"Ellsberg, McNamara and the Pentagon Study Heard ‘Round the World," by Rick Goldsmith, the co-producer and co-director, with Judith Ehrlich, of the documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.”
In October 1966, Daniel Ellsberg, a former marine working for the State Department in Vietnam, found himself traveling back to the United States on a plane that was also carrying his previous boss, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Mr. Ellsberg took the opportunity to give McNamara extensive notes on his assessment of the seemingly stalemated war in Vietnam, which he saw that McNamara began reading with great interest.
Later in the flight, McNamara summoned Mr. Ellsberg to come and settle an argument he was having with Bob Komer, a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, who at the time was assessing the effectiveness of the pacification program in Vietnam.
"Dan, I'm having an argument here,” Mr. Ellsberg recalls McNamara saying. Nodding to Komer, he said, “He says that things are improving, that we're making progress. And I say things are worse, worse than they were a year ago. You're the one who knows. What do you say the answer is?”
“Well Mr. Secretary, I'm most impressed with how much the same things are as a year ago,” Mr. Ellsberg replied.
“You see, that's exactly what I'm saying!” McNamara said. “We've put another hundred thousand troops in there. Things are no better, that means they're really worse!”
The plane landed. In footage from the scene, we see McNamara walking down the walkway; then he steps into a bank of reporters and press photographers. We see Mr. Ellsberg behind McNamara, as the secretary announces to the assembled press corps: “You asked whether I was optimistic or pessimistic. Today I can tell you that military progress in the past 12 months has exceeded our expectations.”
Years later, Mr. Ellsberg picks up the narrative: “I was thinking, ‘I hope I'm never in a job where I have to lie like that.’"
That moment was perhaps a turning point in the lives of both men, whose careers remained entwined throughout the next year, in ways that would change history. In the spring of 1967, McNamara continued to have severe doubts about whether the war could be won militarily. Behind closed doors, he advocated rolling back the massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and moving toward a political settlement that would include non-Communist members of the National Liberation Front, also known as the Viet Cong. McNamara’s recommendations did not sit well with the joint chiefs of staff, nor with President Lyndon Johnson himself.
In June 1967, McNamara ordered, without any official announcement, the formation of a Pentagon task force to study the history of United States-Vietnam relations since 1945. It turned out to be a massive project that would eventually run to 47 volumes and more than 7,000 pages, and include countless classified intra-governmental documents between presidents, generals and other top-level government officials.
Mr. Ellsberg, by now working at the Rand Corporation, a think tank whose major work involved advice for the Air Force and Defense Department, was one of the 36 researchers and authors chosen to put together the Pentagon study. He was selected both because of his reputation as a top-notch analyst, in and out of government, and because he had actually spent significant time on the ground in Vietnam, examining the war effort up close.
It is still in dispute what the purpose of this project was. In his memoirs, McNamara maintained that it was “for future scholars to use.” But that raises the question of why “the architect of the Vietnam War,” precisely at a time when the war was facing critical decision-making, and when McNamara himself was in danger of losing his influence, and perhaps his job, would be interested in launching such a massive and expensive study, merely for “future scholars.”
Mort Halperin, one of the two heads, with Leslie Gelb, of the study, said, “McNamara had a sense then … that this was a tragic blunder, that we were in the middle of a catastrophe. And that it was important to try to understand how we had gotten into that catastrophe.”
Whatever McNamara’s goals and motives, he kept the existence of the study hidden from both President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. As Mr. Halperin told us for our documentary on Mr. Ellsberg, “We classified the Pentagon Papers study as top-secret, and every page as top-secret, because we considered the existence of the study to be top-secret. But the person we were trying to keep it from was not the Vietnamese who would not have cared at all or the Russians or the Chinese, but Lyndon Johnson. We feared, through the whole study, that if the president found out about it, that he would stop it. Because Johnson knew that McNamara had doubts about the war and believed that there were bands of civilians in the Pentagon determined to do everything they could to get us out of Vietnam.”
Work on the study continued through 1967. McNamara’s doubts about the direction of the war deepened, and his star within the Johnson Administration continued to fall. By February 1968, McNamara was gone, replaced by Clark Clifford, who finally received a copy of the finished Pentagon report in early 1969, five days before his own job would end, with the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the next President of the United States. Clifford claimed he never read the massive report, and neither Nixon, nor his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, nor anyone else in the administration was interested in its contents.
McNamara was, by now, well aware of the history of lies and deception that the Pentagon study documented. And he knew now, firsthand, what every Administration since Eisenhower, or even Truman, knew — that a Vietnam war was unwinnable by the United States. But McNamara remained the loyal bureaucrat, and, while serving the Johnson administration, and after he left it to lead the World Bank, he never expressed his inside knowledge publically; only decades later, in his memoir, would the full truth come out.
Daniel Ellsberg took a different route. In 1969, he learned from his former colleague Mort Halperin, now working under Mr. Kissinger in the National Security Council, that President Nixon — who in 1968 had campaigned for the presidency on a “peace with honor” platform — had no intentions of pulling out of the war. In the summer of 1969, Mr. Ellsberg, with access to the study at the Rand Corporation because he was advising Mr. Kissinger on Vietnam, took it upon himself to read the entire Pentagon study.
He was horrified by what he read — not only that four presidents, Truman through Johnson, all saw the war as unwinnable, but they each escalated the war effort while lying about the prospects of victory to the American people. And now a fifth president was doing the same, with no end in sight.
Mr. Ellsberg had been influenced during that summer by antiwar activists, particularly draft resisters, and asked himself, “how far I am willing to go to help end this war?” In October 1969, he began surreptitiously photocopying the Pentagon study, and then spent the next 17 months trying to get antiwar senators (such as George McGovern and William Fulbright) and Congressmen (such as Pete McCloskey) to make it public. But none of them took action. In March 1971, with the war now expanded into Cambodia and Laos, and with America even more bitterly divided, Mr. Ellsberg leaked the study to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times.
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, The Times, with an account of Tricia Nixon’s wedding opposite on the front page, published the first of its series of articles on what became known as the “Pentagon Papers.”
The revelations of the Pentagon Papers woke up America to the fact that our own government routine lies to us, on matters of the greatest importance. A Supreme Court case soon followed, in which the government tried to shut down the press’s ability to publish the papers; the government lost. Two years later, revelations about the Nixon administration’s “dirty tricks” and extra-legal attacks against its “enemies” — starting with Daniel Ellsberg — and their cover-up were the basis for Articles of Impeachment being drawn up against President Nixon, which forced his resignation in August 1974. The end of the Vietnam War came, at last, nine months later.
There are many lessons to be drawn from the whole Pentagon Papers saga. One, articulated by the Princeton legal expert Richard Falk, is spoken near the end of our film: “What has remained significant about the release of the Pentagon Papers is the decision, by a public official, to give priority to conscience as compared to career.”
Daniel Ellsberg in 1971
