Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War

By late 1967, the war had taken its toll on Secretary McNamara. Under enormous pressure, he often cried in meetings, and President Johnson “gently pushed” him out of the Pentagon by assigning him a new position as president of the World Bank. Then, “the rest of the administration worked […] [at] spreading good news about Vietnam” (127). Westmoreland insisted that their forces were “making real progress” (127).

On January 31, 1968, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive: There were over 100 surprise attacks across South Vietnam, including at the US embassy in Saigon. The American public was alarmed by footage of “American diplomats firing guns out the windows of the embassy” (129), and although Westmoreland “declared victory,” the attack was “a psychological disaster” for the US (130). Despite four years and more than 500,000 American troops, the enemy was still able to launch large-scale attacks. It didn’t seem like North Vietnam had been weakened by the years of war.

Back in the US, Ellsberg moved to California, where he lived near his children and resumed his job at the Rand Corporation. However, he remained “a trusted Washington insider” and briefly returned to Washington as a consultant after the Tet Offensive (132). Westmoreland was requesting more troops, and a copy of the request appeared on Ellsberg’s desk. The document was top secret, but Ellsberg thought it “was not a decision that should be made in secret […]. The people had a right to know” (133).

A few days later, Ellsberg was surprised by a “stunning” New York Times headline revealing the secret request for more American troops. Immediately, congressmen and senators began speaking out against the troop increases, and President Johnson lost his ability to increase troops in secret. For the first time, Ellsberg saw that “leaking could be a patriotic and constructive act” (133).

President Johnson was furious about the leak, arguing that an individual “has no right to sabotage his president and his own government from within” (134). Johnson’s approval ratings dropped, and he struggled to beat Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy in the election’s first primary race. On March 31, 1968, President Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection. Then, North Vietnam finally agreed to peace talks.

Attending an antiwar rally in New Jersey, Ellsberg “wanted very badly to believe the war was over” (136). However, there was still much more to come, both in Vietnam and at home in the US. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and just two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated after winning California’s Democratic primary. Ellsberg had been helping with Kennedy’s campaign, and he sat down and “sobbed” when he heard the news. He “tuned out” for the rest of the summer, spending time with his children and “barely” going to work. He was in the midst of a deep depression and began seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Lewis Fielding.

Running on a strongly antiwar platform, Republican candidate Richard Nixon seemed poised to sweep the presidential election. However, just a few weeks before the election, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey “summoned the nerve to break with Johnson” and announced his intention to end the war in Vietnam (139). Nixon’s lead began to diminish. When the peace talks with North Vietnam reported an unexpected breakthrough, Nixon lost his lead altogether; polls showed Humphrey winning with just a few days left until the election. Desperate to hold onto his victory, Nixon’s campaign manager called Anna Chennault, a woman with contacts in South Vietnam’s government. The campaign manager urged Chennault to convince the president of South Vietnam to wait until after the US election to proceed with the peace talks.

Meanwhile, the CIA was intercepting the Nixon campaign’s correspondence with the government of South Vietnam. President Johnson was furious at Nixon’s sabotage. However, he knew it would “rock the world” if he revealed Nixon’s actions just 48 hours before the presidential election (141).

On November 3, 1968, Nixon called President Johnson and categorically denied any attempt to influence the South Vietnamese government. Johnson didn’t believe Nixon, but he decided that revealing the secret would be more damaging than keeping it, so he said nothing. On November 5, Americans went to the polls, and by 8:30 am on November 6, Nixon was declared the winner.

Meanwhile, Ellsberg was feeling better and was back at work at Rand. After Nixon was elected, the new president asked Henry Kissinger to be his national security advisor, and Kissinger called the Rand Corporation, asking for a paper analyzing Nixon’s policy options in Vietnam. Ellsberg was given the job, but when he turned in the paper, Kissinger pointed out that he didn’t include a “‘win’ option.” Ellsberg argued that winning in Vietnam wasn’t an option. He wasn’t sure what Kissinger thought but felt “[h]e had done all he could” (148).

In January of 1969, Nixon was sworn in as president and moved into the White House with his family. He knew he had “the toughest job in the world” (149), but he felt confident in his ability to broker peace in Vietnam. Working under what he called “the madman theory,” Nixon believed “he could frighten North Vietnam into backing down” if they thought he was crazy enough to do anything to end the war (150).

As he settled into the White House, Nixon began “to test the madman theory” (152). He started bombing targets in Cambodia, just across the Vietnamese border. He reasoned that the North Vietnamese forces crossed the border to move supplies into South Vietnam. However, to avoid public outrage, the military lied to Congress, claiming “that the bombs were actually falling on Vietnam” (152).

Meanwhile, McNamara’s Pentagon team was finishing the Vietnam study, known as the Pentagon Papers. The study was an astounding 7,000 pages long, and Ellsberg was anxious to read it. He got permission to bring a copy back to California as long as he “promised to be discreet” (152). It took several flights to move the entire volume, but soon, a copy of the completed study was locked in Ellsberg’s office in the Rand Corporation.

Ellsberg also received a surprise phone call from Patricia. They hadn’t been in touch since their fight about the war, but Patricia told Ellsberg she still loved him. When she came to California for an interview, they saw one another. While they didn’t decide to get back together, they both felt there was still a spark between them.

Meanwhile, the New York Times received a tip from a British journalist in Cambodia about the United States’ “secret” bombings, and the story appeared on the front page. The Pentagon denied the bombings, and “the story went away” (154). Ellsberg, however, knew the story was true. He tried to warn his coworkers at Rand that “Nixon was secretly escalating the Vietnam War” (154), but no one believed him.

A few weeks after the story on the Cambodian bombs, Ellsberg went to speak to students at Ohio University. He told them that “most [Vietnamese] people were neither communist nor strongly anti-communist” (55). Rather, they simply wanted the war to end. After his lecture, Ellsberg thought about what he had said. If it were true that the people of South Vietnam wanted the war to be over, he wondered “how [the United States] could be justified in prolonging the war inside their country” (156).

As he pondered the question, Ellsberg began reading the Pentagon Papers, which “clearly […] documented” a decades-long “pattern of deception” (156).

As Ellsberg read the Pentagon Papers, he realized that “the United States had never actually tried to win” in Vietnam (158). Over and over, presidents had “escalate[d] American involvement in Vietnam knowing that what he was doing had little chance of success” (158). Although all the presidents knew there was no way to “win” in Vietnam, they “had done just enough to avoid ‘losing’ South Vietnam before the next election” (160). Finally, Ellsberg no longer saw the war as “a case of good intentions that failed” (160); he knew the war “had been wrong from the start” (160).

Nixon was continuing the pattern. He had repeatedly promised the American people “peace with honor” (297), but North Vietnam was not responding to threats or concessions, and Nixon’s remaining options were limited.

Meanwhile, Ellsberg attended a peace rally at the War Resisters’ International Conference. He felt just as out of place as he had when he attended the rally in Washington with Patricia Marx, but he kept recalling a line from the essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which Henry David Thoreau called on citizens to “cast your whole vote” (162)—Thoreau meant that citizens should influence events rather than simply voting with a “strip of paper” (162). Ellsberg soon found himself passing out pamphlets and “enjoy[ing] himself” at the rally.

The next day, a young man named Randy Kehler spoke at the peace rally. Kehler was facing jail time for draft evasion and spoke of facing his punishment “without any remorse or fear” (164). Listening to him, Ellsberg was overcome with emotion. He rushed out of the room and locked himself in the bathroom, where he sat on the floor and sobbed. He realized that “[t]he best young Americans were going to war or going to jail” (164), and he wondered if the war would still be happening when his own son turned 18. Finally, he composed himself and asked what he could do to end the war.