daniel ellsberg

What made Daniel Ellsberg—the famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower—different from today’s public intellectuals? How has the think tank environment in Washington changed over the decades? Why were the Pentagon Papers such a big deal? Why is foreign policy change so difficult? And how does progressive foreign policy fit into the story of Washington’s intellectual stagnation?

I sat down with Matthew Petti to discuss a new essay he had on the life of Daniel Ellsberg, the death of the old-style think tank, and so much more.

Matthew’s Newsletter: https://www.pettimatthew.com

Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. 

On June 12, 1971, the daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon, Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox at a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden. It was a wedding celebrated by not only the Nixon and Cox families but by the entire nation. President Nixon said of the day "It was a day we were all just very happy" It was a truly magical event and one of five such weddings at the White House in the 20th Century. 

The next day in a small article on the front page of the New York Times was a little story about a leak of confidential papers from a secret Pentagon study on the history of the Vietnam War. That little story was about an enormous leak of monumental proportions for our nation and its foreign policy. The thief, Daniel Ellsberg, had as good a secret clearance as anyone in Washington, he was married to an influential toy maker's daughter, and no one had any idea what else he had stolen. 

While the papers themselves did not mention the Nixon Administration in any of the documents it did have appendices full of documents that the communist enemies around the world had intercepted coded versions of and now that the real ones were readily available they could match up and break our secret codes. That was a fact that could get people killed and was a fact the press either willfully ignored or flat out did not care about. In either case, they also did not report that information to the public.  

Here was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with a strategic plan that included negotiating with the Soviet Union, the Communist Chinese, and we were at war and trying to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, and we were dealing with communist regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, plus dictatorships in Pakistan and other areas of the world in order to get their strategy in place and their plans to come to fruition. The release of the Pentagon Papers made  it appear to all of these secretive, totalitarian regimes that we could not keep our secrets from the New York Times or, even worse, The Washington Post. 

Nixon was red hot mad and had damn good reason to be. All the staff that worked at the White House called this the moment in which the Nixon Administration felt it had to take matters in hand to deal with leaks, subversives, and riotous protesters  to keep our country from coming apart in a wave of violent upheaval similar to 1968.

 It was extraordinary times and it would lead to events that would bring the Nixon Administration crashing down and leave our nation with a true question mark.

Is it right to remove one of our truly greatest leaders, in extraordinary times, because he may have broken the law in order to save the nation?

For a half century that question has still lingered and its consequence has set the nation on a calamitous course of extremism, cynicism, the criminalization of politics and the rise of widespread conspiracy theories that now 50 years later threaten the very foundation and core of the great American experiment in self governance. 

John Paul Vann was a career Army officer.  He served in combat during the Korean War and was an advisor to the South Vietnamese Army’s IV Corps fighting the Viet Cong for a year from 1962 to 1963.  Vann retired from the Army a few months after completed that assignment.  He returned to Vietnam in 1965.  First he worked as an official for the Agency for International Development.  Vann was then made the Deputy for Civil Operations and Rural Development Support for the Third Corps Tactical Zone in the twelve provinces north and west of Saigon.  In 1968 he was assigned to the same position for the Fourth Corps Tactical Zone in the provinces south of Saigon.  Vann died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam on June 16, 1972.  During his years in Vietnam, he developed some strong views about what the United States was doing versus what he thought it should be doing. 

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. 

On June 12, 1971, the daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon, Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox at a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden. It was a wedding celebrated by not only the Nixon and Cox families but by the entire nation. President Nixon said of the day "It was a day we were all just very happy" It was a truly magical event and one of five such weddings at the White House in the 20th Century. 

The next day in a small article on the front page of the New York Times was a little story about a leak of confidential papers from a secret Pentagon study on the history of the Vietnam War. That little story was about an enormous leak of monumental proportions for our nation and its foreign policy. The thief, Daniel Ellsberg, had as good a secret clearance as anyone in Washington, he was married to an influential toy maker's daughter, and no one had any idea what else he had stolen. 

While the papers themselves did not mention the Nixon Administration in any of the documents it did have appendices full of documents that the communist enemies around the world had intercepted coded versions of and now that the real ones were readily available they could match up and break our secret codes. That was a fact that could get people killed and was a fact the press either willfully ignored or flat out did not care about. In either case, they also did not report that information to the public.  

Here was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with a strategic plan that included negotiating with the Soviet Union, the Communist Chinese, and we were at war and trying to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, and we were dealing with communist regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, plus dictatorships in Pakistan and other areas of the world in order to get their strategy in place and their plans to come to fruition. The release of the Pentagon Papers made  it appear to all of these secretive, totalitarian regimes that we could not keep our secrets from the New York Times or, even worse, The Washington Post. 

Nixon was red hot mad and had damn good reason to be. All the staff that worked at the White House called this the moment in which the Nixon Administration felt it had to take matters in hand to deal with leaks, subversives, and riotous protesters  to keep our country from coming apart in a wave of violent upheaval similar to 1968.

 It was extraordinary times and it would lead to events that would bring the Nixon Administration crashing down and leave our nation with a true question mark.

Is it right to remove one of our truly greatest leaders, in extraordinary times, because he may have broken the law in order to save the nation?

For a half century that question has still lingered and its consequence has set the nation on a calamitous course of extremism, cynicism, the criminalization of politics and the rise of widespread conspiracy theories that now 50 years later threaten the very foundation and core of the great American experiment in self governance. 

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