Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Daniel Ellsberg reflects on the role the Pentagon Papers played in ending the war, and says he wishes he'd released them years earlier.
Apr 28, 2000 | Daniel Ellsberg is arguably the greatest whistle-blower in American history. Nearly 30 years after he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Ellsberg has become an important part of the greater story of the Vietnam War. His name now shows up everywhere, from coffee-table books on the American century to journalism school textbooks.
In 1971, Ellsberg, who had worked as an analyst under Secretary Robert McNamara at the Department of Defense, went public with the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page study of America's 30-year involvement in Indochina that led to the Vietnam War. The report, commissioned by the DOD, revealed government deception, miscalculation and bureaucratic arrogance. Among other things, it revealed that President Lyndon Johnson had been committing infantry to Vietnam while telling the nation that he had no long-range plans for the war. Most damning was the overall impression it gave that the U.S. government did not believe it was possible to win the war.
By giving the documents to Times correspondent Neil Sheehan, Ellsberg risked spending 115 years in the slammer. Indeed, he would later be charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy. The charges were eventually dropped by a federal judge, who wrote that a pattern of "gross government misconduct" -- including a break-in at Ellsberg's former psychiatrist's office that was linked to the White House -- was so appalling that the administration's retaliatory actions "offend the sense of justice."
The Nixon Justice Department responded quickly and furiously to the Times' publication of the classified documents on June 13, 1971, and just after the third installment was published, it secured a restraining order preventing further installments from being printed. The move surprised few, given the critical view the papers took of the war.
By then, however, the Washington Post's Ben Bagdikian had also obtained the documents -- which, as former publisher Katharine Graham recalled in her memoir, were so voluminous they wouldn't fit inside the suitcase Bagdikian used to fetch them -- and contributed to the unstoppable momentum by publishing more excerpts. Within two weeks, the case made its way to the Supreme Court and, in the most important prior-restraint case ever heard, the court ruled that the government had not shown compelling evidence to justify blocking publication.
At 69, Ellsberg is still a feisty activist, only he has shifted his focus in recent years from Vietnam to nuclear nonproliferation. He's also penning his memoirs, for which Viking Books won a six-figure bidding war.
During a telephone interview last week, Ellsberg reflected on the lessons of Vietnam and the more recent protests in Seattle and Washington. When Ellsberg compares today's protest movements with the antiwar activism of the 1960s, he is drawing a parallel that few others are qualified to make.
Looking back, what role do you think releasing the Pentagon Papers played in bringing an end to the Vietnam War?
It panicked Richard Nixon into criminal actions to silence me from revealing information about his secret Vietnam policy. Those criminal actions, when they were discovered in 1973, played a major role in his impeachment proceedings, which led to his resignation. I believe he intended to renew the bombing of North Vietnam in '73 or '74, so I think [the Pentagon Papers] did play a role in shortening our bombing of Vietnam and shortening the war by a few years.
Had he not reacted that way, the effect would not have been great because -- although the release of the papers did have an immediate and very large effect on public attitudes toward the war and their desire to see it end -- it did not directly cause Nixon to give up his hopes of winning or postponing a defeat indefinitely.
The actions that he took to keep me from revealing his secret threats of escalation were known to the people who were caught in the Watergate scandal. And these acts were the cancer on the presidency that led to his downfall.
The release of the Pentagon Papers changed your life. It forced you into the public eye and put you at great risk of prosecution. How do you feel about your decision today?
I thought it was right at the time and have never had any reason to question that since. I never thought, by the way, that I had a high chance of ending or shortening the war. I thought it was worth doing anyway -- telling the truth -- and hoped it might shorten the war. Since, in fact, it seems to have had quite a powerful effect, I'm all the more happy. My only regret is that I didn't do it a number of years earlier, when they might have had a much more powerful effect in averting the war or ending it. If I had released the papers in '64 or '65 when I was in the Pentagon, there might not have been any war. And we might have averted 58,000 American dead and millions of Vietnamese [deaths]. That's a heavy responsibility, but, unfortunately, I didn't imagine doing it at that time.
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