I first heard Daniel Ellsberg when he was on the lam in June 1971, 52 years ago next week, after the Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers. He was in a secret location, being interviewed by Walter Cronkite. Ellsberg passed away today at 92.
I was 17 and had just graduated high school, and decided to hitchhike across Canada. And once I got to Vancouver, I decided to hitch down the West Coast to LA to see relatives in Long Beach. On my last ride, the driver had the radio on and it was Ellsberg and Cronkite. It was a very long time ago, but when the news of Ellsberg’s death came today, I thought about his voice on the radio in the dark, somewhere in Los Angeles County. I had been on the road, and had no idea what this was all about.
People will argue about whether he was right to make the Papers public. They make interesting reading. It is a history of the decision-making that got us deep into Vietnam, starting in the 1940s and ’50s, backing up the French and their colonial efforts to defeat Ho Chi Minh in the North, and then into our involvement in the 1960s to keep him from seizing the South with the help of his Viet Cong guerrilla proxies and turning Vietnam into a single, unified communist state.
The history was commissioned in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was trying to figure out what to do about Vietnam after two years of a massive buildup of American forces, and wanted a secret history to put it all in context. By that time, McNamara realized that the war had no end in sight that he could see, and so like the automobile executive that he was before running DoD, he brought in consultants. Maybe their research would provide some answers. Ellsberg was part of a team of 36 academics, military officers and DOD staff that put the history together. What was supposed to take 3 months took 2 years. They had access to all the government memos and studies and cables – military, diplomatic and otherwise – and wrote it. That was all they had, because McNamara told them they couldn’t talk to any of the decision-makers because he wanted to keep it very secret that they were even working on the study. So it is an unusual history in that it is entirely based on documents. It was finished in January 1969, just before the Johnson Administration left office. There were 15 copies. This was stuff that was never supposed to become public for decades, if ever, and suddenly, in 1971, while we were still in Vietnam, it was all out there because Ellsberg made his own copy, surreptiously, hundreds of pages worth, and shared it with the New York Times.
One main thing I took away was that the Papers showed that our government was not very open with the public about the war, particularly in 1964 and 1965, when big decisions were being made quietly. There was a lot of debate in the highest circles about whether a deep U.S. involvement was a good idea. At the very time that the government was drafting lots of guys and sending jets to bomb North Vietnam, our leadership wasn’t really sure whether this was a good idea and whether the South Vietnamese government was worth propping up, and whether the South Vietnamese people really wanted us there.
And there was a lot of internal debate about whether putting more troops in and running more bombing missions would make a difference. Soldiers fighting a war should know that their leaders at the highest echelon are convinced about a war and that they really know what they are doing, and neither of these things seemed to be the case from a reading of the Pentagon Papers. What they were saying publicly to us and what was being talked about privately in the Pentagon, at the embassy in Saigon and at the White House were different things. Every time I think about President Johnson personally reviewing bombing targets in North Vietnam, it makes me think these people didn’t know what they were doing in Washington. We just really didn’t know it at the time.
What everyone did know was that 1965 was not that far from 1949, when the Chinese communists drove the Nationalists off the mainland and onto Taiwan. The Republicans in the 1950s blamed Truman and the Democrats for “losing China,” their theory being that if we had intervened, we could have kept Mao from taking over. Whether a demobilized, under-strength American military could have been a factor – we were barely able to hold off the North Koreans in 1950 – is debatable. But Johnson was in the Senate during the whole “Who Lost China” episode, and was not eager to have a sequel for his Democrats, “Who Lost Vietnam?” (It is telling that Eisenhower, perhaps the most experienced military leader to ever sit in the Oval Office, accepted a frozen peace in Korea, did not unleash Chiang on mainland China and stayed clear of Vietnam throughout the ’50s save for some military advisers, less than a thousand at the end of his term. He had no desire to get into a land war in Asia on his watch.)
There are a lot of different historical interpretations of Vietnam, to this day. It is a very argued-about war. One thing was clear from the start. South Vietnam had a government that had little popular support, and was beset by one coup after another. This was a serious problem for us, constantly. The North didn’t have this problem. One reason is that it was a totalitarian state led by Ho Chi Minh with a single goal, a unified nation free of foreign occupiers. The other is that we helped leaders in the North rally their people by constantly bombing it, even as we were running out of targets in its decentralized economy and prevented by Washington from going after some targets that might have mattered. This was bombing as diplomacy, and not that effective in the ’60s. Possibly towards the end of our involvement in getting a pretend-treaty signed so we could get out.
My question to President Johnson in 1964 would have been: “We have an Army and Marine Corps that are good at taking territory. If we believe that the problem is that North Vietnam is keeping the Viet Cong insurgency going by supplying it, then are you prepared to put U.S. troops in large numbers in Laos and Cambodia to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail? Are you prepared to send American divisions into North Vietnam, capture Hanoi, and land Marines at its ports?” And he would have said, no, because that would have brought China into the war, just as it did in Korea when MacArthur went too close to China.
And I would have replied, well, then we probably shouldn’t get deep into this conflict if we are just going to chase Viet Cong around their own turf indefinitely, and drop bombs on the North when there’s nothing left to bomb on the approved target list. We should not get into a conflict that has a lot of rules of engagement that take away our advantages.
Our objectives in World War II were so simple they could be written on one side of an index card. Defeat and occupy Germany. Defeat and occupy Japan. We knew we had accomplished our strategic objectives because there were instruments of surrender and the German and Japenese armed forces ceased to exist in the spring and summer of 1945.
There was never that kind of clarity in Vietnam. As long as the government of North Vietnam existed, it was going to try to drive us out and occupy the South, Unless the government of North Vietnam ceased to exist, that was going to be a never-ending problem, especially with a supply line back to Russia and China. North Vietnam had patience, because this was an existential battle for them, and there was no debate possible about this in the North. We didn’t treat it as an existential battle, and starting with our buildup in the mid-60s, there was an increasing amount of arguing about the war in the U.S. Unless we were prepared to absolutely flatten Haiphong harbor and roll into Hanoi, which was never on the table, North Vietnam was going to wait us out, signing any treaty that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
Many at the top of our government seemed to know that our self-imposed limitations on fighting the war were a problem, for years, but didn’t want to admit it to the American people. When Nixon came in in ’69, his goal was to get out and put a decent interval between our withdrawal and the ultimate collapse of the South Vietnamese army and government. There was little confidence that South Vietnam was going to remain a sovereign state. We just didn’t want to be anywhere near the place when it fell. If he hadn’t resigned, Nixon might have been able to funnel enough aid to the South to postpone that collapse until the late ’70s instead of 1975.
We keep making these mistakes. We spent a lot of time in Afghanistan propping up an unpopular government, and once we left, the whole thing collapsed. We didn’t need to try to occupy Afghanistan. We just needed to make sure we could really, really make it unpalatable for whoever ran the place to let terrorists operate from there.
There is one school of thought that says that our efforts in Vietnam bought time. This is kind of a permutation on the Domino Theory. The Domino Theory was another way of stating the Containment approach that took hold in the late 1940s. The expansionist Soviet Union and China – the communist hegemons – were bent on world domination, and were behind all the wars of national liberation. Unless we stopped them in places like Korea and Vietnam, they would keep coming at us in Europe, Asia and Africa.
So, the thinking goes, our stand in South Vietnam convinced the Soviets and the Chinese that we wouldn’t just roll over. And that also gave countries in the Western Pacific the sense that we wouldn’t just roll over. If it was important and strategic enough, we would stand and fight, and our adversaries should be prepared for that.
And so our strong support for Ukraine has been to send a message to the Russians that there is a big cost to aggression. And it was also to send a message to China that invading Taiwan will be costly, (Even as I write that, we do not have a Taiwan strategy at this moment beyond something called “strategic ambiguity,” which is not easy to explain. Containment may still be the strategy, after 75 years, in Europe, but I am not sure what containment means in the Western Pacific with an aggressive China, and so i do not know if we will be having the “Who Lost Taiwan?” debate in the near future. There has been too little discussion publicly about what our strategic interests are in the Western Pacific, and this is how we drifted ever deeper into Vietnam in the early ’60s. Too little public discussion and answering of difficult questions.)
This story from the New York Times 52 years ago sums up some of the contents of the Pentagon Papers about how we got deeply into Vietnam in 1964 and 1965, and the government’s efforts to do it without saying a lot about it.
The story highlights one of the problems that plagued the conduct of the war, as cited by the Pentagon Papers’ authors – the inabiity of President Johnson to be candid with the American people in 1965, when decisions were made to significantly increase our involvement.
“After his first meeting with Taylor and other officials on March 31 the President responded to press inquiries concerning dramatic new developments by saying: “I know of no far‐reaching strategy that is being suggested or promulgated.”
“But the President was being less than candid,” the study observes. “The proposals that were at that moment being promulgated and on which he reached significant decision the following day did involve a far‐reaching strategy change: acceptance of the concept of U.S. troops engaged in offensive ground operations against Asian insurgents. This issue greatly overshadowed all other Vietnam questions then being reconsidered.”
I went to the archives, to The News & Observer for Friday morning, April 2, 1965. On the front page, in a story about his meetings with Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara, there is that quote from Johnson – “no far-reaching strategy.” In the AP story. Johnson knew, although the rest of us didn’t, that we were getting involved in a big way in a land war in Asia, which would have big consequences. Some 23,000 US troops in 1964 became 385,000 by 1966 and 536,000 in 1968. McNamara would write many years later that he thought by the mid-1960s that the war was not winnable, even as he was overseeing the buildup. Ellsberg felt that was clear from the Pentagon Papers when they were finished in 1969, and decided to share that insight in 1971 rather than wait 30 or 40 years for McNamara to write his memoir.
The Pentagon Papers project was led by Les Gelb, who was then a 30-year-old academic and Henry Kissinger protege working for McNamara in the Department of Defense in the 1960s. His introduction to the Papers is unlike any introduction to any government document I have ever read. I had read versions of the papers before, but not the original, unredacted version in the National Archives, which was declassified and released in 2011, on the 40th anniversary of Ellsberg’s leak of the documents. I realized in reading the introduction that Gelb had noted at the top that it was routed to McNamara’s successor, Clark Clifford, on Jan. 15, 1969 through two DoD officials, Paul Warnke and Morton Halperin. Halperin was Gelb’s boss. In the early 1980s, when I was an editorial writer for the Norfolk newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, my boss, Bill Wood asked me to join him for lunch with Halperin, who was in town I think giving a speech somewhere. I have a dim recollection of that lunch, and now regret that I didn’t go to it with 1,000 questions, because this was the guy who had overall oversight of the Pentagon Papers project, which I first learned about a dozen years earlier listening to the radio in Southern California as a very tired, young hitchhiker.
Les Gelb passed away a few years ago. He was one of those people who everyone in the foreign policy establishment knew, even if his name has kind of receded into the mists of history. He is not as well-known as Kissinger or Ellsberg, but is one of those folks who were very influential. I run into people like that all the time and think “People should know about this person.” This is what Gelb said about Vietnam, as written in the New York Times story about him when he passed:
Until about 1966, Mr. Gelb said he supported the Vietnam War — “the Munich analogy, domino theory, they’re very real to me,” he told WGBH in 1982.
But while working for Mr. Javits, he received a letter from a friend, an Army officer commanding a battalion, who said he had never seen an adversary fight as fervently as the North Vietnamese, “and he believed that it could only spring from the deepest sense of nationalism, and if that were the case, we could never beat it.” [Jacob Javits was a senator from New York, fyi]
Mr. Gelb also said he was originally opposed to the publication of the Pentagon Papers by The Times because “while the Papers show some lies, the main message is that our leaders, from Truman onwards, didn’t know hardly anything about Vietnam and Indochina.”
“They were ignorant,” he said. “And it also shows that the foreign policy community believed that if we lost Vietnam, the rest of Asia would fall.”
In a 2017 interview with WNYC’s “On the Media,” Mr. Gelb added: “These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, what the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.”