Final Secrets
I finally finished Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. It's very good and I highly recommend it.
Here are a few last quotes on diverse topics to leave you with:
Referring to a letter Ellsberg and other Rand analysts wrote protesting Nixon's Vietnam war policy:
At one point Konrad Kellen relayed to me a conversation he had just had with an unnamed "High Rand official" (a vice president, it turned out). "He said that if one Rand secretary lost her job because of this letter [through a budget cut], we didn’t have a right to send it." Ironically, the only Rand employees who were going out of their way to congratulate me on the letter were secretaries, all women. They didn’t write memos, but unlike the men who had started cutting me in the hallways or frowning angrily when they saw me, the secretaries would nod warmly or stop me to shake hands in the hall, whispering, "Godo job! Great letter!" More than one said, "It makes me proud to be at Rand." One of the two or three memos that defended both our right and our decision to send the letter was by one of the few women professionals at Rand, Kathy Archibald.
In response to a student who asked him what he thought about the burning of an ROTC building:
I said that I had been trained in the Marine Corps to do violence and that I had seen a lot of it in Vietnam. Its effectiveness, which was ultimately its justification, wasn't just a hypothetical question for me. I had had a good deal of experience on which to judge that, and I was no longer so impressed with it, and I knew much more about how it could go wrong than when I had been a marine. I very well understood, and shared, the frustration of the students at their inability to stop the war. But it seemed to have a lot in common with the frustration of the troops in Vietnam, who were the same age as the students in this audience, at their inability to win the war. And the response I had seen in Vietnam was very similar....I told them of the soldiers in Rach Kien, burning down every hut they came to, for no real reason than to leave some mark that they had passed that way, that they were not just plowing the sea....It was very American, I said, to think that to be willing to use violence was to show seriousness and to be effective, but that was not what I'd learned in Vietnam. I said I could see that many people in the audience felt proud of what had just happened on their campus but that I couldn't tell them I believed that burning down ROTC buildings would be any more productive for ending the war than burning down villages in Vietnam. It would take commitment, courage, and tenacity to end this war, but not an imitation of the government’s own destructive tactics.
During an interview with Walter Cronkite after the Pentagon Papers were released:
Cronkite: Isn't this correcxting of this problem of public information more in the character of the leaders of 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 refected 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 Lundon 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 the 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....