The Nation: Ellsberg: The Battle Over the Right to Know

FURTIVE nocturnal phone calls from strangers offering secret documents. Eager editors excitedly following terse instructions to pick up bags containing thousands of photocopied pages. Nimble newsmen frantically rushing exclusive disclosures into print. Harassed Government attorneys chasing into court to enjoin one series of revelations, only to see another break out elsewhere. A bemused federal judge wondering if the Justice Department might not be swatting futilely at “a swarm of bees.”

As the affair of the Pentagon papers went into its second incredible week, antiwar partisans seemed to be manipulating basic U.S. institutions—the press, Government, and even, in a sense, the courts—to stage-manage a dramatic presentation of their views far beyond the wildest dreams of the most zealous campus radicals. It was surely the slickest counter-Establishment insurgency of recent times. The climax was the sudden appearance on national television of the man who started it all. There was Daniel Ellsberg, once the gifted and aggressive war planner, speaking softly but leveling the harsh charge that Americans bear the major responsibility for as many as 2,000,000 deaths in 25 years of warfare in Indochina.

Within a few days, Ellsberg technically became a fugitive when a U.S. magistrate in Los Angeles issued a warrant for his arrest on a charge of illegal possession of secret documents and failure to return them to proper custody. A grand jury in Los Angeles had been quizzing Ellsberg’s associates at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif., where he had worked and where a full set of the secret volumes had been kept. At a press conference, Ellsberg’s attorneys said he would voluntarily surrender this week. The Government also sought a warrant against a former Rand employee, Anthony J. Russo, for refusing to testify before the grand jury.

Guidance from the Senate

Ellsberg’s passing of most of a 47-volume secret Pentagon study of U.S. involvement in the Viet Nam War to the New York Times had swiftly built into a classic battle over the public right to know. The issue was seen as security v. freedom; the antagonists were major newspapers and the Nixon Administration; the argument went on over the rights of Government to keep some of its activities secret in the national interest, and of the press to keep a democratic society informed of what its officials have done. Reacting with unusual speed because of the gravity of the issues—and apparently also because the Justices did not find them overly complex—the Supreme Court held a rare Saturday hearing and a decision was imminent (see following story).

The court’s decision may prove historic, but it is unlikely to diminish the continuing controversy. For the first time, countless citizens were confronting questions that had never bothered them before. Precisely what should be kept secret? Who should decide? When should secrecy end? Forced onto the defensive, President Nixon ordered all of the documents delivered to the Congress but with secrecy labels still in effect. Congressional leaders promised multiple investigations into what the documents reveal about past U.S. war plans and how the many futile decisions were reached. Reflecting what seems to be nearly the end of public tolerance of the war, a majority of U.S. Senators urged the President to withdraw all U.S. troops from Indochina within nine months, subject only to release of U.S. prisoners of war. The Senate had rejected all previous attempts to influence Nixon’s pace of disengagement.

At a more immediate and less lofty level, the affair raised other intriguing questions. Among them:

HOW WAS THE RELEASE OF THE PAPERS ORCHESTRATED? They were not handed from one editor to another in collusion to keep a step ahead of the Government bans. Nor could a single man, even the brilliant and dedicated Ellsberg, be handling the entire distribution. It seemed likely that Ellsberg was getting help from the activist antiwar left, possibly the same skillful underground operators that fed FBI records stolen from Media, Pa., to selected newspapers. The orchestration of the latest delivery was highly sophisticated. The Pentagon papers first appeared in the Times and the Washington Post, the two newspapers most regularly read in the capital. They emerged in the Boston Globe in the heart of the Cambridge intellectual community. Also favored were the Los Angeles Times, which is powerful in the West and runs a news service with more than 200 U.S. newspaper clients, and the eleven-newspaper Knight chain. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Chicago Sun-Times also met the same obvious criteria: a strong antiwar editorial record.

HOW DID THE DELIVERY SYSTEM WORK? A top editor at the Knight newspapers received a call from a man who admitted he was using a pseudonym. Was the Knight chain interested in the papers? Then it would have to agree that it would protect them against Government seizure. The editor consented and told his Washington bureau chief, Robert Boyd, to expect a long-distance call. The stranger telephoned Boyd several times, each time offering a hint as to where the secret documents might be found. “It was like a treasure hunt,” explained one editor.

Boyd finally was led to a point outside Washington (he will not say where). There he found some 1,000 pages of the Pentagon report. The Knight package consisted of an orderly presentation with occasional marginal notes like “Wow!” inked beside some Pentagon statements. On most pages, a slip of paper had been placed over the secrecy classification when the photocopy was made, blanking it out. But on a dozen pages Knight newsmen found the words TOP SECRET—SENSITIVE. At the Boston Globe, the pickup arrangements sounded so melodramatic that editors suspected a hoax. But they went along and received a bag containing 2,000 pages.

HOW DID ELLSBERG OBTAIN THE PAPERS?

Ellsberg had worked on the Pentagon study in 1967 and was one of four defense analysts at the elite Rand Corp. research institute granted access to the full report kept there. Although Rand officials insist that their security is tighter than the Pentagon’s, no daily check of employee briefcases was made. Ellsberg apparently began taking papers out of Rand beginning late in 1969.

Ellsberg rented a Xerox copier part time for about four months from a friend, Lynda R. Sinay, 27, who ran a Los Angeles advertising agency that was slipping into bankruptcy. Granted immunity from prosecution, she told the grand jury that Ellsberg made about 3,000 copies from her machine, working in her offices at night when no employees were there. He paid her $150. Ellsberg even enlisted the help of his two children, Robert, now 14, and Mary, 12, in the arduous copying task. When Ellsberg joined M.I.T. as a senior research associate in 1970, he transported the copied documents to Cambridge with him. It is known that New York Times Reporter Neil Sheehan traveled to Boston in March, 1971, shortly before the Times began working on its series.

One fundamental question bothers many Americans. Just who is this man Ellsberg, a distinctly minor figure who dares to challenge four Presidents, assails the decisions of some of the keenest minds ever to have been attracted to national security service, and scatters classified documents like chain letters across the country? If he were merely an emotional and impulsive man obsessed by guilt about his personal involvement in a war that turned sour, Daniel Ellsberg’s conduct could be dismissed as outrageous. Yet Ellsberg does not stand alone. He was one of—and represents—an exceptional class of bright scholars who charged out of the nation’s best universities in the ’60s to apply mathematics and precise analysis to the waging of war. These defense intellectuals doubted neither the aims of U.S. policy nor their own capacity to find the means. While they would hardly use the term, they were patriots.

To be sure, there was a heady feeling of power for young men in dealing with the fate of the nation and jousting with generals. There was a certain selfishness in seeking a career as an “inner-and-outer,” spending a few years in the thick of the Washington bureaucracy to establish can-do credentials for an enhanced reflective life back out on campus. There was also the thrill of the game, outwitting colleagues as well as Communists. Moscow and Hanoi were opponents to be taken or checkmated on the international chess board. The deployment of power was fun. War, really, was academic.

At one level, the Bundys, McNamaras, McNaughtons, Yarmolinskys, Hilsmans and Rostows enjoyed the sophisticated cocktail parties and the company of Kennedys. They aimed witty dinnertime barbs at 30-year officers who would never understand the intricacies of counterguerrilla warfare. The more junior Ellsbergs were jockeying to break into that inner circle, while enjoying the kick of being so close. Yet those paper theories of outwitting Hanoi and outfoxing guerrillas did not work. Nor did sustained bombing or half a million U.S. troops. When some of the frustrated technocrats visited Viet Nam to see what had gone wrong, they discovered that those body counts meant people were dying, the game was bloody, there was much misery and no glory. U.S. intervention in Viet Nam had once seemed necessary and reasonable, the sort of thing a just power must some times do in an imperfect world. But now they began to wonder whether the price, for anyone or any side, was worth it. Was the U.S. really accomplishing anything? Above all, after Tet in 1968 and America’s growing sense of failure, they began to discuss a mushy and unfamiliar concept among war planners: morality. Such was Daniel Ellsberg’s private evolution.

A Reasoned Conversion

In a broader sense, Ellsberg’s turnabout from confident hawk to disillusioned dove parallels the Viet Nam sentiments of millions of Americans. That sure feeling of the early ’60s that a quick application of U.S. manpower and machines would speedily hurl back the insurgent Communists and assure survival of an independent South Viet Nam faded years ago. The stalemate and suffering, My Lai and drugs, now make it all seem disastrous to many. If all the plans had worked, of course, there would have been no Pentagon paper revelations, no Ellsberg on TV, little talk about the immorality of the war. The current U.S. agony is real but retrospective, a legacy of failure, of the cumulative agony of America’s longest war.

Ellsberg is too complex a man to fit neatly any mold, even that of the insulated academic, so shocked at his first sight of a combat-torn body that he denounces war. Ellsberg’s conversion was much more gradual—although, as with nearly everything he has done, once he had a change of mind he threw all of his spirit and intelligence into it, moving from one extreme to another. When he first saw combat in Viet Nam as a civilian pacification specialist, in fact, Ellsberg seemed to enjoy the experience. A reporter recalls hearing loud shouts as a U.S. infantry company operated near Rach Thien in 1966. “There was Ellsberg, dressed in fatigues and jungle boots, telling the infantrymen to get off their goddamned asses, to get on the offensive and stay on the offensive. He carried a submachine gun and was practically taking over the company.”

Last May, Ellsberg appeared at a Washington antiwar rally. He berated a group of demonstrators for their lack of zeal and promptly took charge. “I tried to get arrested,” he explained later, “but I guess I didn’t look young enough.” Boston police had no such qualms. One officer clubbed Ellsberg at a Mayday protest at Government Center. Bellicose or pacific, Ellsberg sought the center of the action.

Brainy but no introvert, bookish but also athletic, Ellsberg graduated first in his class from Michigan’s Cranbrook prep school, where he also captained the basketball team. Practicing piano eight to ten hours a day, he was well advanced toward a possible concert career at 15 when his music-minded mother died in an auto accident. He found one consoling thought: “Now I don’t have to play the piano again.” He rarely did until years later.

Life at the Rand Corp.

At Harvard, which he attended on a Pepsi-Cola scholarship, Ellsberg similarly spread his talents broadly. He debated, edited the campus literary magazine, wrote editorials for the daily Crimson, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and married a Radcliffe sophomore. He continued to scamper effortlessly up the academic ladder: graduate study at King’s College in England, a master’s degree in economics from Harvard, then a Ph.D. based on a prophetic thesis in decision making: Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. “He loved analyzing risks,” recalls a friend. “He talked about it all the time. It fascinated him.”

Ellsberg’s education was interrupted by four years of service shortly after the Korean War. He was described by a fellow Marine as a “tough, hard-nosed hatchet man.” When the Suez crisis was hot, Ellsberg, then a captain, voluntarily extended his tour of duty. Again, the potential action beckoned.

From Harvard, Ellsberg moved to the Rand “think tank,” where his expertise in probability theory, particularly as applied to war analysis, was much in demand. Much of Rand’s reputation rested on its studies for the Defense Department on such harsh possibilities as various kinds of nuclear threat, strikes and counterstrikes, including calculations of projected casualties. Although he was almost always tardy in getting reports written—he suffers from habitual writing blocks—his love and grasp of the subject quickly impressed Rand President Henry Rowen. “Dan was an ear whisperer,” recalls one Rand colleague. He would rather talk than write, which is something of a handicap in most bureaucracies. When the Pentagon’s Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, an expert on nuclear test bans, needed an assistant in 1964, Ellsberg landed the job. Now he was on the inside of U.S. strategic studies —and a most contented man. He was so engrossed in his work that he was surprised and shaken when his wife Carol sued for divorce later that year (last week she gave the Government an affidavit linking him to the possession of the secret papers). With his neglected marriage broken, he seemed to be re-examining his whole life, which had centered on a successful but conventional career. He still did not question U.S. aims in South Viet Nam, but he was concerned about the lack of success and wanted to view the problems in the field. Major General Edward Lansdale, recruiting more help for his highly independent intelligence operations, yielded to Ellsberg’s pleas to be allowed to join him in Viet Nam.

Letting Go in Malibu

Lansdale at first found Ellsberg so eager to expound theories while they traveled dangerous roads that he had to warn him to watch for ambushes. Yet Lansdale was struck by Ellsberg’s “sensitive perceptions” and “probing analysis,” even amid Saigon’s intrigues. He became an expert on Saigon’s complex political rivalries. Despite his occasional displays of bravado, Ellsberg began to worry about needless killing. He was later to tell a U.S. Congressional conference about flying over a “free-fire zone” with a U.S. pilot who triggered his M-16 at almost anyone who moved on the ground. “This game goes on daily in almost every province of Viet Nam,” Ellsberg complained. “I am sure the Viet Cong will come out of this war with great pride in the fact that they confronted American machines and survived. I came out of that plane with a strong sense of unease.”

Ellsberg’s feelings were also indicated by a combat photograph he took, which seemed to capsulize the individual GI’s frustration and anger at the war’s futility. A lieutenant had watched his battalion hit by unseen snipers in the Mekong Delta for ten days without killing a single enemy in retaliation. The unit came upon an empty house and radioed for permission to destroy it; the request was denied. Ellsberg’s picture shows the officer senselessly bayoneting a canteen in sheer fury.

Hospitalized with hepatitis, Ellsberg began to read more books about the long history of warfare in Indochina. He recuperated back in California, where he rejoined Rand and turned to a livelier life: a succession of dazzling girls, a red sports car and a share in a ramshackle Malibu Beach house. He flooded the place with psychedelic lighting to the point where police raided what they thought was a noisy pot party, only to find a number of tipsy Rand analysts dancing to rock music. He lived with a Swedish secretary before marrying Patricia Marx, who had been regularly dating New York Theater Critic John Simon.

Fears of a Replay

Friends say Dan and Patricia dove happily into most everything California offers uninhibited couples, including group-encounter sessions, Yoga, Buddhist self-improvement sects and nudism. They backpacked into mountains, and Dan enjoyed climbing with his son Robert. Husband and wife so loved the sea that even when they were a continent apart Dan would hold the telephone outside his window so Patricia could hear the Malibu breakers. Dan, who neither smokes nor drinks, also underwent psychiatric analysis, later told friends it was a turning point of his life.

After the Communist Tet offensive of 1968, Ellsberg began to despair of U.S. success in the war and to review more introspectively his own involvement in the previous planning. He had by then spent about eight months on the Pentagon study ordered by McNamara and written a draft of one volume. That, too, seemed to disturb him deeply. A friend recalls first meeting Ellsberg at a Santa Monica restaurant and Ellsberg’s terse answers to his conversational questions: “What do you do?” “I work.” “What kind of work do you do?” “I think.” “What do you think about?” “Viet Nam.” “What do you think about Viet Nam?” “How in God’s name are we going to get out of there?”

But Ellsberg was thinking much more than that about Viet Nam as he began to harangue friends about the immorality of the U.S. presence in Indochina. He felt that the clock was running out. A close friend is convinced that Ellsberg’s age had much to do with the timing of his exploit: “He was worried about having turned 40 without having done anything big. He was just busting to do something.”

In his television interview last week Ellsberg said he could think of only one U.S. hero in the war: Sergeant Michael Bernhardt, who reportedly refused to shoot civilians at My Lai. He claimed that release of the papers was timely because he fears that Nixon may be planning “a replay of 1964,” meaning major bombing strikes against North Viet Nam after next year’s election. Ellsberg contends that Johnson planned such attacks before the 1964 election.

Ellsberg’s views on the war were best detailed in one of the few articles he has managed to complete (he has been pecking out a Viet Nam book for nearly a year), a March essay in The New York Review of Books. In it Ellsberg predicts that Nixon will increase bombing as more U.S. troops withdraw, to protect those that remain and also to prevent the collapse of the Saigon government until a politically acceptable interval passes. His thesis is that only heavy bombing can cover the U.S. withdrawal, that it is a necessary condition of exit. As a result, he says, more Asians will die or be made refugees.

What Ellsberg claims has been a U.S. callousness toward Vietnamese deaths and a preoccupation with lowering its own casualties to an acceptable level has been a recurrent theme of his criticism. Last January he turned an easygoing Cambridge conference into an electric moment of confrontation when he rose from the floor to ask Henry Kissinger if the Government did not have any estimates of Vietnamese casualties under Nixon’s Vietnamization program. Kissinger hesitated, called it a “cleverly worded” question. But did he have an answer? Kissinger evaded and called the question “racist.”

Attack and Defense

Discussing at a party one night how differently the U.S. views murder of Vietnamese and of its own citizens, Ellsberg and a friend concocted the most outrageous slogan they could think of to illustrate the point. It was: FREE CALLEY—AND MANSON. Ellsberg’s son had a batch of buttons printed and gave them to his father on his 40th birthday—and the pair enraged Cambridge residents by handing them out on the street. Few appreciated the irony.

It was to convince other Americans that U.S. policy in Viet Nam has been morally blind that Ellsberg arranged to release the secret study. Yet not all of the men who have admired Ellsberg’s mind and potential share the conviction that his act will accomplish anything positive. Lansdale considers it more likely that the papers amount to “a perverted McCarthyism. The people who released them have elicited emotional responses just as McCarthy aroused the intellectuals and the liberals. The people attacked will be hitting back.”

Senator Barry Goldwater charged that “when publishers and editors decide on their own what security laws to obey, it puts them in the same category as those radicals who foment civil and criminal disobedience of laws they disagree with for moral reasons.”

Other tart criticisms were offered by two of Johnson’s White House intellectuals, the University of Texas’ Walt Rostow and Brandeis’ John Roche. Rostow said that the Pentagon researchers had exercised a “most egregious extraction out of context” of his “hundreds of memos on Southeast Asia.” Newspapers, he contended, had further distorted the perspective. “If a student here at Texas were to turn in a term paper where the gap between data and conclusions was as wide as that between the Pentagon study and the newspaper stories, he would expect to be flunked.” Roche scoffed at the study as “third-echelon chitchat,” adding: “The Pentagon has this immense welfare program: aid to dependent colonels. They sit around over there and work up contingency plans.”

Some of the flaws in the study were openly conceded by Leslie H. Gelb, chairman of the task force that managed it, in a court affidavit. He said that the people who worked on it were “uniformly bright and interested, although not always versed in the art of research. Of course, we all had our prejudices and axes to grind and these shine through clearly at times, but we tried, we think, to suppress or compensate for them. Writing history, especially where it blends into current events, is a treacherous exercise. We could not go into the minds of the decision makers. We often could not tell whether something happened because someone decided it, decided against it, or because it unfolded from the situation.”

Yet the disclosure of the documents had some unexpected defenders. William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review supported the Times, partly on the grounds that “overclassification of documents by governments amounts to approximately 3,000%—and no one is going to read all this mass anyway.” Frederick Nolting, former ambassador to Saigon, argued that in some cases the truth of what happened is even worse than the Pentagon papers make it appear. “If anything, the published records tend to varnish over these crucial events or make them less offensive and damaging to those actually involved.”

A Terribly Unpopular Thing

Replying to critics who claimed that the Times had only started the series to make money, Managing Editor Abe Rosenthal said that there was no increase in circulation at all until the Government took the Times to court (then on one day it jumped about 60,000). But the cost of producing the series, which may yet run through another eight installments, could reach $1 million. As for how the Times selected the material it has run so far, Foreign Editor James Greenfield said that the editors started with specific decisions, then worked back to the documents that had led to the decisions. “We threw out literally hundreds of documents —some that would have put your hair on end—because they didn’t show how the decision was made.” Despite qualms about the use of classified material, the majority of U.S. editors seems to feel that they would have acted like the Times if given the chance (see PRESS).

Whatever the specific strengths and weaknesses of the Pentagon history, its impact was clearly most damaging to Democrats, but the Nixon Administration’s attempts to suppress the report made many Americans wonder about its motives. U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour conceded that “what the Government has done in this case is a terribly unpopular thing. We are villified on all sides.” The impending prosecution of Ellsberg is certain to bring more abuse, as well as some praise, to the Administration.

The White House insisted, with much justification, that it must take action when it feels that a law has been violated. “How would you explain to people that you elected not to enforce the law?” asked one presidential aide. Yet the law in this case was not necessarily all that clear cut. Only the court action will determine whether the law has, indeed, been violated. If the newspapers are allowed to resume publication, the Administration can be faulted on two counts: its reading of the law was poor and capacity to amplify the voice of its critics was unbounded.

At least subliminally, the Ellsberg affair was bound to affect the mood of both the country and Congress, adding some velocity to the antiwar tides. The Senate showed growing impatience with the Administration’s Viet Nam disengagement policies and was in a mood for strong action. By virtue of only one vote, hawks were able to gut an amendment to the draft extension bill that would have cut off all funds for U.S. military operations in Indochina within nine months. The Senate then went on to pass with ease, 57 to 42, a bill proposed by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield that urged the President to withdraw all troops in nine months but did not include a cutoff of funds.

Too Many Ellsbergs

The Pentagon papers controversy has severely damaged the mutual willingness of press and Government—inherently in conflict—to maintain a working relationship with each other. The fact that for the first time the difference had to be resolved by the Supreme Court indicates a breach that threatens the orderly processes of a democratic society. Regardless of the legal issues, the newspapers saw a higher morality in exposing the secret history of decisions that had led to a dangerously unpopular public policy. Appeal to a higher morality by an individual or an organization is often necessary—and always dangerous. No government of law can passively permit it—or simply repress it. Therein lies the Administration’s dilemma. There may be too many Daniel Ellsbergs in the U.S. now for a President to ignore their will.

Ellsberg has helped fulfill his prophecy of mounting stress in the U.S. unless the war ends, a prophecy offered before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year. Said Ellsberg: “Personally, I have thought in the last couple of years of protest in this country that it was still possible to exaggerate the threat to our society that this conflict posed for us. But I am afraid that we cannot go on like this, as seems likely, unless Congress soon commits us to total withdrawal, and survive as Americans. I think that what might be at stake if this involvement goes on is a change in our society as radical and ominous as could be brought about by our occupation by a foreign power. I would hate to see that.”