ON A CLEAR MORNING later that spring, a small military plane cruised low over the Plain of Reeds, a contested area near Saigon. Daniel Ellsberg sat in the front passenger seat with his camera pointed out the window. This was a very different way to see the war.
American military maps showed this region of South Vietnam in different colors: one color for land controlled by the South Vietnamese government, another for territory controlled by the Viet Cong. What struck Ellsberg was how much the landscape below looked like one of those maps. There was a river, and on one side the forest burst with shades of green. The other side looked like a vast red desert. Just bare reddish-brown earth. No trees, no plants, no crops.
Ellsberg knew the cause—American planes buzzed 150 feet above the treetops, spraying a defoliant known as Agent Orange. The goal was to deny the enemy hiding places by killing all vegetation.
Spring 1966. Daniel Ellsberg stands next to a small aircraft on the Plain of Reeds after U.S. forces used napalm to kill vegetation in the area. Ellsberg noted, “Shooting at People. Got shot at” on the back of the photo.
“We had made a desert,” Ellsberg recalled. And this was the country the Americans were there to help.
As they flew over a small village, Ellsberg heard what sounded like corn popping. Someone was firing at them from the ground. The pilot called in an air strike and within minutes American planes sped over the village, dropping bombs. Ellsberg watched a phosphorous bomb hit a house, and saw the explosion spread in the air like the petals of an enormous white flower. “It’s a gorgeous sight,” he later said. “When white phosphorus touches flesh, however, it burns down to the bone; you can’t put it out with water.” He’d seen these terrible burns on children in Vietnamese hospitals. And these were the people the Americans were there to help.
As the pilot turned back toward his base, he pointed down to the wetland below.
“There is a VC down there.”
Ellsberg pulled out his pistol. The pilot grabbed his M-16 and dove to just a hundred feet above the ground. Below were two men in loose black clothing. They were running. They were unarmed.
They’d probably hidden their weapons nearby, the pilot said. As the plane zipped over their heads, the men dove and lay flat on the marshy grass. Then the men jumped up and began running again. The pilot came back around, firing his M-16.
“Does this happen often?” Ellsberg asked.
“All the time.”
“Do you ever hit anyone in this way?”
“Not very often,” the pilot said, turning for home. “It’s hard to hit anybody from a plane with an M-16, but it scares the shit out of them. They will be pretty scared VC tonight.”
Ellsberg asked how he knew they were Viet Cong.
“There’s nothing but VC in the Plain of Reeds.”
When he got back to Saigon, Ellsberg asked around. He was told that in addition to enemy fighters, about two thousand people lived and fished in the area they’d flown over. He thought about that. And he thought about the village he’d seen destroyed.
“We had been fired at, all right, but by whom?” he asked himself. “What connection did they have to the village? Or to the people, and the children, in the burning houses?”
And the question that really haunted him: “How were we serving American purposes in raining down punishment on the people in these houses?”
* * *
In early 1966, Robert McNamara reached the conclusion that the United States could not win the Vietnam War. But he was unwilling to confront President Johnson. In public, he continued to support escalation. Privately, he began airing grave doubts.
“No amount of bombing can end the war,” an exhausted-looking McNamara told a few reporters in an off-the-record discussion in February. The sustained bombing of Vietnam, he confided, was showing no discernable results. The infiltration of soldiers from North to South was steadily rising. According to the CIA, the bombing campaign was costing the United States nine dollars and sixty cents for every one dollar of damage inflicted on North Vietnam.
The strain on McNamara was visible, literally.
“His face seemed to be grayer and his patent leather hair thinner,” one of the journalists, Stanley Karnow, later wrote. “His voice lacked the authority it had once projected when he would point briskly to graphs and flip-charts to prove his rosy appraisals.”
That summer the CIA completed a report titled “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist.” The main point was that the American military was not hurting the enemy nearly enough to weaken their commitment to eventual victory.
McNamara read it. Johnson read it.
“Hell, don’t show this report to anyone,” Johnson told McNamara. “Put the clamps on it.”
* * *
In the summer of 1966, Patricia Marx flew to Vietnam to visit her fiancé. They had another romantic tour planned, but at the last moment Ellsberg found out he couldn’t get leave from work.
Stuck in Saigon, and as intensely curious as ever, Marx started looking around for stories. Teaming up with another journalist, she researched an article about families that had been driven from their homes by the fighting. She walked through squalid refugee camps. She spoke with people who had been forced to come to the city after their villages had been destroyed by American bombs, their crops wiped out by Agent Orange.
She had been against the Vietnam War from the start. This is when she became really furious about it. “I looked at those kids in the streets,” she remembered. “The poverty, and the thought of what was happening to those human lives was just intolerable, sickening.”
Marx still had her radio show in New York and took the opportunity to tape an interview with Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter who had been in Vietnam for three years. Sheehan’s view was bleak. Years before, he explained, the country’s best leaders had gone north to fight the French. North Vietnam simply had more talent, more discipline. The only thing holding off the Communists was American firepower.
“What’s going to happen?” Marx asked, frustration in her voice. “Are we just going to keep slugging it out?”
Patricia Marx with children in Vietnam, summer 1966
“I don’t see any quick end to the thing,” Sheehan said. “What I suspect, from what most American officials say here, is that it’ll be a long war.”
The blow-up with Ellsberg was inevitable. It came one night in Saigon, when they went to a party thrown for Sheehan, who was heading back to the States. Everyone was drinking and talking about the war. A European diplomat described a recent trip to North Vietnam, and the destruction he’d seen from American bombs. Marx listened, fuming.
As they walked home, she turned to Ellsberg and demanded, “How can you be a part of this?”
“But I’m trying to stop these terrible things.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re part of something that’s so awful. And you seem to be engaged in it.”
This exchange really stung Ellsberg. He was against the bombing of North Vietnam, and she knew that. I’m trying to do the best I can to moderate the killing, and I’m not getting any credit, he thought as they walked in silence. She’s holding me responsible for the whole war.
Over the next few days, Marx watched Ellsberg locking up again, closing himself off exactly as he had before he’d left for Vietnam. “His heart withdrew into a safe I didn’t have the combination to,” she remembered.
She soon left for the States. She had no idea where they stood, but held out hope they would eventually patch things up.
Ellsberg figured they were broken up for good. He blamed her critical words. “I thought she was unreasonable to hold me accountable for policies I was opposing,” he said many years later.
“Of course,” he added, “now I think she was right.”