Michael Ellsberg

“insisted they could not be considered U.S. provocations:” In an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Wayne Morse suggested that our destroyers might actually have been associated with the “South Vietnamese” raids, and that anyway, the North Vietnamese might reasonably have believed this. (His suspicion, it turned out, had been stimulated by a call from someone in the Pentagon-not me, I regret to say-someone “in uniform” who told him that what the Administration was saying about the situation did not include all the facts. He suggested that the Senator question the Administration on the location of the Maddox and on its true mission; if all the facts were known, they would reveal that the U.S. was playing a provocative role in the Tonkin Gulf).

Secretary McNamara responded: “First, our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any. I want to make that very clear to you. . . . The Maddox was operating in international waters, was carrying out a routine patrol of the type we carry out all over the world. It was not informed of, was not aware of, had no evidence of, and so far as I know today has no knowledge of any South Vietnamese actions in connection with the two islands that Senator Morse referred to. . . . I say this flatly; this is the fact.” (Austin, 68).

There was a certain kind of truth to this. There were indeed no “South Vietnamese” actions against North Vietnam. The actions were American. But McNamara’s briefing of the Senators went beyond simply obscuring this. On August 3, and again on August 6, he knowingly misidentified the operations that preceded the August 2 attack (and again, the night before the alleged second attack, of which the Senators were told nothing). He said “that whatever action had taken place against these North Vietnamese islands had been part of an anti-infiltration operation being conducted by a fleet of coastal patrol junks the US had helped South Vietnam to organize in December 1961. . . . As part of that, as I reported to you earlier this week [August 3] we understand that the South Vietnamese sea force carried out patrol action around these islands and actually shelled the parts they felt were associated with this infiltration. . . . Our ships had absolutely no knowledge of it, were not connected with it.”

In contrast, Captain Herrick of the Maddox cabled on August 3: “Evaluation of info from various sources indicates DRV considers [my] patrol directly involved with 34-A ops. DRV considers U.S. ships present as enemies because of these ops and have already indicated their readiness to treat us in that category.”

Herrick had been listening to Hanoi radio and to intercepts of North Vietnamese messages about the raids the night of August 3-4 (i.e., just before the second alleged attack on his ship). Two Swift boats (the Norwegian-made CIA patrol boats) had bombarded a radar installation on Cape Vinh Son, while two others attacked a neighboring security post in Rhon River estuary. One was pursued for an hour by a NVN patrol craft. It was the first naval bombardment of the North Vietnamese mainland.

Herrick had earlier requested termination of his patrol, for the reason given in his cable. The Seventh Fleet commander had made the same proposal, to terminate it on the evening of August 4 (before the alleged attack) to avoid any entanglement with the 34A operations. But Admiral Moorer, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, ordered the patrol lengthened by two days, though it was to stay north of a certain latitude to avoid “interference with 34-A ops.” Moorer also hoped, after August 2, that “The above patrol will. . . . (B) Possibly draw [North Vietnamese naval patrol boats] to northward away from area of 34A ops.”

I don’t recall exactly when I first saw this cable. In In Retrospect, McNamara claims he didn’t know at the time that Herrick was well aware of the 34A operations and that his testimony to the contrary was “honest but wrong.” This might be true, for this one detail. But he certainly knew-even I did at the time-that all other aspects of the statement above, about Navy ignorance of and lack of coordination with 34A were false. This applies above all to his statements then and in his 1995 book about the “South Vietnamese actions.” Over thirty after the events, McNamara was still speaking in In Retrospect of “CIA support for South Vietnamese covert operations against North Vietnam, code-named Plan 34A…The CIA supported the South Vietnamese 34A operations, and MACV maintained close contact with them…” (129). I must repeat: as he knows, these were 100% US operations, utilizing some South Vietnamese personnel along with (as he acknowledges) foreign mercenary crews, totally planned and controlled by the US, through MACV, CIA and CINCPAC; some people in the GVN had very limited knowledge of the operations, but no hand in planning or managing them.

I can only speculate why Secretary McNamara, unusually candid about many things in his memoir, feels a need to maintain this particular cover story so long after the true facts have been revealed by others. He does criticize President Johnson for using the Tonkin Gulf Resolution later as sufficient authorization for escalation that the Congress did not mean to authorize at that time. Apparently what he does not wish to acknowledge even at this late date is that at the time he was supporting the Administration request for authority to commence direct use of force if and as the President might see fit in the future, the US was already, at that time executing acts of war against North Vietnam, without the knowledge or consent of Congress.

Another motive that may be at work is that Robert McNamara, in his various books, is strikingly unwilling to acknowledge that he personally ever knowingly misled or lied to Congress or the public. (He does admit, and deplore in retrospect, that the President chose to mislead or conceal intentions and programs at times; but he never acknowledges the obvious fact that he himself , in his service to the President, frequently participated in these deceptions.) Thus, in this same passage as above, he says that Senator Morse had been present when “Dean, Bus, and I briefed senators on 34A,” referring to August 3 briefings (137). He never described to the Senators the actual 34A operations; he described instead, deceptively, the South Vietnamese anti-infiltration junk operation, an entirely different program, which actually was run by the South Vietnamese with US “support.” His assertion to the Senators and others that the July 31st raid was part of this program was knowingly false; as was his statement that there was no such activity on August 3rd, hence that the alleged second attack was “unprovoked.” The effect of his persistence in protecting the Administration and himself personally from charges of deception (or in the above instance, of what Senator Morse was ready to call “aggression”) is to continue to muddy the historical record and to thwart, in important respects, the process of historical understanding and national self-awareness that, I don’t doubt at all, he sincerely wishes to further.

“I didn’t say anything to John, and the situation never arose:” Later in Saigon,General Lansdale told me he believed he had been fired by McNamara under circumstances such as those McNaughton feared. He said in the fall of 1963, McNamara had told him to come with him to the White House for a meeting with the President. With McNamara the only other one present, Kennedy had told Lansdale he was ready to send Lansdale back to Vietnam. Lansdale had hoped for an assignment like that ever since Kennedy’s Inauguration.

Just a few months earlier in Vietnam, forces under the influence of President Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had raided Buddhist pagodas and arrested many monks involved in the anti-government Struggle Movement that had been launched that spring with a series of dramatic immolations. A controversial cable, cleared hastily in Washington over a weekend, had directed Ambassador Lodge to respond encouragingly to South Vietnamese generals who had inquired about US attitudes toward a military coup. Diem should be pressed to send Nhu and his wife out of the country, the cable said. If Diem refused to separate himself from Nhu, then the US was ready to contemplate that Diem himself must go.

Lodge had been skeptical that Diem would ever get rid of Nhu, but it had been suggested to President Kennedy-by Rufus Phillips, a member of Lansdale’s team in the fifties and now in charge of AID support to the strategic hamlet program-that if there was any man who could persuade him, that was Ed Lansdale. (Unlike most American officials who dealt with Diem, Lansdale truly liked him.) So McNamara was asked to bring his assistant over to the Oval Office.

Lansdale told me that President Kennedy said he wanted him to go over to try to influence Diem to send Nhu out of the country, along with his wife, the hugely unpopular Madame Nhu. He asked if Lansdale was willing to go with that mission. Lansdale said yes. Then Kennedy said to him, “But if that didn’t work out, or I changed my mind and decided that we had to get rid of Diem himself, would you be able to go along with that?”

As Lansdale told me the story, Kennedy did not use the words “kill” or “assassinate” in connection with Diem, but Lansdale said he was in no doubt that this was what was being discussed. Lansdale didn’t make clear to me, nor perhaps was he entirely clear himself, whether Kennedy was proposing that Lansdale actually be in charge of carrying out the elimination of Diem. As I understood him, Kennedy was asking him, as a minimum, whether he could be involved directly in a policy that might come to involve the elimination of Diem. Would it involve him in personal anguish, more than he could accept or than the President would wish to inflict on him? More specifically, could he be counted on to be loyal, not to obstruct it or to tell about it (or to warn Diem!), not to resign or withdraw visibly if the policy moved in that direction?

Telling me the story, Lansdale relived the incident. He hesitated, his face got troubled, he shook his head slowly and sadly as he said, “No, Mr. President, I couldn’t do that. Diem is my friend.” It was clear as he said that, he told me, that he would not be going to Vietnam. The expression on his face as he shook his head was not that of someone reproving the President for an untoward suggestion but that of someone who felt he had no choice but to relinquish an opportunity he had wanted for years.

The President seemed to understand his response and didn’t say anything unfriendly or express disappointment. But the discussion was over. In McNamara’s limousine on the way back to the Pentagon the Secretary was furious. He hadn’t gotten on with Lansdale for a long time and this was the last straw. He said to Lansdale, “You don’t talk to the President of the United States that way. When he asks you to do something, you don’t tell him you won’t do it.” Undoubtedly he felt personally embarrassed at having brought Lansdale over to the Oval Office. Lansdale said that McNamara never spoke to him again. Shortly after that Lansdale was fired by McNamara. He found a job with the Food for Peace program. On November 2, 1963, he was clearing out his desk in the Pentagon when he got the word that Diem and Nhu had been killed.

“Forty-ninth Regiment of the Twenty-fifth division:” I told the group that I had talked to the adviser to the regiment, in the headquarters under the bridge, and he told me, “This is the worst regiment in the Vietnamese Army,” which was quite an extreme statement to make. But it might have been true, because, I said, it was generally believed (I was quoting Vann) that the 25th and the 5th were the two worst divisions in ARVN. That last remark led Ambassador Porter, after the meeting, to request Westmoreland to conduct a study of these two divisions. The subsequent study by MACV focused-rather pedantically, I thought-on my statement that these were literally the two worst divisions in Vietnam. The study concluded that this appraisal was correct. (As usual, John had spoken carefully). It said that the only chance for progress in these divisions, and hence for progress in III Corps, was for the commanders to be replaced.

It recommended that Westmoreland, or if necessary Lodge, should request that change at the highest GVN levels. But Westmoreland rejected that course, on the grounds, first, that it was or might be counterproductive or infeasible; and second that it was unnecessary. That was in April. In June, or two months after the MACV study had recommended their removal, the commanders of both divisions were promoted from colonel to general. They remained in command a year and a half later, though the commander of the 25th went on sick leave in late 1967 after the VC overran the province capital of Hau Nghia.

“This is a secretary of state?”: Later that talk, when I felt I had gained his confidence, I asked him a question that had been suggested to me by Bud Southard, a CIA analyst who had done a highly-classified study of the crisis earlier and had a feeling that some crucial things were missing from the written record. Had Bobby himself passed on a direct threat on the missiles from the President to the Russians at the climax of the crisis, just before Khrushchev began dismantling them on Sunday morning?

I asked him if there was a time-limit for removal of the missiles by Khrushchev. (Whether you called it a threat or a warning or a statement of fact, that would define it in diplomatic terms as an ultimatum.) Yes, Bobby said: “I told him he had 48 hours.”

This had never come on in public and wasn’t even in the secret record. (Much later an equally sensitive matter came out-that Bobby had in effect offered a secret deal on our missiles in Turkey, which would be removed if the Soviet missiles left Cuba.) The next day I decided I needed to pin down some details and I called his office from the Pentagon. He came on the phone and I told him I wanted to follow up what he had told me the day before about his talk with Dobrynin. He said, “No, I don’t want to talk about that. I shouldn’t have told you about that.”

I said, “I understand. My report is going to be highly classified, but I won’t put any of this in my report at all. I just wanted to make sure I understood you myself.”

He said, “No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to talk about this any more, even with you.”

I said, “Ah, right. Thank you.” The phone clicked.

“The figures on enemy strength:” After Steadman’s memo about the leaks, Don Stewart, chief security investigator in the Pentagon, was asked by the FBI to work on finding the source. After reading in the Wall Street Journal about the hundred FBI agents pursuing the source of leaks, I spent some anxious nights, expecting at any moment the arrival of agents at my door. They never arrived.

In a later article—post-Pentagon Papers—Jack Anderson says that Stewart pretty quickly narrowed the list of suspects behind the leaks to me. In a memo to J. Edgar Hoover on March 29, Stewart specifically identified me as the source and urged my prosecution, along with Sheehan, under the espionage act. A top Clifford aide “told him the Secretary and the Press are getting along fine and this could upset relations.

This attitude was relayed to the CIA whose secrets had been compromised, but somehow a CIA official got the mistaken impression that the Pentagon wanted to kill the investigation of both cases, not just the probe of Sheehan. The CIA thereafter informed the Justice Department it had no interest in pursuing the investigation. So the Justice Department advised the FBI to drop the investigation of both Sheehan and me. “Thus the dovish Ellsberg was left without so much as a question raised in his record, free to spring his great leak three years later.”

“But neither of them made it possible for most people to know that:” Two people who did know it were Presidents Johnson and Thieu; so they both, covertly, gave critical help to Nixon. Johnson, toward the end of the campaign, was reading intercepts of Nixon’s assurances to Thieu, through intermediaries, that the Thieu regime would get greater support from Nixon than from Humphrey, and that therefore Thieu should refuse, before the election, to go to Paris for negotiations, thereby probably ensuring the defeat of Humphrey and the election of Nixon. (See note for p. 227, below.)

Johnson regarded this as criminal, even “treasonable,” interference-which it very arguably was-in a diplomatic process by a private individual for domestic political gain. (Presidents regard diplomacy for domestic political gain as their own exclusive prerogative.) Yet, though Johnson could almost surely have swung the by-then-close election to Humphrey s simply by revealing the evidence on this, he chose not to do so.

Almost surely one ingredient in this decision was that he believed, in effect, what Nixon’s representatives were telling Thieu: that Thieu would get stronger support from Nixon than from Humphrey. And Johnson preferred to have his policy vindicated by someone who would continue it, hopefully successfully, even a Republican, than to elect a successor from his own administration who would abandon it. (See Gardner, 492-516; Witcover, 396-444, and Bundy, 35-48.)

“An indelible impression was created:” The article was evidently in press before the appointment was made; Kissinger’s observation about Nixon at RAND on November 8 is pretty strong evidence that he had no advance inkling of the offer, or even hopes for it. Bill Bundy, who became managing editor of Foreign Affairs a year later, says “Legend at the magazine had it that Kissinger tried at the last minute to withdraw the article lest it embarrass him with Nixon. However, the editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, refused to consider this, arguing that it was extraordinarily timely and important and that readers would understand its unofficial status” (Bundy, 552n).

Actually, the article and its timing served Nixon’s purposes wonderfully well, precisely because readers and media pundits drew the opposite impression, namely that it was a quasi- official statement (as if it had been written, and approved by the President, after Kissinger’s appointment or while he was in the White House). Not just for months but for years (and to a considerable extent, to this day) this impression bought Nixon the benefit of the doubt on his Vietnam policy from liberals and moderate doves, in their belief that Kissinger had not changed his views or priorities from those he had expressed privately over the previous year, and that Nixon evidently agreed with them.

“But it was a secret:” Was Henry Kissinger himself ever sincere in proposing that the US limit its objectives to procuring a “decent interval” before a Communist flag flew over Saigon? I suspect that he was, for most of 1968 (and perhaps earlier). But for all practical purposes he secretly jettisoned any such notion when he went to work for Nixon, to whom it was unthinkable. Kissinger became the enthusiastic manager of Nixon’s secret plan to preclude indefinitely-in part by secret threats and demonstrations of Nixon’s willingness to escalate-any such Communist takeover.

Kissinger did not, however, inform his liberal friends in universities and the media, with whom he remained in private contact, that he had shifted gears. So until the invasion of Cambodia, Nixon got the benefit of the mistaken belief that he had accepted Kissinger’s previous plan for a disguised withdrawal.

Did Kissinger himself retain a private attachment to the notion of a “decent interval” as an aim? Did he differ from the President, in other words, in continuing to find this acceptable? Mort Halperin, who worked directly for him in the White House as his deputy in the first half of 1969, tells me that this is not an operationally meaningful question. “Henry Kissinger had one absolute working principle,” he says. “Find out what President Nixon wanted, and then recommend it to him.”

If the President didn’t seem to know what he wanted, initially, Halperin says, Kissinger would suggest various ideas until he sense presidential interest in or attraction to one of them. Then he would recommend that. To ask whether, after that point, Kissinger “had” a private opinion that was contrary to what he believed his boss wanted is not, Halperin believes, really meaningful: and certainly not ascertainable. There was a practical aspect to this. To have acted or even thought otherwise would have been to lose private access to the President.

“But he came up with another, more telling criticism:” What makes this of interest is that Nixon’s secret plan—as discussed later—the strategy he actually followed in 1969 and later, was above all a threat strategy, of a sort I hadn’t focused on in my study, either as a separate option or in any of the sub-options. It was at the same time a “win” strategy: not in the still-current Rusk-JCS sense that I was ruling out here, but in a modified sense, a “moderate win,” that Hanoi would unquestionably have regarded as defeat for its own and the NLF’s goals, and which they were prepared to fight forever and make any amount of sacrifice to avert

“‘Although the French in Indochina have made far-reaching paper concessions:'” In the summer of 1971, the twenty-fifth year of the Indochina War, I was about to leave Cambridge for a court appearance in Los Angeles, when someone mentioned to me that John Carter Vincent was living in retirement in Cambridge. I called his number and his wife invited me to come over right away, on my way to the airport. She and her husband met me at the door of their large house in Cambridge and greeted me very warmly. They brought me into a sitting room filled with Asian antiquities and hangings from their long service in the Orient.

Vincent was one of the most distinguished of the Foreign Service officers who was forced into early retirement for having been as foresighted and candid about the course of the Chinese civil war as he had earlier been about the prospects of the French colonial reconquest. I stayed as long as I could, risking my flight, to express my thanks for a performance of official truth-telling that had helped me to arrive where I was that day: on my way to arraignment, for sharing with the public, among other things, his own, still-classified early forecast to Acheson. I told him of the unforgettable impression it had made on me; it was something I particularly wanted other Americans to see. I asked him if he actually remembered the report he had made. He said, “Oh, yes, I remember it very well. I said, ‘Guerrilla warfare may continue…” He paused. “What did I say? Ten years? Fifteen years?”

“You said: ‘Indefinitely.'”

I had to leave. His wife had left the room for a moment, and she met me at the door and pressed into my hand a slip of paper, then hugged me goodbye. They both waved me off as I left in the taxi. I unfolded the strip of paper. She had written out for me a one-line quotation in French: it said, “The only weapon we have left is not to forget.“

“‘We have not urged the French to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh:'” This extremely illuminating discussion is worth reading in full. Regrettably, it is not included in either the Beacon or Bantam editions of the Pentagon Papers; Books 8, 9, and 10 of the GPO edition remain essential for many documents of the 1945-60 period such as this one.

The month I read this, the chance of including Ho Chi Minh in a political solution had just expired. Ho died in August 1969 (just after rejecting a secret ultimatum by President Nixon that projected the permanent exclusion of Communists or their associates in the struggle against the French and the Americans from sharing governmental power in Saigon). To the day of his death-and probably beyond-he remained by far the most popular and respected figure in every part of Vietnam. Walt Rostow, for one, disputed this in an interview for the movie Hearts and Mindsreleased in 1974. He was shown asserting that “By the late Fifties, Ho Chi Minh couldn’t be elected dogcatcher in Vietnam.” That judgment was followed in the film by my own, responding to his: “Ho Chi Minh, dead, could defeat any candidate we ever backed in Vietnam.” That remained a good bet.

“Since at least the late 1940s:” Tran Ngoc Chau, recounting his experience as Viet Minh guerrilla and officer from 1945 to 1950, told me recently that it was precisely American support to the French in the earliest days that convinced many Vietnamese they must accept Communist leadership of the resistance, in order to get Soviet (and later Chinese) help. Chau said that if they had been fighting the French alone, they would not have needed outside help so urgently, and they would have preferred other leadership. Many Vietnamese who supported the Viet Minh and later the NLF were not at all unaware of the shortcomings and costs of Communist leadership and probable rule. But confronting the wealth of the United States standing behind France, they simply saw no alternative path to independence, which they judged to be worth the cost. I commented that that seemed a rather sophisticated argument to ascribe to peasants, or even intellectuals in the cities. How would they have known of the stance of the U.S. at the time? (I didn’t know it, as an American, till twenty years later).

“The Viet Minh told them,” he said. It was what he himself had been told as a regimental political officer, and what he had passed on. Given the reality of this message, Chau points out, the US acquired an ineradicable taint in Vietnamese eyes, of which later Americans were scarcely aware, as the allies and crucial supporters of French colonial efforts. Later American support of a nominally “independent” regime in Saigon, actually an American creation and creature, did nothing to change this image, which was a fatal handicap in later efforts to contain the reconstituted Vietnamese independence movement.

But there was a tragic element in what he was telling me. I had heard that note once before. In the midst of my reading in 1969, I had asked Hoang Van Chi whether he felt North Vietnam, his native region, would be better off today if Ho Chi Minh had not headed the revolution. He had been an official of the Viet Minh during the war against the French. He said, “Yes,” right away. That didn’t surprise me, since he was a strong anti-communist. I asked him to go into more detail, just how it would have been better, expecting him to start out from his well-known criticisms of the communist land reform campaign and authoritarian controls. He said, “My country would not have been divided and destroyed.”

He went on: “If Ho Chi Minh had not headed the liberation someone else would have, not a Communist. If one other than a Communist had headed the liberation movement against the French, the United States would never have supported the French with money, weapons, planes, and napalm, and many of my countrymen would not have died. Moreover, the liberation would have applied to the entire country.”

“In terms of the UN Charter, and of our own avowed ideals:” Our role had defied every principle of self-determination from the beginning, and violated our international assurances at Geneva since 1954. In the technical language of Nuremberg-American language ratified by the UN in 1951-it was a “crime against peace.” “Crimes against peace; namely, planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing” (Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1945); see Quincy Wright, The Role of International Law (New York, 1961), 108; and see Richard Falk, ed., Vietnam and International Law, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1967, 69).

Moreover, the air attacks on North Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 appear to meet every legal test of “aggression,” or illegal use of armed force in international relations (Wright, 59-65). Even before that, however, the U.S. Government, gave a unilateral “international assurance”-in binding fashion-that it would “refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb” the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, which called for nationwide elections-i.e., throughout Vietnam, which was regarded by all as one nation-in July, 1956 (PP, Gravel ed., vol. 1, 570-72). As the Pentagon papers reveal unequivocally, we proceeded to supply arms and to pay the entire budget of an army and police force devoted to repressing by force every element in “South Vietnam” that favored the honoring of the Accords, from 1954 to the present; while a regime totally dependent on our arms and money refused even to discuss the implementation of the Accords.

“I didn’t expect him to say more over the phone:” Just as well, since he learned years later that his phone—along with 16 others of NSC staffers and journalists—was being tapped at this time by the FBI, on orders of the White House. The program of illegal wiretaps (they were not court-ordered, and in fact, on Hoover’s orders, all records of them were kept out of the Bureau’s official record-keeping) had been triggered by a story by William Beecher in the New York Times describing the secret bombing of Cambodia (see Secrets, pp. 260, 330-331).

Those involved in the taps, requested by Kissinger for the President, might feel some vindication at my account of my discussions with Halperin, except that it should be noted that he was not talking to a journalist-years of tapping all his phone calls uncovered no unauthorized disclosures to journalists or other outsiders—but to someone with a Top Secret clearance who had worked on Vietnam policy as a consultant in the White House that same year. In fact, it was precisely because I myself had drafted a list of Vietnam Options for the President that he was able, and felt free, to allude to a policy choice as concisely and cryptically as he did.

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“Fear of that particular penalty:” Nearly all such officials preserve the hope of serving officially in future administrations, in their own parties or even under the opposing party, whether as officials, ambassadors, members or chairmen of panels, or at least as consultants, with access to officials and to privileged information. They protect their credentials as “responsible” candidates for such trust and service literally to their dying day.

Maintaining their availability for future positions of trust is perfectly compatible with being publicly critical of particular current policies, especially of the opposition party, so long as this observes certain limits. There must be no serious criticism of the past policies of administrations in which they served, and especially of presidents from their own parties. No revelation of secrets, no embarrassing quotations. Above all, no imputation that a president or other high official lied or broke the law, or acted in a morally questionable manner, or acted in matters of war and peace for reasons of political self-interest.

I knew what I was doing to my future employability when I came to violate all these constraints. And by the same token, I could understand the reserve of current officials or those who still wanted to preserve their official access and influence and prospects of future careers, even though I had concluded that such restraint was incompatible with acting effectively to end our involvement. But the degree of self-censorship even late in life, in post-retirement memoirs by former officials, remains striking.

“The diary of Nixon chief of staff:” H. R. Haldeman’s diary (published in 1994):

September 2, 1969, at Camp David:

September 29, 1969: “K got his Green Beret trial turned off, with Resor dropping the charges because no CIA witnesses.”

“I expected the FBI to call any day:” On April 28, 1970, the FBI went to Harry Rowan with a report that I’d given the Pentagon Papers to Fulbright. Whatever his personal reaction to this report, Harry told them, “That wouldn’t be a security breach; Fulbright is entitled to have them.” He went on to report that I would be giving up my clearances anyway, now that I was going to MIT.

Harry didn’t tell me about this interview, since the FBI investigation was ongoing. But in fact, the FBI terminated their investigation at this point, because of risk of “embarrassment to the Bureau” by crossing Fulbright. (Evidence of all this was later withheld, improperly, during my trial, until the last week, when the raw FBI reports, found in Howard Hunt’s White House safe, were turned over to me.) I knew nothing of this, while I continued to work part-time for RAND and continued copying the Pentagon Papers up until September. I had indeed given the Papers to Fulbright, by this time, but it remained unclear what, if anything he would do with them.

“The word he used for the impression the chief executive made on him was ‘insane:'” Interestingly, it was less than twenty-four hours after I heard this from Mathias that President Nixon left the White House alone with his valet, Manolo Sanchez, at 4:30 AM Sunday morning, to hold discussions at the Lincoln Memorial with some of the hundred thousand students who were pouring into the city to protest his invasion. Several of these were reported in the Washington Post the next day to have received the impression from his comments to them, which centered on surfing in California and football teams, that the President seemed out of his mind.

Anthony Summers, in his recent book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Penguin, 2000, 361-368) reports a number of observers who were highly concerned about the President’s mental stability, precisely during this episode, but also on other occasions. (Oddly, Summers does not draw a connection between Nixon’s mental state during this crisis, in which he was observably upset and depressed by the public reaction to his invasion, and Summers’ own revelation of Nixon’s reliance on Dilantin, a highly active drug intended to prevent seizures but “prescribed” to him for depression by a rich funder, not a doctor.)

“Hitler’s tactic, as such, was in the mind of the top White House advisor:” Some have inferred that Nixon actually got the idea of the tactic of unpredictability from me, via Kissinger. That disquieting thought occurred to me, too, when I first saw the phrase “Madman Theory” in Haldeman’s memoirs, until I noted that Nixon was using it in 1968, well before he had begun a relationship with Rockefeller’s man Kissinger.

Nor for that matter did Kissinger need stimulus from me for the basic idea. He had repeatedly endorsed the practice of deliberate ambiguity and unpredictability in connection with first-use nuclear threats in his early writings and his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, published in 1957 two years before my lecture on the “uses of madness.” It was also a theme of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in his strategy of “brinkmanship” during the Eisenhower-Nixon era. (Understandably, neither of them, extolling this tactic for the US, stigmatized it by using the word “madness” or associating it with Hitler.) No doubt this notion of Kissinger’s was part of what Nixon admired in Kissinger’s book, and what may have attracted him to Kissinger as an assistant, just as conversely it was what I and some others at RAND most deplored in the nuclear policies of Dulles, Nixon, and Kissinger.

“Cambodia was undertaken for very complicated reasons:” I guessed, from leaks that had come out, that he meant that Nixon’s decision to send American troops into Cambodia, which the Joint Chiefs had not proposed, had a mix of domestic political motives and diplomatic coercive aims that went beyond narrow military benefits. Nixon reportedly was furious at Congress for turning down both Haynsworth and Carswell for the Supreme Court, and he was in a mood to “show them who was boss” by a display of Executive initiative: invading a neutral country! And he wanted to demonstrate to Hanoi, China and the Soviet Union his unpredictability, his willingness to escalate beyond the bounds of what LBJ had been willing to do, even the bounds of rationality, that he wouldn’t be held back by domestic constraints: the “madman theory” Kissinger had recalled in his opening comments in front of me and Lloyd Shearer.

No doubt that combination of motives looked unprecedented, sui generis, to Nixon and Kissinger; yet it was a mixture of domestic and external motives very similar to the brew that yielded the Tonkin Gulf incidents six years earlier, during the campaign against Goldwater. Each official in a position like Kissinger’s—high enough to know the bearing of domestic political considerations and also the president’s private strategy—thought that, unlike their predecessors, the president had very special considerations in mind that called for this particular judgment and escalation: reasons that they were hiding from the public.

What they didn’t know was how similar these reasons were to the ones that had moved their predecessors to similar actions. They were ignorant because those predecessors had hidden these reasons from them as members of the public. Thus each person in those offices thought his predecessors had made wrong decisions for stupid ideological and geopolitical reasons, where he was making the same decisions for quite different, very clever, subtle and complicated reasons, including domestic political calculations. And so, year after year, the war went on.

“He had often shown great concern:” In Fulbright: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) Randall B. Woods quotes from an Apri1 1, 1971 memo from Jones to Fulbright:

In the end, when I finally did make my first public statement on coming out of hiding for arraignment, I had someone call Fulbright to tell him that I felt I did have to reveal that I had first given the study to him. I wanted to give him warning, so that he could prepare his explanation to his Committee. He responded that he didn’t mind at all my revealing that. On the contrary, he said he admired greatly what I had done and felt it would be very useful to the country.

“he wouldn’t feel inhibited any longer about scheduling hearings and calling witnesses:” This situation did come about when the newspapers published the Papers later that year: i.e. Fulbright and other Committee chairmen were relieved of the responsibility of revealing the documents themselves. In fact, after the newspaper publication, the Administration finally yielded to the Congressional demand for a copy of the study and delivered a set of the classified documents, which had to be read by Congresspersons themselves in a special, secured room. Soon after, they turned over a somewhat censored, unclassified version to Congress and the public, which could readily have been used in open hearings. And immediately after the newspaper publication, both Majority Leader Senator Mansfield and Senator Fulbright were quoted as saying that hearings should be held promptly.

Meanwhile, President Nixon was hunting for a conservative chairman—perhaps Representative Hebert, chair of the House Armed Service Committee—to hold hostile hearings on the release of the Papers, with the intention of attacking me as a witness and through other testimony. Yet no hearings at all occurred. This is still a puzzle to me (as well as a great disappointment at the time.) The Hebert hearings (we now learn from the Nixon tapes) were postponed at the Administration request till after the US-promoted reelection of Thieu in Vietnam, but then (for reasons not yet revealed) they were never held. Nor did Fulbright ever schedule the hearings I wanted.

“I really did sympathize with his position as a presidential candidate:” I never felt critical of McGovern for his choice, given his candidacy. I got over my disappointment almost immediately when he told me, and I later campaigned energetically for him during the break in my trial in 1972.

Nevertheless, I was not happy with his later explanation of his decision, after the Papers were published, and his accounts of our conversation. In press conferences a few months later, just after the Times began publication, McGovern gave a very different description of our interaction (see below), one which could be said to be almost the opposite of reality. In an oral history years later, he reiterated and elaborated this false version of events. See Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency, Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober (New York: HarperCollins, 1996):

Not a word of this is true.

“‘This is the language of torturers:'” It was the first time that I had heard that precise description of the bombing that had now been going on for six years, with some intermissions: the torture of a society. I had actually raised the question, in a seminar discussion of “coercive diplomacy” at the Council on Foreign Relations a few months earlier, of how best to name distinctively this particular form of coercion, in which actual pain and destruction was being imposed. How to distinguish it from the coercion in crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis in which there were verbal threats and demonstrative maneuvers but no actual shots were fired (except for the downing of a U-2)? To lump these two processes together as simply coercion could be misleading; in fact, I suggested that the officials, much the same ones in the Missile Crisis and the onset of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam, had been insufficiently conscious of this difference between the two situations.

Out of my interest in bargaining theory, I asked for suggested terms that would convey the specific process in which, to reinforce the effect of continuing threats, some threats had begun to be carried out. No one at the seminar-all men who had taken part in such crises-came up with anything. All this came back to me as I heard Patricia’s reaction. Specifically, I recalled, no one had mentioned the word, “torture.” Or, “terrorism”-another term that now came into my mind, as even more apt than “torture.” We were, after all, focusing on American policies. We were all former or current American officials, and those were words we had never thought of associating with actions by Americans. With officials like us. With ourselves. Perhaps it was easier for Patricia to solve the verbal riddle that had stumped me and my smart colleagues; she was the first person to read these Papers who was not in some degree incriminated herself by them.

“there was no way to assure that documents with headings like these wouldn’t ring an alarm bell:” My concern turned out to have had some basis, perhaps especially in the Square where many of the copiers were Harvard students. Many years later, John Kenneth Galbraith told me that when the New York Times had started publishing the Papers in June of 1971 he had urged his son to read them, with a good deal of excitement. (He was also a little apprehensive, he told me, that his own cables from Saigon, which he had visited in 1961 and 1962 at President Kennedy’s request, would turn up in this series and that they might not read quite as well as he liked to remember them.) His son, who was a senior at Harvard at the time, had looked at the pages of documents in the Times and said, “Oh, yes, I’ve read all those already.”

Galbraith said, “That’s impossible! These are all classified documents; they’ve never been released.” His son told him that he had a Harvard friend working at Gnomen Copy in the Square who had been copying them one night a few months earlier. He had read a few pages and decided they looked so interesting that he had made an extra copy of the whole order—and some subsequent batch—for himself and his friends. They were stored in the basement of Quincy House, where Galbraith’s son had read them. At least Harvard students weren’t likely, in 1971, to summon the police.

“I thought it certainly would deserve a Pulitzer Prize:” As Austin interviewed many others and searched archives and available records exhaustively, he kept in touch with me about his findings and, especially, his ongoing hypotheses about the course of events. I’ve never seen a journalist–and rarely an historian–so thorough in laying out the questions at issue, alternative hypotheses, points of evidence that might bear on these, and plans for acquiring critical evidence. He was like a highly professional trial lawyer, or a natural scientist. And in the end, to my real astonishment, all this effort paid off. He did what I had said I didn’t believe he could do.

Although virtually all evidence regarding a second attack was negative, there remained the fact of top secret cables of intercepted North Vietnamese radio transmissions which McNamara had read aloud during his congressional testimony. These supposedly described the second North Vietnamese attack on our destroyers. This remained really the only substantial evidence of any attack on August 4. The problem was that the details seemed to correspond more to the previous attack on August 2. The cables themselves had never been submitted in evidence and remained classified. But Austin, astonishingly, was able to determine that because of misfiling in the Pentagon the cables that McNamara had presented did in fact come from the earlier August 2 incident. It was one of the most impressive journalistic coups I’ve ever seen.

“I said I wasn’t going to speculate on that:” Long before the publication of the Papers I had decided that if, at a certain point, it seemed very likely that there would be an indictment and prosecution, I would reveal myself as the sole source. I wanted to be able to say this as emphatically as possible and with convincing detail, thus doing as much as I could to take the legal pressure off those who would otherwise be suspected of complicity with me, whether on the basis of their friendship with me, their antiwar views, or their role in producing the Papers. If I kept silent or took the Fifth Amendment, I wouldn’t be able to comment on the role of others and I would leave them under suspicion.

On the other hand, I always thought there was some possibility that the Administration would choose, for some political reason, not to prosecute, even if they felt privately confident that they knew the source of the leak. This seemed to have happened with my leaks in March 1968, for reasons I didn’t know. I didn’t yet understand the weakness, or non-existence, of a legal foundation for prosecution, though by this time I’d gotten some inkling of this possibility. If, for some reason, they didn’t want to indict me, I didn’t want to force their hand into doing so by acknowledging my role. I wanted to leave them the out, or the cover, of saying they couldn’t be sure of the source. (It turns out that White House Domestic Counsel John Erlichman, a lawyer, was at that time strongly advising President Nixon not to prosecute me, on political grounds; he felt the trial would simply give me more prominence and a platform for my views against the war.)

In fact, absent any revelations by the newspapers or the Congressmen to whom I had given the Papers, or by me or any of those who had helped me copy or distribute them, the Justice Department would have had a very hard job of proving in court, or even demonstrating to a grand jury, that I was in fact the source, or even that I had copied the documents. My fingerprints on the originals of the documents in my safe proved nothing; I had authorized access to those and had been reading them for my research. Had they called me before a grand jury (unlikely, since I was from the first the principal suspect) I would have told them the truth, but they couldn’t know that in advance.

Thus, Sidney Zion’s assertion that I had given the Papers to the Times, long before any arrest order had been issued for me, was highly relevant to the problem the Justice Department faced as to how to proceed. His statement was hearsay, but a clear signal to the investigators that some on the newspaper were talking (to Zion, initially) and that a grand jury should be able to get credible testimony. (Eventually, the warrant for my arrest was based not on evidence from inside any of the newspapers but on affidavits from my former wife and some others in LA).

Zion’s action, as he more or less admitted, was really his way of getting back at the Times for firing him earlier. Almost immediately he faced great attack from the journalistic community for revealing a source merely, as he himself acknowledged, to satisfy his ego. He defended himself against the charge, at the time and for years thereafter, on the grounds that he “knew” that his revelation would have no bearing on the legal proceedings and that, for various reasons, I wouldn’t mind it. These claims were self-serving and, in both cases, mistaken. But since I was in position to go into hiding at the time he made his announcement and did manage to elude the FBI, I wasn’t, at the time, particularly concerned about Zion’s initiative. I had been expecting some such revelation by someone sooner or later.

What I had not been expecting were the revelations from the Congressmen who soon joined him. After all, that was only Sid Zion on the Barry Gray show, repeating hearsay or speculation. It was considerably more startling, and unsettling, for me to be watching the national news on television a night or so later, in a hotel room where we were staying under assumed names, and see Senator George McGovern announcing to a press conference he had called in the Capitol that he had been offered the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in his Senate office several months earlier. He said that he had declined to accept them, because he could not be party to breaking the law (see note for p. 363, above), but that he had urged me to take them to the New York Times. Evidently, the Senator said, I had followed his suggestion.

I didn’t wait for the rest of the discussion. I raced down the hall to the elevator, ran out of the hotel, which was on the banks of the Charles River, and found a pay phone on a side street a block away. I didn’t want to call from the hotel, leaving a record of a call to McGovern, whose phone might also be tapped by this time. In a rage, I dialed the private office number McGovern had given me months before, identified myself, and demanded to talk to his chief of staff. “What the fuck is going on there?!” I said in a fury to the high-level staffer who took the phone. The press conference was still going on as we spoke, apparently in the hall outside the office. “What do you guys think you’re doing? McGovern swore to me that he would never, never reveal my name.”

“Sorry, sorry,” the aide said, “but it’s gone beyond that.” Meaning what? Apparently, beyond the value of his assurance. “It’s gotten too big. It’s out of control.” As a news story, that was for sure. Starting about June 15, a few days earlier, with the federal request for an injunction, various aspects of the Pentagon Papers story occupied at least the first fifteen minutes of the half-hour national news on all three networks every evening for the next thirty days.

But McGovern was adding hard news to this coverage. He was the first person to give first-hand testimony linking me to the unauthorized distribution of the Papers, and a clear circumstantial link to their receipt by the Times. As I learned later, the FBI a year earlier had learned that I had copied the documents and given them to Senator Fulbright, but they had backed off even from further investigation, let alone pursuing an indictment, in the sole context of my having supplied them to a senator (see note for p. 334, above). In the wake of the newspaper publication and the government’s request for injunctions, it was a new world. Senator McGovern’s announcement that I had copied the study and offered it to him (he didn’t mention that he had initially accepted it, or that at his suggestion I had given parts of the classified study to his assistant) was more than enough basis for the Justice Department to proceed, if they wanted to.

What may have been beyond McGovern’s control was his own ability to bring himself to stand aside from that news current. He was, after all, running for the presidency. The same, ironically, applied to Representative McCloskey, the other person to whom I’d given a large batch of the Papers to release. He had already planned to offer himself as a symbolic rival to Nixon for the Republican nomination on the issue of the war. After he was quoted as having been offered the Papers by me, he too spoke to the press crowding outside his office. Again, I watched him, live on the news, announcing that he had received the Papers from me. Unlike McGovern, McCloskey sounded very supportive of what I had done. But as I saw it, watching this, he was still nailing down the effects of McGovern’s revelation on the calculations of the Justice Department. I went through the same drill, racing down to the outdoors pay phone to shout at the staff member who answered the call while this session was still going on.

(Former) Senator Goodell, who joined my defense team soon after, explained to me when I described with considerable indignation the behavior of his former colleagues: “Dan, when you’re running for president and you have a chance to get on the national evening news, there’s no way, no way, you’re going to turn that opportunity down.” It was an unfortunate coincidence for me that that applied to two of the three Congressmen to whom I gave the Papers.