SECRETS
A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Daniel
Ellsberg
PREFACE
On the evening of October 1, 1969, I walked out past the guards’ desk at the Rand
Corporation in Santa Monica, carrying a briefcase filled with top secret documents, which
I planned to photocopy that night. The documents were part of a 7,000-page top secret
study of U.S. decision making in Vietnam, later known as the Pentagon Papers. The rest of
the study was in a safe in my office. I had decided to copy it all and make it public, perhaps
through Senate hearings or the press, if necessary. I believed this course, especially the
latter possibility, would probably put me in prison for the rest of my life. How I came to do
this is the focus of this memoir.
For eleven years, from mid-1964 to the end of the war in May 1975, I was, like a great
many other Americans, preoccupied with our involvement in Vietnam. In the course of that
time I saw it first as a problem, next as a stalemate, then as a moral and political disaster, a
crime. The first three parts of this book correspond roughly to these emerging perceptions.
My own personal commitment and subsequent actions evolved along with these changing
perspectives. When I saw the conflict as a problem, I tried to help solve it; when I saw it as
a stalemate, to help us extricate ourselves, without harm to other national interests; when I
saw it as a crime, to expose and resist it, and to try to end it immediately. Throughout all
these phases, even the first, I sought in various ways to avoid further escalation of the
conflict. But as late as early 1973, as I entered a federal criminal trial for my actions
starting in late 1969, I would have said that
none
of these aims or efforts―neither my own
nor anyone else’s―had met with any success. Efforts to end the conflict-whether it was
seen as a failed test, a quagmire, or a moral misadventure-seemed no more to have been
rewarded than efforts to win it. Why?
As I saw it then, the war not only needed to be resisted but remained to be understood.
Thirty years later I still believe that to be true. This book represents my continuing
effort―far from complete―to understand my country’s war on Vietnam, and my own part
in it, and why it took so long to end both of those.
For three years starting in mid-1964, with the highest civil service grade, I had helped
prosecute a war I believed at the outset to be doomed. Working in Washington under top
decision makers in 1964-65, 1 watched them secretly maneuver the country into a
full-scale war with no real promise of success. My pessimism during those years was not
unbroken, and for about a year―from the spring of 1965 to the spring of 1966―I hoped
for and worked toward some sort of success. That was after the president, despite many
misgivings, including his own, had committed us to war. Once we were fully committed, I
volunteered in mid-1965 to serve in Vietnam as a State Department civilian. My job came
to be evaluating “pacification” in the countryside. In this I drew on my earlier training as a
marine infantry commander to observe the war up close. Whether we had a right―any
more than the French before us―to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our
leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me. But during two years in
Vietnam, its people and plight became real to me, as real as the U.S. troops I walked with,
as real as my own hands, in a way that made continuing the hopeless war intolerable.
Knocked out of the field with hepatitis and back in the United States in mid-1967, I
began to do everything I could imagine to help free our country from the war. For two years
I did this as an insider, briefing high officials, advising presidential candidates, and
eventually, in early 1969, helping the president’s national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger, discover uncertainties and alternatives. But later that same year I felt called on
to go beyond this approach and so to end my career as a government insider.
One of these actions risked my own freedom. In 1969 and 1970, with the help of my
friend Anthony Russo, a former Rand associate, I secretly photocopied the entire
forty-seven-volume Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of U.S. decision making in
Vietnam from 1945 to 1968, which were then in my authorized possession, and gave them
to Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In
1971 I also gave copies to the
New York Times,
to the
Washington Post
, and ultimately, in
the face of four unprecedented federal injunctions, to some seventeen other newspapers, all
of which defied the government in printing them for the public to read.
I wasn’t wrong about the personal risks. Shortly thereafter I was indicted in a federal
court, with Russo later joining me in a second, superseding indictment. Eventually I faced
twelve federal felony charges totaling a possible 115 years in prison, with the prospect of
several further trials for me beyond that first one. But I was not wrong, either, to hope that
exposing secrets five presidents had withheld and the lies they told might have benefits for
our democracy that were worthy of the risks. This truth telling set in motion a train of
events, including criminal White House efforts to silence or incapacitate me, that led to
dismissal of the charges against me and my codefendant. Much more important, these
particular Oval Office crimes helped topple the president, an act that was crucial to ending
the war.
This is the story of the greatest change in my life, which began well after my return
from Vietnam. The disillusionment of the brief hopes that I experienced in Vietnam and the
skepticism toward the war that I brought back in mid-1967 were not really new for me. On
the contrary, they were a return to the pessimism that I had acquired on a first trip to
Vietnam in 1961 and that had been reinforced in my first year in the Pentagon from
mid-1964. By 1967 this skeptical mood was widely shared inside the government, perhaps
even more than in the public. This was a time when my general desire to see the war ended
did not distinguish me from almost any of my colleagues in the government or
government-sponsored research, whether or not they had served in Vietnam. An entire
generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they
saw as hopeless and interminable. I was like them in most respects, no different in
character or values, no less committed to the cold war, to anticommunism, to secrecy, and
to the presidency. By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war.
Indeed this poses a question that I have worked at understanding ever since: How could it
be, under these circumstances, that after the massive disillusionment of the Tet offensive in
early 1968 the war still had seven years to go?
The heart of this memoir tells the story of how it was that starting from this common
insiders’ position critical of our policy, I eventually came to go beyond efforts to stop the
war from within the executive branch, to be willing, instead, to give up clearances and
political access, the chance of serving future presidents, my whole career, and to accept the
prospect of a life behind bars. It focuses on what in my experience made it possible for me
to do in 1969 through 1972 what I now wish I (or others) had done in 1964 or 1965: go to
Congress and the press and tell the truth, with documents.
It’s easy to say that the idea of doing this simply didn’t occur to me at the time, any
more than it did to others. The question remains why it didn’t. Like so many, I put personal
loyalty to the president (and to my career, my access to inside information and influence,
however I idealized my purposes) above all else. Above loyalty to the Constitution. Above
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