“AN EMOTIONAL BASKET CASE”—that was how President Johnson described Robert McNamara’s state of mind by late 1967. “The pressure got so great that Bob couldn’t sleep at night. I was afraid he might have a nervous breakdown.”
In meetings, McNamara would rail against the war, shouting, “The goddamned Air Force, they’re dropping more on North Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in the last year of World War II, and it’s not doing anything!”
Then he’d turn to the window to hide his tears.
“He does it all the time now,” one of his secretaries told a visitor. “He cries into the curtain.”
Johnson gently pushed McNamara out of the Pentagon, giving him the prestigious but less controversial job of president of the World Bank. “I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired,” McNamara said years later. “Maybe it was both.”
Anyway, he was out. And, on Johnson’s orders, the rest of the administration worked to change the mood of the country by spreading good news about Vietnam. During a brief visit to the States, General Westmoreland joined the effort. “I have never been more encouraged in the four years that I have been in Vietnam,” he announced as he stepped off the plane. “We are making real progress.”
November 1967. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, briefs the press during his visit to Washington, telling them, “We are making real progress.”
“A new phase is now starting,” Westmoreland told the press later in November. “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”
* * *
On the night of January 31, 1968, fireworks lit the sky above Saigon. The streets were crowded with people celebrating Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.
Amid the all-night festivities, nineteen young Vietnamese men gathered at a car repair shop. For months, they had been sneaking ammunition and TNT into Saigon under loads of firewood and inside baskets of rice. The woman who owned the shop, a longtime secret agent of the Viet Cong, had helped them hide the weapons.
Now the men distributed the guns and bombs, and their squad leader went over the details of the mission. At 2:45 a.m., they crammed into a small truck and a taxi and drove, headlights off, along the dark, tree-lined avenue leading to the concrete walls surrounding the embassy of the United States.
Moments later, a massive explosion rocked the embassy compound. Two American military policemen ran toward the explosion and opened fire on the figures climbing through a three-foot hole in the wall.
“They’re coming in!” one of the MPs shouted into his radio. “They’re coming in!”
* * *
It was the middle of the afternoon in Washington, D.C. Walt Rostow was meeting with reporters when an aide came and handed him a slip of paper.
“Looks like some trouble in Saigon,” he told Rostow.
January 1968. The U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, looks at the body of a dead Viet Cong soldier in the grounds of the U.S. embassy at the end of the Tet Offensive.
That was an understatement. The battle at the American embassy was one small part of the massive Tet Offensive—that night seventy thousand communist soldiers launched surprise attacks on more than a hundred cities and towns all over South Vietnam.
Americans turned on their televisions and saw American diplomats firing guns out the windows of the embassy. There was rubble strewn everywhere, and the bodies of Americans and Viet Cong attackers. A little after nine in the morning, Saigon time, when the embassy was finally secured, General Westmoreland arrived to show reporters around the battlefield. Over the sounds of firefights still raging elsewhere in Saigon, Westmoreland declared victory, saying, “The enemy’s well-laid plans went afoul.”
“The reporters could hardly believe their ears,” one Washington Post journalist recalled. “Westmoreland was standing in the ruins and saying everything was great.”
On one level, Westmoreland was right. Tet was a military disaster for the Communists. American and South Vietnamese forces repelled the attacks everywhere, killing more than fifty thousand Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers.
And yet, Tet was a disaster for the United States too—a psychological disaster. For years, the president had been telling the public how well things were going in Vietnam. But now people were watching American troops fighting brutal battles to retake territories and cities that were supposed to be secure. There were more than 500,000 Americans in Vietnam. More than twenty thousand had been killed. For what? If, nearly four years into the war, the enemy was able to launch an attack of this size, what exactly had been accomplished?
Walter Cronkite, anchor of the nation’s most watched TV news program, summed up the mood of the country. After presenting an update on the fighting in Vietnam, he turned away from the camera as the show went to a commercial.
“What the hell is going on?” he said. “I thought we were winning the war.”
* * *
Daniel Ellsberg watched it all from his new home in Southern California. After leaving government service, he had decided to return to the Rand Corporation, where he’d worked before joining the Pentagon. “I wanted to be free again to tell what I knew and what I believed about our Vietnam policy,” he said of the decision. “After three years of largely listening and learning, I believed that I knew things about the situation in Vietnam worth passing on in my own voice.”
Ellsberg let his hair grow longer and rented a tiny cottage on the beach in Malibu. The flimsy structure was still settling into the sand, causing the floor of each room to tilt at a different angle. And there was a problem with the wiring that caused electricity to spray out of the shower along with the water. “I used to take a shower leaning slightly out,” he remembered, “so that if the electricity came on at that moment, you could fall outside the shower.”
Ellsberg with his children, Robert and Mary, outside his Malibu beach house, 1969
He loved it. He lived near his kids. He lived near Rand headquarters. He swam in the ocean every day. At night he lay in bed listening to the waves.
But Ellsberg was still a trusted Washington insider. In the wake of the Tet Offensive, Rand sent him briefly to D.C. to join a group of consultants advising Clark Clifford, the new secretary of defense.
* * *
President Johnson was pacing the halls again. Unable to sleep, he would put on his robe and slippers and walk down to the situation room in the White House basement.
“We couldn’t break him of the habit,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled, “even for health reasons, of getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 every morning to go down to the operations room and check on the casualties from Vietnam, each one of which took a little piece out of him.”
In the wake of Tet, the Joint Chiefs and General Westmoreland submitted another request for more troops. Now was the time to go on the offensive, they said. “We face a situation of great opportunity as well as heightened risk,” Westmoreland told the president. He wanted another 206,000 troops.
While Johnson wrestled with another agonizing decision, a copy of the troop request came across Ellsberg’s desk. It was top secret, Ellsberg knew. Not even Congress was aware that the president was considering another major escalation.
This was not a decision that should be made in secret, Ellsberg thought. The people had a right to know.
* * *
On Sunday, March 10, Ellsberg picked up his copy of the New York Times and read the stunning headline: “WESTMORELAND REQUESTS 206,000 MORE MEN, STIRRING DEBATE IN ADMINISTRATION.”
The article, by Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, laid bare all the details of the military’s secret request.
Ellsberg was shocked. He had no idea who had leaked the story.
The impact was immediate. Members of Congress started speaking out against further troop increases. Senator William Fulbright, who had helped steer the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through Congress, now declared that he regretted that action. Previously, Johnson had increased troop levels in Vietnam little by little, without making dramatic announcements. Thanks to the leak, that was no longer an option.
“As I observed the effect of this leak, it was as if clouds had suddenly opened,” Ellsberg later said of this turning point in his life. “In the past, I had instinctively accepted the ethos of my profession, the idea that leaking was always inherently bad, treacherous … I had been wrong. Obviously, leaking could be a patriotic and constructive act.”