Secrets Quotes

“I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson’s reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“Do you ever feel like the Redcoats?”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“Cronkite: Isn’t this correcting of this problem of public information more in the character of the leaden in Washington than it is in anything that can be legislated?… Ellsberg: I would disagree with that. It seems to me that the “leaders”—by whom, I think, you’re referring to the executive officials, the Executive Branch of government—have fostered an impression that I think the rest of us have been too willing to accept over the last generation, and that is that the Executive Branch is the government, and that indeed they are leaders in a sense that may not be entirely healthy, if we’re to still think of ourselves as a democracy. I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson’s reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that. What these studies tell me is we must remember this is a self-governing country. We are the government. And in terms of institutions, the Constitution provides for separation of powers, for Congress, for the courts, informally for the press, protected by the First Amendment…. I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions…. Cronkite: How was [this study] kept a secret from the White House? Ellsberg: The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“(see note to p. 249), which I can still recommend”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“Kai Bird,”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“you and I disagree…is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“Vietnam to defend democracy, and remembers me responding that the Saigon regime was no democracy.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“remember someone saying that we were”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“These had explicitly denied that the demilitarized zone (DMZ) was an international border separating two independent states.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“carrying on a war in someone else’s country, a country in no way implicated in attacking our own or anyone else’s. To continue to do that against the intense wishes of most of the inhabitants of that country began to seem to me morally wrong.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“This was one of Kissinger’s first visits to Rand, after a long period of coldness that had begun in the late 1950s because of Rand’s critique of his advocacy of limited nuclear wars as instruments of U.S. policy in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“Richard Nixon was elected president with 43.4 percent of the vote.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“don’t think it occurred to me in 1961 that the White House might be lying about what the president had been told.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“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.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“I was exactly like the various White House officials who testified later during the Watergate hearings that they had believed—in the words of their boss, President Nixon—that “when the president does it, it is not illegal.”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the U.S. “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials throughout his years in office. (NATO retains a first-use policy to this day, as does the United States outside the NATO area—perhaps now with a new degree of sincerity, indicated by the first-use premises of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy review leaked in March 2002.)”
― Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers