But it had the effect, it did slow people up quite a bit, a whole lot actually. People would say, I'm not sure I want to do that, even though Ellsberg did get away, do I want two years to rely on what got him off?
People should keep this in mind: If somebody else has done it, then don't just say, well, now they've done it, let's see how it goes. The second and third person to join can have a huge effect. Practically speaking in one's own life, if somebody has set an example like that, it's not now too late to join them. It hasn't been done yet. It won't be done until the cover is really ripped off these things and this stuff really comes jamming out. To do that, the second and third and fourth person can all have still very significant effects. That's what I would like to see. It was very good to see that a dozen people complained about the NSA. Well, let's get a thousand of them out there.
In your book you talk for the first time about leaks that you made in 1968 to the New York Times after you saw the impact of someone else's leak - Westmoreland's request for 206,000 additional troops. Were those 1968 leaks more effective, in your opinion, than the Pentagon Papers?
Actually, what I did do in March of 1968 is pretty much what I want people to do. I had timely information. I went first to Bobby Kennedy when I saw the effect of the 206,000 leak, the idea that Westmoreland had asked for 206,000. I didn't leak that.
I would like to know and to publicize the person who did that because they had a tremendous effect that perhaps saved us from an escalation that would have led to nuclear war. That was the great leak in history and it may have been kind of inadvertent, I don't really know what the motives were. Somebody may have slipped it out. Or it may have come from somebody who wanted them to send 206,000. That's also possible.
Certainly there's no question that the effect was enormous. When I saw that, I then went through this routine - and there was a tactical one - where I did a leak a day of high-level information. I kept that secret for so long that I tend to forget it. If you really keep something secret, I can tell you psychologically, you tend to forget it in a certain sense in that it doesn't enter your generalizations, you don't operate with it. You haven't totally forgotten it, because something can remind you of it, I often said sincerely after the Pentagon Papers came out that that was my first leak. That was flatly wrong. I really had forgotten.
If somebody had asked me about that, I would have said, well, of course, it had happened. But I really had put it out of my calculations. I didn't talk to anybody about it.
When was it that you finally publicly said that you had done those leaks?
I never really published it. It didn't come out because it was years later. I certainly didn't bring it out. The prosecutor in the Pentagon Papers case had suspected that I had been the source of the 206,000, so they tried to introduce that into the case after my indictment and we were able to move to keep it out. Then it disappeared again because it wasn't in the indictment.
I would say my leaks in March 1968 had more effect than the Pentagon Papers did have on policy. I know that sounds peculiar, but the 1968 leaks were not only timely but they actually were very effective in the context of the 206,000. In combination with that, it was the big turning point.
That 206,000 would have meant calling up the reserves. That would be the equivalent now of putting in the draft, meaning you now have unlimited troops to work with. In those days, we had done everything we could up to 550,000 without the reserves. If you'd called up the reserves, you could now send several hundred thousand more over.
If we'd sent those troops, we would have invaded North Vietnam, that's what Westmoreland wanted to do. And if you'd invaded North Vietnam, you'd be next to China. And the upshot of that would almost certainly have been Chinese intervention and war with China. So all that was at stake.
In March of 1968 I was facing within weeks a decision that I understood, that I knew was a mistake, that might result in the use of nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh and the open-ended extension of the war which would lead to nuclear war with China. For that, I was ready to go to prison.
The difference that the next year's reading [of the Pentagon Papers] - starting just the next month - made, and meeting people in the War Resistance League, was that by the fall of 1969 I was ready to go to prison without that urgency, without the feeling that I had something that might change it. I'd just seen the 206,000 have a big effect and my leaks added to that. A year later, like Randy Keeler and like Rosa Parks and like others, I was now ready to give it up without the belief that it was going to be very effective or that it was going to change the war.
And without the belief that I was facing imminent escalation.
What are the lessons of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers?
They're separate. There's a quote in my book:
To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And 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.
That's Haldeman reporting to Nixon what Donald Rumsfeld actually said.
Now Rumsfeld was making the point that there was a downside of the Pentagon Papers for them because it might be applied to the presidency, to Nixon himself. Nixon's judgment was: Let's not worry about that, let's put out more stuff that makes other presidents look even worse. On this point, he was basically right. People did not infer from the Pentagon Papers that Nixon was lying to the same extent as the previous four. I hoped that they would, but they didn't.
Actually he wasn't saying things that were much of a lie, as Johnson did. He was just implying, very much through Kissinger's unattributed backgrounders, that he had changed the policies entirely and that he was determined to get out entirely without victory. That was false. As I've said, press conferences are a vehicle for lying to the public, backgrounders are a vehicle for lying to the press. Kissinger played the press wonderfully on that. Without the president having to lie, Kissinger would say things like, judge us by where we are six months from now, implying to various people that we'd be out in six months or in a year. That went on and on.
Do you now consider yourself anti-war under every circumstance?
No, I'm not a total pacifist. Obviously I wasn't when I was in the Marines or when I was in the Pentagon. For example, the British anti-aircraft gunners and Spitfire pilots who were firing at German bombers over London were not just justified in what they were doing but were doing exactly what needed to be done, even though this obviously involved lethal force.
Likewise, resistance to Hitler was justified. Of course, ever since, both the British when they wanted to invade Suez or the Americans in Indo-China, have wanted to equate all our adversaries with Hitler in malevolence and in the impossibility of alternative means of defending ourselves. In literally none of those cases since World War II have those analogies really been valid.
That doesn't mean that you can't fight anyone but Hitler, a literal Hitler. There have been a couple times when our cause was just in the sense of opposing oppression - that would apply to the first Gulf War - but where the means used were questionable.
I've gotten very skeptical about the case that any government, ours or any other, makes to its people and to the world for war. Put an extreme burden of proof on that. It wouldn't be wrong to call myself a near-pacifist, but certainly not an absolute pacifist.
Schedule of Ellsberg Interviews at Daily Kos
Part I, January 20, 2006 - The Pentagon Papers and the 1968 Leaks: Covers Ellsberg feeling that the Pentagon Papers ultimately proved ineffective in what he was trying to accomplish, but that leaks he did prior to them in 1968 were much more effective.
Part 2, January 21, 2006 - Judith Miller, the New York Times and Government-Controlled Media: Ellsberg speculates that Miller was "on the team" for the CIA - something he witnessed of several reporters during Vietnam - and that to a greater or lesser extent than the public realizes, we are dealing with a controlled press in this country.
Part 3, January 22, 2006 - The Cult of Secrecy in Government and Its Undermining of Democracy: Ellsberg discusses the undermining effects of government secrecy on the working of a practicing democracy, overclassification and the problems of signing oaths of secrecy to get clearances, which routinely leads to lying to Congress and courts during the course of investigations.
Part 4, January 27, 2006 - Whistleblowing and Effective Activism: Ellsberg talks about the hows and whys of whistleblowing - and importantly, when it's NOT worth the personal price - as well as what average American citizens can do to effectively put pressure on the government for change.
Part 5, January 28, 2006 - Iraq/Vietnam Parallels and Other Foreign Policy Fiascos: Ellsberg analyzes the obvious parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the two major differences - oil and strategic geographical importance - which he believes will keep us in Iraq for as long as 50 years.
Part 6, January 28, 2006 - Bush, the Next 9/11 and the Approaching Police State: Ellsberg discusses ... well, the title says it all.
Daniel Ellsberg's website.