From Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, Chapter 25: Congress
In late December 1970 I had what turned out to be my next-to-last talk with Senator Fulbright, in his office, about what to do with the Pentagon Papers. He now had nearly everything I had, including NSSM-r and my notes on the Ponturo study of Tonkin Gulf. Norvil Jones had made it clear that there would be no public hearings on the war of the sort he’d envisioned back in May, during the Cambodian invasion. The public concern just wasn’t there anymore, nor was there support for such hearings on the Foreign Relations Committee itself. The war had scarcely been an issue in the November congressional elections. Fulbright himself didn’t disagree with my own urgent concern, after the failed Son Tay raid to rescue American prisoners of war, and the renewed bombing of North Vietnam, that the war would soon be getting larger, but he didn’t see much possibility of mobilizing opposition in Congress until that happened.
As for the Pentagon Papers, Fulbright seemed sympathetic to my desire to find some way, apart from immediate hearings, to bring them to bear on the continuing war. He mentioned a number of ways in which it would still be possible to get the papers out with relatively little damage to me, though that wasn’t my major concern. He raised the possibility of issuing a subpoena to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird for the papers. He didn’t have to limit himself, he said, to requesting them from Laird, as he had done several times so far. He could demand them.
At this point Norvil revealed what I take it had been his real worry from the beginning. He thought that the committee, even if it got the papers from Laird by request or subpoena, couldn’t put them out to the public on its own, without administration approval. Even more, the chairman couldn’t do it on his own because he and the committee were supposed to safeguard for the Senate as a whole classified material, which they got all the time and for which they had storage facilities. If Fulbright leaked the papers or went ahead and distributed or published them, he could be charged with having jeopardized the ability to get classified material from the executive, not only for the committee or himself but for the entire Senate. Jones also mentioned that the committee members, and in particular its staff members, were often accused of leaking. It was easy for me to guess that Jones himself didn’t want to be accused of this. He had often shown great concern that I not reveal to anyone that I had given the papers to Fulbright.
Fulbright told me that he had asked Laird several times now for the study, but it seemed unlikely that he was going to get it. It was becoming clear to me that Jones was not going to encourage Fulbright to stick his neck out by releasing or using what I’d given him. Fulbright himself said to me, “Isn’t it after all only history?” I said, well, yes, but it seemed to me quite important history. It was also a history that wasn’t over yet. He said, “But does it really matter? Is there much in there that we don’t know?” He asked if I would give him an example of a revelation that would make a big splash.
I said that it was not any individual page or revelation, or even a small set of them, that was very important. It was the overall detailed documentation of our involvement over the years and the repetitive patterns of internal pessimism and of desperate escalation and deception of the public in the face of what was, realistically, hopeless stalemate. It was the total lack of a good reason for what we were doing anywhere in the whole story. You had to read a lot of it, perhaps a thousand pages, covering a number of periods, to get the full effect. Moreover, it was still going on. That was the point. It was hard to believe that could be true unless you were exposed to a very long segment of this record.
After my talk with Fulbright in his office, Jones and I moved to Jones’s office next door and continued the discussion. It was at this point that he suggested that I might just give the study to the New York Times. I said that I had already considered this possibility. It was considerably more risky for me legally, though I was prepared to do it if I had to. I asked Jones if he could think of any other senators who might be willing to release the study. He pulled out an extension board from his desk; taped to it was a list of all the senators’ offices and telephone numbers. He went down the list with his finger, one by one, fairly quickly, looking for a probable candidate. He didn’t spot one. I put the name McGovern to him. Jones thought not, though he agreed that McGovern was the most likely to do it. I mentioned Mathias and others. Jones really thought that no senator was likely to do it, but that a House member was more possible, having less to risk in some sense. The trouble was that a representative could not conduct a filibuster. He or she couldn’t set out to read it into the record and might not even be able to have it inserted into the Congressional Record. It was much too long. Moreover, a House member wouldn’t give me the same degree of protection, given the Senate’s responsibility in foreign policy. However, he thought that Pete McCloskey, a Republican representative from California and a decorated war hero from Korea, was my best bet for using it. So I set out to check with McGovern and McCloskey.
In Cambridge in January I happened to talk with Sandy Gottlieb, executive director of SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), and we discussed filibusters and other out-of-the-way maneuvers. Gottlieb thought Gaylord Nelson was the most likely senator to do something like this. At the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution he had raised the sharpest questions on the floor about the dangers of giving the president a blank check, and he had even proposed an amendment to the resolution, drafted by his aide Gar Alperovitz, who was pressing him to force the issue, that ruled out expansion of the war without further action by Congress. But Fulbright had persuaded him that to force the joint resolution into a conference with the House to resolve the wording would defeat the purpose of sending a clear message of unanimity and determination to North Vietnam in the wake of the (supposed) attack on our ships and the president’s “response.” Nelson had not, at the end of the day, joined Senators Morse and Gruening in voting against the resolution. But as a later protest he was almost alone in voting against the defense appropriations bill because of the war. I mentally added him to my short list of prospects.
***
McGovern seemed to be the best of these, so in late January 1971 I called Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and asked him to arrange a meeting for me. McGovern was running late by the time I got into his office and had to go off for lunch in a little less than an hour. I spent the time talking in general terms about Vietnam policy—he seemed interested in what I was saying about Nixon’s aims—and political tactics. He made a very good impression on me with his views on what needed to be done and the importance of doing something radical. He said, when I asked, that he believed in filibusters and was definitely prepared to undertake one on the war (though he never did). He said he wanted to talk more, and we made a date for later that afternoon.
I went to the Senate cafeteria, where I happened to notice I. F. Stone eating alone. I’d never met him, but I recognized him from pictures. I had long wanted to tell him how right he had been about the war from the beginning in his remarkable newsletter. I introduced myself and asked if I could speak with him. He waved me down, peering at me from behind thick lenses, and we spoke for most of an hour as we were eating. He was so upset at the way things were going in Vietnam that at one point his eyes filled with tears. He said that when he talked to students, he just didn’t know what to tell them about what could be done, things seemed so hopeless.
I began to tell him what I was trying to do, partly to cheer him up a little but also to get his opinions. Impulsively I told him what I was doing with the Pentagon Papers. I wanted his advice, but that wasn’t the only reason I was taking such a chance. I was telling him because he was a hero of mine, speaking in the same spirit in which I’d sought out and told Janaki and Randy Kehler what I was doing, to let them know that they had inspired me and that I was joining their effort (and, surely, to gain their respect.)
His feeling was that McGovern was really the only bet, though he thought I should try Gaylord Nelson too. Stone offered to help any way that he could. He asked if I was ready to pay the consequences, and I said that I was. At the very end as I got up, he grabbed my arm tightly and told me, “Bless you for what you’re doing, I admire you.” Behind the thick lenses (he was soon to go blind) he again had tears in his eyes. It meant a lot to me to hear that from him.
I had more than an hour before I was supposed to see McGovern again, so I called Nelson’s office, saying that Stone had suggested it. He happened to be free to see me right away. We talked in a leisurely way for about an hour.
I had a large batch of the Pentagon Papers with me in my briefcase, and I was prepared to tell him about them and offer them to him, but I needed to feel him out first on whether he was really prepared to do something unconventional or daring. His annual vote against the defense appropriations bill was already an example. I congratulated him on that, but he didn’t seem to want to take much credit for it. Since he had so little company doing it, he thought of it as a purely symbolic gesture. But to my disappointment, after what Sandy Gottlieb had told me, it didn’t appear from our discussion that he was ready to add anything to that gesture. When I raised the possibility of a filibuster—I thought of that as a litmus test for a senator’s possible willingness to do something like reveal classified documents—he brushed it off with a shrug. He’d already raised objections to several other initiatives I’d mentioned—voting against appropriations aside from defense, discussing impeachment, obstructing various pieces of legislation or appointments the administration wanted, committing in advance to votes against appropriations, anything that hadn’t yet been tried—dismissing them mainly on the obvious lines that they weren’t very likely to work.
Finally I asked him what his own proposal was for ending the war. He said, “Well, picking up supporters one by one for the McGovern-Hatfield bill.” I asked if he believed that could pass in the House, and the answer was “No, not really.” I said that approach was fine if it ended the war before we destroyed Vietnam. He didn’t seem to disagree with my description of the urgency of the situation, but that didn’t appear to make him feel very desperate. He seemed oddly passive, even resigned about the impossibility of doing anything from the Senate to block further escalation. Of course, his own experience with the issue justified a good deal of cynicism about his fellow senators, but I was beginning to wonder if by this point he was really all that different from them.
He didn’t seem in a hurry to end our discussion, but his cool dismissal of one tactic after another as impractical or naive suddenly got under my skin, and I abruptly got up to leave. He looked surprised. I said, “You know, Senator, a few years ago when I was in the Pentagon, there were some things I could have done to stop this war, and now I’m sorry that I didn’t do them. I hope a year from now you won’t have to be sorry that you didn’t try any of these things.”
It was not a warm note to end on, and I didn’t try to pretend that it was. I thanked him for giving me the time and left. I went to McGovern’s office and waited for him. When he came back, we picked up our discussion where we’d left off in the morning, and as I heard his anguish about the war, I became more and more confident that the “messenger” that morning, the voice in my ear on the shuttle, was right: He was the man. He was desperate to see the war ended. He wanted to help end it. I wanted to help him.
I decided to lay it out for him. In his first speech announcing his candidacy for president, he had said that he wanted to tell the truth to the American people. I now told him, if that was what he really wanted to do, I could give him so much truth that he wouldn’t be able to tell it all between now and November 1972. 1 described the McNamara study in some detail. I said I’d copied it, told him about Fulbright and where that stood, said that I had parts of it with me, and offered to let him have it.
He agreed, enthusiastically. He wanted it, wanted to put it in the record from the floor of the Senate. He would filibuster with it. It was exactly what he needed. He mentioned that there was no legal risk for him to reveal this information on the floor of the Senate. Nor would he ever have to tell where he got it.
I told him what I’d told Fulbright, that I wasn’t eager to go to prison but that I was ready to take any necessary risk. He said, more emphatically than Fulbright, that there wasn’t any need for that. There was no way he could be compelled to reveal his source. He got up, went over to a tall bookcase in an alcove, and brought down a thick volume that contained the Constitution. He looked for a passage and read it to me. As a senator he could “not be questioned” about anything he said on the floor of the Senate. Couldn’t be questioned, he emphasized, not by the FBI, the Justice Department, the executive branch, a judge, a grand jury, or his fellow senators.
I took that ringing reassurance mainly as a token of his own commitment to the project. It didn’t really go very far to protect me, since I would be an obvious suspect and all of them could question me, all right. I had no intention of lying if I was asked directly under oath or by an authority, nor, after the experience of the McCarthy era, was I willing to take the Fifth Amendment. In fact, if I ended up, under investigation, acknowledging myself as his source, I would want him to confirm that I was telling the truth. But I liked the tone of his assertions and the energy he gave to them; it signified that we were in this together and that he would do all he could to protect me.
I did think I had a degree more protection giving the papers to a senator (or, if I had to, a member of the House) than to a newspaper, even if the applicable law didn’t recognize a distinction. At a minimum I’d lose my clearances and my career, in any case, but there might be some hesitation to prosecute me if a prominent senator was championing the rightness of my giving the information to him and the public. Also, even if I was prosecuted, that might affect the verdict or at least the sentence. Still, what was more important to me was that the papers would be introduced in the Senate chamber, with every prospect that this would lead to hearings. McGovern was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and could call for hearings, and presumably if Fulbright didn’t have to fear executive retaliation for exposing the classified documents—since McGovern would already have taken personal responsibility for doing that—he wouldn’t feel inhibited any longer about scheduling hearings and calling witnesses. Listening to McGovern’s initial reaction, I felt as if I were on the way at last to getting these papers off my back and into the public consciousness.
In fact, McGovern was sounding so unreservedly enthusiastic that I wasn’t sure he was facing up to the political risks of this for himself. I didn’t want to think that I was taking advantage of him, leading him into something that he hadn’t fully calculated. I took the role of devil’s advocate, confronting him with some of the challenges he might face. For example, he might be accused of using this as a campaign ploy. He said he thought that would not be a serious problem. His position on the war was long held and well known, and revealing this history would be very consistent with it, so he wouldn’t be accused of electioneering. I asked, “What about the fact that these revelations would seriously embarrass former Democratic officials?” Wouldn’t he be accused of undermining the party, and wouldn’t that hurt his campaign funding? He answered that without hesitation on the most practical level. He said, “My sources of funding, for my campaign, are different from those of most of the others, like Muskie. The people who are backing me would like my doing this. It wouldn’t hurt me.”
I asked, “What about the accusation that you are running to be president, to be in charge of the whole secrecy system, and here you are playing fast and loose with it by disclosing all this classified material on your own initiative?” He said that would be the most serious charge. He would simply have to say that this was a special circumstance. We were in a bad war with no other way to bring it to an end, and it was necessary under the circumstances to reveal this information to the public. Indeed, from what I’d told him about the contents of the study, it would mainly be confirming charges and evaluations he had already been making for years. It was obviously information that the public deserved to have and Congress needed to have, which had been wrongly withheld. It was an abuse of the classification system to have concealed it.
He had the message, words, and music; I didn’t need to help him with it. He sounded both sober and confident. He said, “I want to do it. I will do it.” He told me to give the material I had with me to his assistant John Holum. Then he sounded a note that seemed prudent and responsible. He said, “That’s the way I feel right now. But I don’t want to give the final word today. I think I should let it sit in my mind for a few days. I won’t speak to anyone else about it. I’ll just live with it, to make sure I feel the same way a week from now. I’ll call you in a week.” That sounded more than reasonable to me. If anything, it was reassuring that he was taking this with the seriousness it deserved. We shook hands, and he introduced me to Holum, to whom I gave the contents of my briefcase.
I flew back to Cambridge and told Patricia the good news. Of course I had heard this once before; Fulbright had been just as enthusiastic and reassuring at first. But I really was feeling hopeful. I would even say that I was confident after our conversation that McGovern wouldn’t change his mind. Yet when he called me in Cambridge just a week later to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it,” I reacted with a calm that seems surprising to look back on. I simply said, “I understand,” and I believed that I did understand. I really did sympathize with his position as a presidential candidate. I wanted him to run a strong campaign, and my own reaction to his disappointing decision indicated that I must have had misgivings, more than I’d acknowledged to myself, about whether what I was proposing was really the right course for him. Still, I hoped that he might be an ally, an adviser, now that I’d shared the story with him. I didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. I asked him if we could discuss the matter a little more when I was back in Washington—but not to reconsider his decision—and he said, “Certainly.” We made a date for the following week.
***
After Senator Fulbright had said to me in December 1970, “Isn’t it after all only history?” and after Senator McGovern too had backed off, Patricia asked me how sure I was that it was worth putting out the papers, worth the likelihood of prison for me. She said, “These senators don’t seem to think it’s worth the risk. Why are you so sure that they’re wrong about that and you’re right?”
I said, “Well, I can’t be sure about that. They might be right. No one can say, and I don’t know, what the effect will be. The problem is, I’m the only one who’s read these documents. They haven’t. So I can’t go by their judgment. I have to rely on my own.”
But now that we were married, the prospect of my going to prison didn’t affect me alone. Patricia deserved to have a voice in that decision, and she couldn’t really do that when she didn’t know what was in the papers. Up till now I had deliberately kept her from reading them. I wanted her to be able to say that she hadn’t known what was in them. But if she was to keep going through this with me now, she needed to have a better understanding of what it was about. The only way to get that was for her to read some of this material even if that increased her own risk. I thought the time had come for her to read some of the studies. She agreed.
I picked out some of the memos that I remembered from my own time in the Pentagon, 1964-65, about the pros and cons of various bombing strategies. I thought they would reveal to her how much the public had been misled in the 1964 campaign and afterward, with no knowledge that this Goldwater-like strategy had been advocated, taken for granted really, within the Johnson administration. The memos were by colleagues of mine like John McNaughton and Bill Bundy, one level above me in the bureaucracy, people I worked with and knew well.
Our third-floor apartment was a converted attic, with one large room that combined a kitchen and living room and a small bedroom just big enough for our bed. Patricia took the volume into the bedroom to read and closed the door, in case I had to use the phone. While she was in there, I sat at my desk in the living room, which was covered with piles of papers, and looked through other volumes of the study to see what else I should show her. After about an hour she came back into the living room, holding the volume I had given her. She had seen something in those pages that I hadn’t seen when I first held them in 1964-65 or even when I reread them in the McNamara study. She pointed out to me that passages about alternative bombing programs were filled with phrases about “a need to reach their threshold of pain”; “We all accept the will of the DRV as the real target”; “Judging by experience during the last war, the resumption of bombing after a pause would be even more painful to the population of North Vietnam than a fairly steady rate of bombing”; “‘water-drip’ technique”; “DRV pain in the North”; “VC pain in the South”; “It is important not to ‘kill the hostage’ by destroying the North Vietnamese assets inside the ‘Hanoi donut”‘; “Fast/ full squeeze” option versus “Progressive squeeze-and-talk”; “the ‘hot-cold’ treatment … the objective of ‘persuading’ Hanoi, which would dictate a program of painful surgical strikes separated by fairly long gaps”; “our ‘salami-slice’ bombing program”; “ratchet”; “one more turn of the screw” . . .
Patricia said, “This is the language of torturers.” Her eyes were filled with tears. She said, “These have to be exposed. You’ve got to do it.”