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Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,
by Daniel Ellsberg. Viking, 2002, 498 pages.
The Truth, At Last, About
Vietnam by Bruce Ramsey
In August 1964 there is news of a North Vietnamese attack
on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Then a second attack. President Johnson
gets on television and speaks to the American people. He brings foreboding of
war. He has "unequivocal" evidence, he says, that North Vietnamese PT boats have
made two "unprovoked" attacks on U.S. Navy ships "on routine patrol in
international waters."
| | Bruce
Ramsey is a journalist in Seattle. |
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Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst for the Department of Defense, knew better: the
ships had not been on a routine patrol. They had not been only in international
waters. The skipper had reported a second attack, but said later that his only
contact was by radar, and that he suspected that his men were shooting at a
bogey.
None of which Johnson told the American people or Congress, when he asked for
the authority to use military force "as the president determines" — and
which Congress gave him, by a vote in the Senate of 88 to 2.
"Secrets" is the story of the Vietnam war as Ellsberg saw it and thought about it
for seven years. It is a clear, logical, well-written book, and one of the best
to come out of the war.
Ellsberg came to the conclusion early on that Vietnam was a war of political
allegiances in which the edge went not to the side with the greatest firepower,
but to the side that cared most about winning. And that was not likely ever to be
the South Vietnamese, or the Americans.
One highlight of this book is Daniel Ellsberg's advice to Henry Kissinger on
what it's like to be cut in on official secrets. Ellsberg told him:
"You will feel like a fool for having studied, written and talked about these
subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without
having known of the existence of this information . . .
"That will last about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this
daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries
of hidden information, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have
it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others
don't — and that all those other people are fools . . .
"It will become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these
clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this
man be telling me if he knew what I know?' . . .
"You will deal with a person who doesn't have these clearances only from a
viewpoint of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go
away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In
effect, you will have to manipulate him." |
| What Ellsberg found in
the Pentagon Papers was that presidents all the way back to Truman had had good
advice. In particular, the risks were pointed out to Kennedy and Johnson, and
they ignored the warnings. |
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Kissinger listened to all this and said nothing. He had been named national
security adviser to President Nixon, but Nixon had not taken office, so it was
too early for him to evaluate the classified information about Vietnam. For
Ellsberg, it was old stuff. He had been in the war bureaucracy for years, with
access to the secret dispatches, and had turned against the Southeast Asian war
and wanted to stop it. And he was worried that the Nixon administration would
repeat the mistakes of the previous administrations. The book presents a
devastating portrait of Lyndon Johnson, who ran in 1964 as the peace candidate,
accusing Barry Goldwater of being for war. Goldwater was, in fact, for cranking
up the war — but so was Johnson. Not quite as much as Goldwater, but far
more than he revealed to the electorate. As in 1940, the peace candidate got down
to the serious business of escalation as soon as the election was over.
The theme of "Secrets" is that the fundamental problem with America's Vietnam
policy was not bad advice to Johnson or Kennedy about sending in advisers and
troops, or the failure to see a "quagmire." What Ellsberg found in the Pentagon
Papers was that presidents all the way back to Truman had had good advice. In
particular, the risks were pointed out to Kennedy and Johnson, and they ignored
the warnings. Remembering the embarrassment over the Democrats' having "lost"
China, they did not want their name identified with any further loss. And so they
were willing to gamble on poor odds, marketing their policy with lies.
As a Republican, Nixon had an opportunity to blame the war on the Democrats
and pull out, and, as Ellsberg explains, the Democrats were mainly to blame. But
instead Nixon decided he would extricate America "with honor" by substituting air
power for troops, covering his political weaknesses with high explosives.
"The president was part of the problem," Ellsberg writes:
"This was clearly a matter of his role, not of his personality or party. As I
was beginning to see it, the concentration of power within the executive branch
since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy 'failure'
upon one man, the president. At the same time it gave him enormous capability to
avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force and fraud.
Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not
fail to corrupt the human being who held it."
Ellsberg does not mention Franklin Roosevelt in this context, but that is what
"since World War II" implies. This is the foreign policy of a monarchy, not a
republic.
| Ellsberg came to the
conclusion early on that the would not be the side with the greatest firepower,
but to the side that cared most about winning — and that was not likely ever
to be the South Vietnamese. |
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Ellsberg also develops some powerful thoughts in this book about
responsibility. He quotes the story of an Army general who feels stabbed in the
back by Johnson, and who gets in his car and drives to the White House to hand
Johnson his resignation, but turns back at the gates; and how that general
afterward was ashamed of his failure to act.
Ellsberg thinks of what he would say if his son were drafted. He writes:
"I would tell my kids, I thought, that no one could make it all right for
them to carry a gun or shoot anyone just by telling them they had to. That would
have to be their choice, their entire responsibility. If I ever did it again
— I would tell them, as I now told myself — it would be because I chose
to do it . . . I would also examine very critically my own reasoning for it . . .
Responsibility for killing or being ready to kill was not something you could
delegate to someone else, even a president."
In was in that frame of mind that Ellsberg decided to "cast my whole vote"
against the war by leaking the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the lies of
Kennedy and Johnson, and of Truman and Eisenhower before them. The last part of
the book is about making that decision and carrying it out: how he came by the
papers, how he smuggled them out, how he tried to leak them through Sen. William
Fulbright, Sen. George McGovern, and others, and how he finally chose the New
York Times; and how that led to federal injunctions, a Supreme Court ruling, and
his own prosecution for leaking.
Disclosing papers to the public was not spying; it was leaking. This was the
first time in American history, he says, that anyone was prosecuted for a leak,
and it turned out that there was no clear law against it.
The New York Times won its case at the Supreme Court. Ellsberg won his case
when the judge dismissed it following the news that the Watergate burglars had
ransacked the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
"Secrets" has some delicious tidbits. There is Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S.
ambassador to Vietnam, dismissing the idea of fair elections in Vietnam by saying
that if he and Nixon had had a fair election in Illinois, they would be vice
president and president, respectively, and not Lyndon Johnson, a man who had
"spent most of his life rigging elections." There is Nixon, visiting Lodge in
Vietnam, endorsing the idea of Vietnamese elections "as long as you win." And
there is McGovern, promising to break the story of the Pentagon Papers and
welshing on the deal because he feared doing so would hurt his chances to become
president.
Critics will say this is a self-serving book, and I suppose it is. So are a
lot of good books. And this one tells a good story and fine illustration of the
dangers of giving too much political power to one man.
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