Daniel Ellsberg: Still blowing the whistle

The legendary activist who leaked the Pentagon Papers says officials need to speak out against administration lies now.

Editor's note: In this fourth and final excerpt from "Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out," Daniel Ellsberg talks about why he should have released the Pentagon Papers sooner, the dangers in following one's conscience, and his fear that the White House will use a terror attack as a "Reichstag fire to close down democracy."

By Bill Katovsky

Read more: Books, Bush, Protests, Books Features, Excerpts, Iraq War

April 17, 2006 | Daniel Ellsberg is perhaps the most famous whistle-blower in American history. In 1965, the former Marine and Pentagon analyst went on a State Department fact-finding mission to Vietnam. During that mission, which lasted 17 months, Ellsberg realized that the official line on Vietnam was false. Villages were not being "pacified," "hearts and minds" not won over. Field reports were being doctored, enemy casualties inflated. Furthermore, the South Vietnamese government was riddled with corruption, and its army suffered from low morale.

Two years after he returned to the United States, Ellsberg found himself living a double life. He was a Pentagon insider briefing top officials, including National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger -- and a participant in antiwar gatherings. Finally, Ellsberg decided he had to act. In his office safe was a 7,000-page top-secret Pentagon study -- commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who ordered the study because of his own increasing doubts about the war. The study, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, documented a consistent pattern of exaggeration and deliberate falsehoods about Vietnam policy dating back to the Truman administration. Ellsberg copied the report. "I saw [Vietnam] first as a problem, next as a stalemate, then as a moral and political disaster, a crime," he writes in "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," which won the 2003 American Book Award for nonfiction.

At first, he tried to get antiwar senators like William Fulbright interested in the Pentagon Papers. After being rebuffed on Capitol Hill, Ellsberg went to the press.

Did the papers' publication shorten the Vietnam War? At the outset, they became the center of an intense freedom-of-the-press struggle. The Justice Department sought an unprecedented injunction to prevent the New York Times from printing them. When the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in favor of the Times, it was a victory for the First Amendment, though their continued publication in the Times and 18 other newspapers failed to generate the impact Ellsberg hoped they would have. He explains why in "Secrets":

"Starting the day after Christmas 1971, [Nixon] launched a thousand U.S. bombers during five days of bombing against North Vietnam, in the heaviest raids since 1968. Thus, six months later after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, when people asked me at the end of the year what I thought I had accomplished, I said, 'Nothing.' Nothing in regard to the war, my overriding concern. It wasn't public opinion I had been ultimately seeking to change. It was the bombing, the war, Nixon's policy. None of those had been influenced by American public opinion since the start of his term in office, as far as I could see, or by the release of the papers. Most Americans in truth had wanted out of the war long before the papers were published; a majority had come to regard it as immoral. In the face of that majority sentiment, the president had kept the war going by reducing ground troops, while he increased the bombing, and by recurrently convincing the public that he was on the verge of a settlement."

While the papers stopped short of covering the years of his own presidency, Nixon feared that Ellsberg or others might come out of the woodwork with potentially damaging evidence. Nixon wanted to plug these leaks. This led to the creation of a new cloak-and-dagger unit called the Plumbers. Its first covert mission was breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to find dirt to use against Ellsberg. It was this same group -- Cuban exiles working for E. Howard Hunt -- who later bungled the break-in of the Democratic National headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

Ellsberg's trial for leaking the papers lasted five months. He faced 115 years in prison if convicted on all the charges. But on May 11, 1973, the judge dismissed Ellsberg's case outright. He cited "improper government conduct" (illegal wiretapping and evidence tampering came to light). On that very same day, Nixon sat down with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, in the Oval Office and vented his fury. An excerpt from that secretly taped conversation appears on the last page of Ellsberg's memoir:

"For example, on this national security thing, we have the rocky situation where the sonofabitching thief is made a national hero and is going to get off on a mistrial. And the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents. They're trying to get at us with thieves. What in the name of God have we come to?"

The Senate Watergate hearings commenced the following week. It was the subsequent cover-up, not the crime itself, which set into motion Nixon's resignation. (The articles of impeachment that were then being drafted included the Ellsberg break-in.) The war ended on May 1, 1975, under President Gerald Ford. Would the Plumbers unit have been formed if Ellsberg hadn't pulled off one of the most important whistle-blowing acts in American history? Would there have been a Watergate scandal? How much longer would the war have lasted? How many lives were ultimately saved?

In a Sept. 28, 2004, New York Times Op-Ed piece called "Truths Worth Telling," Ellsberg encouraged officials in the Bush administration to step forward with documentation detailing how the White House had misled the American public into supporting the Iraq war. Citing himself as an example who had failed to act until it was too late, he described a conversation he had had in 1978 with Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two senators who had voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution:

"Seven years and almost 50,000 American deaths later, after I had leaked the Pentagon Papers, [Morse told me that] if I had leaked the documents then, the resolution never would have passed. That was hard to hear. But in 1964 it hadn't occurred to me to break my vow of secrecy. Though I knew that the war was a mistake, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president. It took five years of war before I recognized the higher loyalty all officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, the soldiers in harm's way or their fellow citizens."

Today, Ellsberg -- who was the subject of a 2003 FX cable movie, "The Pentagon Papers," starring James Spader -- lives in Kensington, Calif., just north of Berkeley, with his wife, Patricia. He continues to be outspoken, giving antiwar lectures, attending peace rallies and mentoring government whistle-blowers like former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. He has been arrested 70 times.

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James Spader doesn't look like me in the movie, but he caught my intensity. Patricia and I watched it hand-in-hand. We loved its love parts. I asked her, "Did I really look that good?" And she said, "Better." I have one child with Patricia. Michael is now twenty-eight. He's a writer actually. He is up most nights writing. He is writing a memoir, of all things. His growing up. Various intellectual and emotional concerns. He is a very good writer. And a savage editor. Michael slashed "Secrets" almost in half. He calls himself Jack the Ripper. My older son, Robert, is editor-in-chief of Orbis Books. He did a lot of editing on my book. In the movie, Robert is running the Xerox machine, and my daughter, Mary, who was ten, is cutting the "Top Secret" off the documents. That really happened.

FX never approached me when they made the film. I am sure one reason was not to pay me any money. The other was probably to not get any interference from me -- which I would have almost had to do because every scene was wrong essentially. My former wife did not come to the place where we were copying documents and confront me.

At the beginning of "Pentagon Papers," Spader is speaking to the camera and more or less quoting a description in an essay that I wrote in which I quoted from "Toilers of the Sea," by Victor Hugo, about people walking into quicksand. As usual in that movie, he gets it almost exactly backwards. My essay is called "The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine." It got a prize for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association in 1970. Its thesis was that the notion we got into Vietnam as into a quagmire -- without noticing that we were getting deeper in and it was harder to get out of -- was a myth. Whereas the movie says that is how we got into Vietnam. What I said in my paper, which has been reprinted a lot, is that it's a very arresting image and very plausible, but is wrong in every respect. It is nothow we got into Vietnam. It may have been how the public thought we were getting into Vietnam. It was told that we were about to win any day. But inside the White House, the president was never told that. Never. Never told it was gonna be quick or easy or cheap. Nor that the next step would be sufficient to win.

I was also rather furious at the movie's end. It ends by my character saying, "If my greatest act of patriotism was an act of treason, so be it." Two or three times in the movie, I'm heard using the word "treason." "Gee, this is treason." And "I'll be tried for treason." I was, of course, not indicted for treason. I did not expect to be indicted for treason. I really don't appreciate people legitimizing the idea that what I did was treason. When people do say it, I correct them. So for my character in the movie to say it was an act of treason again reverses my actual attitude.

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