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Daniel Ellsberg
Speaker; Activist; Author, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam
In conversation with Phil Bronstein, Executive Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Phil Bronstein: An interview published on October 29 with George McGovern says he believes the Bush administration is lying more than the Nixon administration lied.
Daniel Ellsberg: Is the Nixon administration the gold standard for deception? I think not. It would be hard to say that this administration or any other administration dissembled or deceived the public more than presidents I served, Johnson in particular. But Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Nixon – it's hard to choose on dissembling. Journalist I.F. Stone used to say, "All government officials lie and nothing they say is to be believed." That doesn't mean everything they say is a lie, but it does mean any official of any government – Democratic, Republican, dictatorial – anything they say may be false, and almost never do they give the real reasons for what they're doing.
Bush is not deceiving Congress on a point of great importance the way Lyndon Johnson did with the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed within days of my coming to the Pentagon. My first full day was August 4, 1964 – the day of our first raids against North Vietnam, based on an unprovoked – as the president put it – attack against destroyers on routine patrol in international waters. "We seek no wider war," was his campaign slogan. By the end of that day or the end of that week, I knew every one of those assertions was false. He manipulated Congress and deceived them that he had no intention of going to war without coming back to them after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution for further explicit authority.
Bush does say, "I have not decided." But as Senator Byrd said, Ha ha about that. That is said with a wink and is so transparent that I can't accuse him of any intention to deceive. He was trying to make it easy for congressmen to shift responsibility to the president and still say, "It was just a blank check, and I didn't know he would to cash it." But they know they signed a declaration of war, and did that unconscionably.
Bronstein: Is it possible for a good modern government, never mind the last remaining superpower, to have a foreign policy that does not involve lying and deception and secrecy?
Ellsberg: I don't know of any former colonial power and present colonial power that has carried on other than a secret foreign policy. Do they have to? I don't think politicians can easily tell the full truth to every audience about why they feel something is necessary. They tailor what they say to different audiences. But that concealment is more problematic than anyone I ever met in the executive branch realizes. They don't see it as a problem. We were lied into Vietnam; that was more than a problem. We're being lied into a war now. That isn't to say these officials don't think they have good reasons for deceiving.
Cheney says, I, Richard Cheney – my expectation is that our attacks on Iraq will result in democracy in Iraq, and that will have a domino effect on the dictatorships in the region that we have supported for so long and they will all become democracies. I ask myself, Can he believe that? In one sense, yes. I did learn in the Pentagon that anyone can be as dumb as he has to be to keep his job. Do I really think that Cheney believes that? No, I think he's lying. Why? He thinks it's for the good of the country to get us into this war, and this is the way to do it. When he and the president say the purpose is to reduce risk of nuclear weapons going off, that's not implausible to people who haven't looked at this subject very closely. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Pearle know it will increase the risks of nuclear weapons.
Bronstein: Do you think it's possible there are things they know that they're not telling us that might support their case, or do you think that's impossible?
Ellsberg: These are very smart men, and the president chose them.
Bronstein: You said they are as dumb as they needed to be.
Ellsberg: When they have to be. But they're smart. They're not less smart than McNamara and the best and the brightest of which I was one. We were smart, but I would say the spouse of every single one of these officials, and most of the children, had better judgment on Vietnam. We were smart; we lacked wisdom and foresight and scruples. And we got this country into a lot of trouble and we killed a lot of people, Asians and Americans. This crew is smart enough to get us into just as much danger as the people I worked with. Intelligence isn't the criteria; leadership isn't the criteria. This president is showing real leadership. He's going against – on his own conscience – most of his military advisors, if not all. He's going against the opposition party; he's going against the will of all of his allies, virtually. Tony Blair is one person on his side. It's leadership in the wrong direction, and that shows that leadership isn't the last criterion here, either. We need a lot of committed non-followership.
Bronstein: You mentioned former defense secretary McNamara. He sort of came clean about Vietnam only about 30 years after you did.
Ellsberg: Up to a point. I give him a lot of credit. He's the only official of my era who has written a memoir or in any other fashion said, I apologize, we were wrong. He got a lot of heat for it afterwards. I wish others had done the same. On the other hand, there are some things, looking at his two books since then, that he really can't face. He can't use the word lie about anything he did. He doesn't apologize for all the lying. I don't think that he thinks of it as problematic. He did a lot of it, and I helped. To this day, he's still lying about a crucial matter that got us into the war. We provoked, and planned to provoke more, attacks on our ships. We used American forces as bait, and I believe that is about to happen now, so I'm afraid that hasn't changed.
It wasn't that I discovered a conscience; or that I looked back and said, How corrupt and seduced I was. John Dean did a good job of that in Blind Ambition. I didn't. I was as conscientious then – and as patriotic – as I am now, which is a lot. It wasn't that I discovered having a conscience; the contents and direction of that conscience changed.
Bronstein: One thing that strikes me is this seductiveness of being inside, having access.
Ellsberg: It is seductive. It's exciting. Not exactly fun, but it makes you feel very alive, just as I found as a civilian using my Marine-experience combat: If you don't get killed, don't get shot up, it makes the adrenaline flow. People feel that inside the Pentagon. My boss and I happened to think McNamara and Johnson were on a wrong path with bombing. How did we do what we did to help them? Not because we told ourselves, Well it's good for our career, we want to keep our jobs. I didn't have to keep that job. I could go back to RAND. You feel it's the only president you've got and your loyalty to that president was the highest we could imagine, and patriotism was doing what he wanted done. You could disagree with him before, but once he had decided, you didn't expose him, get in his way, you did your best to make it come out all right. I'm sure there are many people in the Pentagon following that direction of conscience right now. I hope they will wake up from that.
Bronstein: What caused you to turn away from that, very aggressively? And what caused people who were also very bright and who were friends of yours, like John Paul Vann, not to turn away?
Ellsberg: My aggression expressed itself more when I was working for the president wrongly. What caused me to see it differently? I went through a period in Vietnam where I hoped, despite earlier skepticism, that this might turn out all right. I worked with Ed Lansdale, who had helped defeat a Marxist insurgency in the Philippines. Within months of coming there I knew what you didn't have to be any expert to learn in Vietnam: Nothing we were doing was succeeding, or would succeed. We were killing people and dying to no good effect. Some believed we would do better if we bombed more or invaded North Vietnam. I didn't. I came back to a Pentagon, that almost to a man said, We should be out of there. That was in '67. The war had eight years to go.
I believe right now the Pentagon and CIA and State Department are filled with people who believe it would be a mistake or worse, clear-cut flat aggression. There are a lot of Americans who wear uniforms who didn't join up, any more than I joined the Marines, to be in an aggressive war. They know it's going to be very dangerous. The chance that Saddam, if attacked, will use chemical and biological weapons – if he has them, which is an uncertainty – is very high, incomparably higher than the chance he would use them if we didn't attack. We're increasing our risks. The question is what you do about it.
A lot of people have learned from Vietnam, from the Pentagon Papers; there is more leaking, more unauthorized disclosure now, than ever happened during Vietnam. But there needs to be more. What brought me to that point was meeting young Americans who weren't exposing secrets, they were exposing their truth, in Gandhi's sense of truth: what they felt, knew, believed – that this war was wrong. They were going to jail rather than go to Canada or Sweden, in order to send this strongest possible message to people like me, that to stop this war it was worth giving it all you had. It made me cry when I realized that the best they could do with their lives at that point was to go to prison. That's what my country had come to. When I stopped crying one night, I said to myself, "What can I do now that I'm ready to go to prison to help end this war?" Most things that are worth doing to avert a war don't involve jail, but they all involve risk of your career. You cannot oppose a president's policy, even by anonymous leaks. You can't stand up in the Senate. Even a Senator Byrd cannot stand up in the Senate without risk to his position with his constituents, to the money that will be coming to his state – opposing a president and wanting to filibuster him.
I asked myself what I could do, and there was a number of things. The Pentagon Papers was not the most effective, but it was all I could do. I'm seeing now people who are new heroes like Barbara Lee or Scott Ritter, and Senator Byrd who has not been a lifelong hero of mine. In '64 he conducted one of the longest filibusters in the history of the Senate, against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as all but two did, and as Edward Kennedy did at that time, but he learned from that. He said he has regretted that vote more than anything in his life for 38 years. On Iraq, he tried to filibuster and 75 senators shamefully voted to close off that debate. I believe nearly all of those senators will regret their vote for this for the rest of their lives – as long as Senator Byrd has. But let's celebrate the 23 who voted against that, including Barbara Boxer. Let's let Dianne Feinstein – who made a great error in voting for that, I believe against her better knowledge – know she will have time as a senator to do more than she's done for us on this war.
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