June 29, 2001

Lying About Vietnam

By DANIEL ELLSBERG

The Pentagon Papers, published 30 years ago this month, proved that the government had long lied to the country. Indeed, the papers revealed a policy of concealment and quite deliberate deception from the Truman administration onward.

A generation of presidents, believing that the course they were following was in the best interests of the country, nevertheless chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the real policy was, what alternatives were being pressed on them from within the government, and the pessimistic predictions they were receiving about the prospects of their chosen course.

Why the lies and concealment? And why, starting in 1969, did I risk prison to reveal the documentary record? I can give a definite answer to the second question: I believed that the pattern of secret threats and escalation needed to be exposed because it was being repeated under a new president.

About the first question, I can still only speculate. Let me speak to the Johnson administration, in which I was a minor participant. The familiar answer is that in 1965, Lyndon Johnson was protecting his Great Society programs by concealing the scale of the war he was launching.

But there is also a much less famliar reason that explains Johnson's lack of candor during his entire term. Throughout the campaign of 1964, President Johnson indicated to the voters — contrary to his opponent Barry Goldwater — that no escalation was needed in South Vietnam. He sometimes added, almost inaudibly, "at this time."

As the Pentagon Papers later showed, that was contradicted as early as May 1964 by the estimates and recommendations of virtually all of Johnson's own civilian and military advisers. I believe he worried, not only in 1964 but over the next four years, that if he laid out candidly just how difficult, costly and unpromising the conflict was expected to be, the public would overwhelmingly want escalation on a scale that promised to win the war.

To this end, Congress and the voters might compel him to adopt the course secretly being pressed on him by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff. From 1964 through 1968, the Joint Chiefs continuously urged a litany of secret recommendations, including mining Haiphong; hitting the dikes; bombing near the Chinese border; closing all transportation routes from China; sending ground troops to Laos, Cambodia and the southern part of North Vietnam; possibly full-scale invasion of North Vietnam.

I think that this escalation would not have won the war. I suspect that Johnson thought this as well. But beyond that — as Johnson brought up repeatedly — the Joint Chiefs' course would have greatly risked war with China. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were ready to accept that risk. President Johnson was not.

But Johnson didn't want to get out either. We now know from memoirs and documents declassified after the Pentagon Papers that a number of his people, not only George Ball, an undersecretary of state, were urging him to do just that, to extricate us by a disguised withdrawal. But Johnson couldn't face being accused of losing a war. Instead, he stayed in and lied about the prospects. And that made for a prolonged war, an escalating war and essentially a hopeless war.

I do not believe that the war would have been less hopeless if the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs had been followed. It would have been much more bloody. It might well have involved a nuclear war or a major conventional war with China. That would have been even more catastrophic than what actually happened. So the worst was avoided. But at the cost of 58,000 American and several million Vietnamese lives.

I first learned of these debates in 1964 and 1965, when I was special assistant to John McNaughton, the assistant defense secretary. I read all the documents of that period that were later included in the Pentagon Papers, and I heard from McNaughton of his discussions with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson. I strongly regret that at that time, I did not see it as my duty to disclose that information to the Senate.

But then I was in Vietnam for two years from 1965 to 1967. I saw that our ground effort in South Vietnam was hopelessly stalemated, and I did not believe that increased bombing of the north would ever cause our adversaries to give up. Therefore I came to the belief in 1967 that we should negotiate our way out.

But in 1969, when I read the entire Pentagon Papers, covering 1945 to 1968, I became aware that every president from Harry Truman on had heard this advice from people more authoritative than me. And for some reason the presidents had always chosen to stay in. Their determination not to suffer the political consequences of losing a war outweighed, for them, the human costs of continuing.

Finally, I learned that Richard Nixon also refused to lose. In the fall of 1969, Morton Halperin, who had just given up his job as deputy to Henry Kissinger, informed me that Nixon really had a secret plan. It was widely thought he had no plan, that his campaign claim was just a bluff. Not true. His plan included secret threats of escalation unless there was a mutual withdrawal of North Vietnamese as well as United States forces.

I thought this plan would fail. From my experience in the government and in Vietnam, and from reading the Pentagon Papers, I thought the Vietcong would not give up, that the threat of escalation would be carried out, and that it would fail, with a great loss of life on both sides.

So my concern in releasing the Pentagon Papers was not simply, or even primarily, to get out the truth. I thought I would probably go to prison for the rest of my life. I wouldn't have done that just to set the record straight. I released the papers because I foresaw prolonged war and eventual escalation, including incursions into Laos and Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong and the bombing of Hanoi. I wanted to avert these events, but they all occurred.

I never had any sense that putting out these documents was likely to end the war, just that it might help. Maybe it did.

Daniel Ellsberg, who made the Pentagon Papers public, served in Vietnam and is a former Defense Department and State Department official.

Copyright © 2001 The New York Times Company