Daniel Ellsberg Dissertation Text

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To anyone over a certain age forty five? , daniel ellsberg needs no introduction, but it would be quite a challenge to explain ellsberg to someone who had never heard of him. There was this brilliant young man from the midwest who in 1948 went to harvard on a scholarship, studied economics, demonstrated great promise, and got inducted into the small, super élite company of game theorists, whose lifework was to formulate and fine tune an american deterrence policy that would insure that the cold war never became a nuclear war. Ellsberg, enthusiastic about this calling, served in the marine corps and then went to work for the rand corporation, the santa monica beachfront consulting firm, where the best defense intellectuals thought the unthinkable. He had a forrest gump like talent for popping up at key moments and for meeting historical figures.

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In 1964, he moved to washington to work in the e ring of robert mcnamara 39 s pentagon, just at the moment when it was determining vietnam war policy. A year later, he went to vietnam, where his guides in saigon and the jungles and rice paddies of the surrounding countryside were general edward lansdale, the model for pyle in graham greene 39 s the quiet american, and colonel john paul vann, the antihero of neil sheehan 39 s a bright shining lie. Guns and jeeps and patrols and ambushes replaced memos and meetings and press conferences as the stuff of ellsberg 39 s routine. But the publication of the pentagon papers, which copiously documented how uncertain an enterprise the vietnam war had always been, didn 39 t bring the war to an end indeed, nixon escalated it. Even people over a certain age may have trouble recalling what the pentagon papers actually said. After the justice department decided to enjoin the times from publishing them, the discussion of the papers shifted from their content to the freedom of the press dispute, which the supreme court decided in the press 39 s favor.

Once ellsberg was identified as the leaker, he briefly went on the lam in cambridge, then turned himself in, was put on trial, and was set free. He ends secrets by making a detailed and persuasive case that the leak of the pentagon papers did help end the war, though in a way he hadn 39 t anticipated: by setting in motion the watergate scandal. Richard nixon wasn 39 t entirely displeased with the publication of the papers, since the historical period they covered ended ten months before he took office, and thus made the war look like the fault of the kennedy and johnson administrations. On the other hand, nixon intuited correctly that ellsberg might possess more inside information, this time about his own administration. Before nixon 39 s plumbers undertook the watergate burglary, they broke into the office of ellsberg 39 s psychiatrist in beverly hills, looking for material that could be used to blackmail or discredit him.

During the period when ellsberg was in psychoanalysis, which is what the plumbers were presumably seeking to document, he was living on the beach in malibu, driving a white triumph spitfire convertible, and putting most of my energy. Ellsberg points out that there is much stronger evidence tying nixon to the psychiatrist 39 s office break in than to the watergate burglary, and that the smoking gun tape that led to nixon 39 s resignation, in august, 1974, recorded nixon approving a payment of hush money to the mastermind of the ellsberg operation, e. If you buy ellsberg 39 s theory, what really helped end the war was the maddening effect on nixon of ellsberg 39 s existence: an establishment radical spreading stolen information the enemy within. Ellsberg has evidently spent a good part of the past three decades working on this book.

Secrets is not the hasty memoir of somebody in the news who is aware of how fast his star is fading. It 39 s long and meticulous every scene is thoroughly researched and carefully paced, and fitted to its place in ellsberg 39 s over all political progression. The pentagon section of secrets is a wonderful evocation of the intoxicatingly frantic routine of the overachievers who populate the next to the top level of government it shows ellsberg and his colleagues planning the war with utter confidence in its justness as a cause and with contemptuous disregard for congress, public opinion, and the woefully gullible press. In the vietnam section, ellsberg segues into the quagmire position that dominated liberal thinking about the war in the mid sixties, according to which the real but perhaps remediable problem was the corruption of the south vietnamese government and macv. On his return to the united states, ellsberg adopts the view that the problem is with the basic purpose of the war effort, not its efficacy. He becomes increasingly angry, and, as he does, the logic of his position becomes fuzzier.

Sometimes he seems to be a pacifist who simply opposes all government sponsored violence. At other times, he suggests that the specific aims and conduct of the united states were evil: after the publication of the pentagon papers, he tells newsweek that they are the u.s. As ellsberg 39 s fervor grows, so does his willingness to violate the boundaries of ordinary behavior. Ellsberg doesn 39 t only steal classified government documents and give them away he also subordinates his personal dealings to the cause. Again and again, he presents little scenes in which people confess to him that, although they are every bit as anti war as he is, they lack his willingness to risk everything for the movement.

Ellsberg, meanwhile, puts the cause ahead of both his own welfare and that of his friends and family. Ellsberg, having missed a good deal of his son 39 s childhood while away in washington and vietnam, decides to bond with the boy by bringing him in on the photocopying of the pentagon papers. Then he informs his ex wife that he probably will have to stop supporting her and their children, because he 39 s going to leak the papers and go to jail.

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Ellsberg 39 s first day of work in the pentagon, in the summer of 1964, coincided with the gulf of tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave lyndon johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the vietnam war. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an american ship that congress thought it was, and that the administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon. Just a few weeks ago, congress passed a resolution authorizing a war with iraq, which gives the president the widest war making latitude since the gulf of tonkin resolution. But there are some obvious difficulties in looking for guidance about iraq in ellsberg 39 s vietnam narrative. Given the copious news leaks and op ed skirmishes of the past six months, nobody could argue that if people only knew what kind of policy arguments were taking place inside the administration we wouldn 39 t be heading to war. Thanks in no small part to daniel ellsberg, the authority of official washington no longer feels unitary and unquestionable. Is there any conceivable secret document one could leak that would defuse the coming war in the way that ellsberg imagined the pentagon papers would defuse the war in vietnam? a c.i.a.

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