Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers in Espionage Aficionados

Feb 26, 2020 Eric_W rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-historiography, biography-memoir, vietnam

Ellsberg certainly likes himself in this revealing memoir, although I didn't care for the way the audiobook shifted back and forth between a narrator and Ellsberg himself. That being said, it's clear that Ellsberg, however laudable his motives, revels in rationalization for his actions. I was surprised by the role Neil Sheehan (author of the excellent https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...) played in spiriting off with a complete set of the documents he swiped from the apartment where Ellsberg Ellsberg certainly likes himself in this revealing memoir, although I didn't care for the way the audiobook shifted back and forth between a narrator and Ellsberg himself. That being said, it's clear that Ellsberg, however laudable his motives, revels in rationalization for his actions. I was surprised by the role Neil Sheehan (author of the excellent https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...) played in spiriting off with a complete set of the documents he swiped from the apartment where Ellsberg was hiding the copies. Sheehan delivered them to the Times where they spent weeks going over everything in preparation for their publication. Ellsberg found this out only during the depositions for his trial when the infamous Howard Hunt's safe was found to contain evidence showing what Sheehan had been up to.

Once the Times had hold of the documents and had begun publishing, the Nixon administration went to court to get an injunction against publishing, the first time the press had been subject to prior restraint according to Ellsberg. I seem to remember the case of Near v Minnesota in which the Supreme Court had ruled prior restraint unconstitutional, but perhaps the erroneous clarion call of "national security" made the difference. In any case the Supreme Court in New York Times v United States ruled they could publish. One result was an awakening of the somnolent newspaper industry which had been mostly regurgitating government handouts with regard to foreign policy. A longer term effect was the steady erosion of unquestioning support for not just the war, but government itself.

Bob Haldeman had predicted as much in a conversation with Nixon:
To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing.... You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.

The recent publication by the Post of the Afghanistan Papers reveals a similar pattern of mendacity and prevarication on the part of the government and military; the "we have just turned the corner," syndrome.

By that time it was all really moot anyway, as Ellsberg had, with the help of many friends who helped hide him and his wife while the FBI was looking for him, distributed sets to more than a dozen other papers. In fact, for a while Ellsberg must have felt he was living in a spy novel. He was hidden by friends who communicated in codes and talked only on pay phones (I wonder how that would go today -- I suppose the equivalent would be burner phones.)

Among the secrets revealed was that the president and his men kept two sets of books. Often even the pilots were unaware they were bombing in areas they had been told were off limits like Laos and North Vietnam. It got so bad that a lowly sergeant reported to his senator that everyone was lying. He was assuming the president didn't know, but it was the president who was orchestrating the whole thing.

By this time Ellsberg had been arrested and charged. Ironically, the U.S. did not have an Official Secrets Act. In fact Congress had specifically excluded whistle-blowers when it was debating what to do about leakers, although neither Ellsberg nor his attorneys knew that at the time.

I have to admit that Ellsberg probably should have gotten a medal simply for the fortitude in standing over an early Xerox machine to make copies of 7,000 pages. That, in itself, was punishment.
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