REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
By Daniel Ellsberg
Penguin, 2003
500 pages, $38(pb)
On the evening of October 1, 1969, Daniel Ellsberg left the Rand Corporation offices in California after a busy day. His briefcase was packed with top-secret Pentagon documents on the US war in Vietnam, which he intended to release to the world.
As he passed the security guard that evening, and on subsequent nights, Ellsberg knew that he could spend decades in prison if he was stopped. However, he shared a personal courage, the respect for truth and a passion for humanity with the Vietnamese resistance movement, and the US anti-war movement, that was to win out against the firepower and lies of the US military and political machines.
The Pentagon had commissioned the Rand Corporation "think-tank" to produce the 7000-page, 42-volume secret history of the US war in Vietnam, known as the "Pentagon Papers". There was a sensation when they were leaked by Ellsberg.
The Pentagon Papers exposed Washington's calculated aggression against the people of Vietnam. A quarter of a century of US savagery in Vietnam, and the deliberate lies told by US governments to deceive the US people about it, were documented in the words of the highest-level war planners, including four presidents. The leak fuelled the anti-war movement for its final victory push.
As he recounts in his stirring memoir, Secrets, Ellsberg had been an anti-communist liberal and a Democratic Party intellectual committed to winning the war in Vietnam. His specialist interest at the Rand Corporation was governmental crisis decision-making, and Vietnam was a tempting case study.
In 1964, Ellsberg accepted a job as special assistant to the assistant secretary of defence in President Lyndon Johnson's administration.
Day one in his new job was memorable. For 24 dramatic hours, he analysed cables from the USS Maddox, a US Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, which appeared to show that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked the ship with torpedos in international waters. Surely an unprovoked act of aggression?
In "retaliation", Washington ordered the bombing of North Vietnam and rushed through US Congress the "Tonkin Gulf resolution", a blank cheque authorisation for full-scale war against Vietnam. The resolution passed unanimously.
This was Ellsberg's first brush with government dishonesty. There had been no torpedo attack. The last cable suggested there had only been a fight with "radar ghosts" due to freak weather conditions and excitable sonar operators. Ellsberg was disturbed over this fictitious pretext for war, and he continued to marvel at the daily political art of deception as President Johnson glibly lied that "we seek no wider war".
A two-year stint in Vietnam to observe "pacification" (an Orwellian phrase for rural counter-revolution) finally convinced Ellsberg that the Communist-led national liberation movement had the political support of the great majority of Vietnamese people, and that the US-installed, landlord-based puppet dictators of the South could not survive, even with the backing of massive US force. With his experience as a US marine, Ellsberg had gone on patrol and observed burning villages, a little girl hugging a blackened plastic doll from the ashes, forests turned to deserts, peasants hunted from the air like animals — finally, he writes, "I saw Vietnam".
As Ellsberg began work on the top-secret History of US decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68 for US defence secretary Robert McNamara, he concluded that the US never had any right to be in Vietnam. He discovered — from "eyes only for the president" and other confidential material — that Vietnam's people had always been committed to national independence and that communist "North Vietnam" had not started the war by invading "democratic" "South Vietnam".
He learned that the partitioning of Vietnam, following the Vietnamese people's defeat of the French colonialists in 1954, was supposed to be only temporary pending national elections scheduled for 1956, as was internationally agreed in the Geneva Accords, and that Ho Chi Minh's forces would have won those elections easily and democratically. But the US had opposed Vietnam "going communist" and gaining its independence at every step of the way, from arming and financing the French from 1946 and illegally defying the Geneva Accords by installing dictators in the South, to Washington launching its own war.
Ellsberg found that US presidents' — Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Johnson — talk about the US protecting "freedom" and "democracy" in Vietnam was cynical public relations to mask their real concern that the positive example of an independent and (the greatest sin of all) Marxist Vietnam would have harmed the business investment climate in all South-East Asia. The secret record showed that what Ellsberg had once considered the "overblown rhetoric" of radical war critics was in fact right on the mark.
Every president had secretly planned to escalate the war, while lying about it. President Richard Nixon, too, followed the pattern. Elected on the promise to bring "peace with honour", and "Vietnamising" the war in order to reduce the number of US ground troops, he was secretly planning a massive escalation of aerial bombing and a widening of the war to Cambodia and Laos.
Vietnam, concluded Ellsberg, was no longer a "problem to be solved", but a crime to be ended. "On the basis of the record ever since 1946", Ellsberg writes, "telling truth to presidents, privately, confidentially — what I and my colleagues regarded as the highest calling and greatest opportunity we could imagine to serve our country — looked entirely unpromising as a way to end the war".
Neither would "telling truth to power" fulfil his responsibility as a citizen.
When an anti-war activist he admired was imprisoned for draft resistance, Ellsberg discovered the liberating power of political action. Handing out anti-conscription leaflets on a street corner in Philadelphia was far removed from the privileged insider that had been his career, but he felt more powerful. He had joined a movement.
Still a trusted civil servant, however, Ellsberg had something in his safe at the Rand Corporation which he could contribute to the anti-war movement: the "documentary evidence of lying by four presidents and their administrations over 23 years to conceal plans and actions of mass murder". With dissident former Rand analyst Tony Russo, and their families, they hit the photocopiers.
Having no luck with any politician willing to be the conduit (only late in the piece did he find a maverick senator from Alaska willing to read the papers into the parliamentary record), Ellsberg passed the material to the New York Times in 1971. A panicked Nixon slapped an injunction on further publication after three instalments, but 17 other newspapers were fed the forbidden fruit as Ellsberg went underground, hiding from an FBI "manhunt" for 12 days.
When Ellsberg surfaced, he faced 12 charges and 115 years in prison. However, the Nixon administration was in a political crisis — the war was going badly, so too was the economy, and the truth was now roaming the streets. Nixon's national security adviser Henry Kissinger described Ellsberg as "the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs". The costs were to trigger the undoing of Nixon, and the war.
Unsure whether a jury would convict Ellsberg, Nixon set up a personal dirty tricks squad, the Special Investigations Unit (jocularly called the "plumbers" by Nixon), headed by ex-CIA heavy Howard Hunt to gather dirt on Ellsberg in order to damage his reputation and blackmail him into not releasing more confidential information.
Hunt used anti-communist Cuban exiles to burgle the office of Ellsberg's psychoanalyst. They also attempted to assault Ellsberg at an anti-war rally in 1972. The "plumbers" went on to burgle the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building ... and the rest is history.
It had all come unstuck for Nixon — the prosecution of Ellsberg (which collapsed because of government misconduct), the crimes of the White House "plumbers", the war in Vietnam. Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers had a lot to do with ending the war and triggering the American people's loss of trust in the government. Ellsberg had defied "national security", at great personal risk, to serve truth and resist a criminal war.
Ellsberg and other whistleblowers who choose truth over lies, and humanity over slaughter, have an integrity and honour unimaginable to war-fighting presidents and prime ministers, old and new, who need to wrap their murderous wars in a bodysuit of lies.
From Green Left Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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