“A VERY ODD MAN, an unpleasant man,” Henry Kissinger would later say of his new boss, Richard Nixon. “He didn’t enjoy people. What I never understood is why he went into politics.”
But if Kissinger did not exactly relish the president’s company, he did come to admire Nixon’s intelligence, and his willingness to make bold moves. Both were hard-core cold warriors. Both liked to work in secret. Together, over the next five years, they would remake American foreign policy.
Priority number one, of course, was Vietnam. There were 525,000 Americans in Vietnam when Nixon took over, and more than thirty thousand had already been killed. More than three hundred were dying every week. About four hundred pilots were stuck in horrific North Vietnamese prison camps. Peace talks in Paris were going nowhere. On March 16, Nixon sat down with Kissinger and General Earle Wheeler to discuss options in Vietnam.
“Gentlemen,” the president began, “we have reached the point where a decision is required: to bomb or not to bomb.”
Lyndon Johnson had halted the bombing of North Vietnam, and Nixon was reluctant to resume it. Doing so would be hugely controversial with war-weary American voters.
“But we have to look at what we’re up against,” he said. “I am convinced that the only way to move the negotiations off dead center is to do something on the military front. That is something they will understand.”
It was time to test the madman theory.
On March 17, American B-52s began striking targets across the Vietnamese border in Cambodia. Nixon felt justified, because the Communists were using Cambodian territory to move supplies and stage attacks in South Vietnam. But he didn’t believe the American people needed to know.
“My administration was only two months old,” Nixon later explained. “I wanted to provoke as little public outcry as possible at the outset.”
Nixon was well aware that voters had not elected him to escalate the war. To keep the Cambodia operation secret, the military prepared phony reports for Congress, stating that the bombs were actually falling on Vietnam.
* * *
At the Pentagon, the team working on Robert McNamara’s secret Vietnam study was finally finishing up. The study ran seven thousand pages. Only fifteen complete copies were made.
During one of his frequent visits to Washington, D.C., Ellsberg asked Mort Halperin to let him borrow one. He really wanted to read it. Halperin, who was working for Kissinger, hesitated—he couldn’t have word leaking out that the study existed. Ellsberg promised to be discreet.
Over several cross-country flights, Ellsberg carried portions of the Pentagon Papers from Washington to Los Angeles in his briefcase. He locked a complete copy in the safe in his office at Rand.
Back home in California, Ellsberg got a surprising phone call—from Patricia Marx. The last time they’d spoken was when he’d called from Europe on his way home from Vietnam. She was still angry about that call, she now told him, and still upset about his silence before and after it. She also told him she still loved him.
Later that spring, Marx flew to California to interview Governor Ronald Reagan for her radio show. She visited Ellsberg, and both immediately sensed that their relationship was not over. “The same old spark was there,” Marx remembered.
“It was exciting to see her,” Ellsberg agreed.
When Marx flew back to New York City, they had no definite plans to get together again. But Daniel and Patricia would continue thinking about each other in the months ahead.
* * *
On the morning of May 9, Henry Kissinger sat by the pool in Key Biscayne, Florida, where Nixon owned a vacation home. Scanning the papers as he ate breakfast, he turned to the New York Times—and suddenly leaped from the chair.
On the front page was the headline: “RAIDS IN CAMBODIA BY U.S. UNPROTESTED.”
The story described the supposedly secret American bombing raids in Cambodia.
“Outrageous!” Kissinger chanted as he paced beside the pool. “Outrageous!”
He ran to show Nixon the front-page story.
“We must do something!” Kissinger fumed. “We must crush these people!”
“Find out who leaked it, and fire him,” snapped Nixon.
Within hours, at Kissinger’s request, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began placing wiretaps on the phones of Kissinger’s assistants. When that didn’t turn up the leaker, the FBI tapped the phones of several journalists. But the illegal taps never led to the identity of the leaker—the Timesreporter had actually gotten the story from a British journalist in Cambodia.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, publicly denied that the United States was bombing Cambodia. No other newspapers followed up. The bombing continued; the story went away.
One of the very few Americans to know the truth was Daniel Ellsberg.
“It’s right,” Mort Halperin told him, referring to the Times story.
Halperin explained the strategy behind the secret bombing. “Nixon’s staying in,” he informed Ellsberg, “he’s not getting out.”
Without revealing the source of his information, Ellsberg tried to persuade colleagues at Rand of the danger—Richard Nixon was secretly escalating the Vietnam War.
“I couldn’t make anyone believe it,” Ellsberg remembered. “In those days, a government denial was all it took to make a reality disappear.”
* * *
Later that month, Ellsberg was invited to give a lecture at Ohio University. The subject was Vietnam.
It was an antiwar crowd, and Ellsberg sensed the students’ mistrust of a former Pentagon insider. To get the conversation going, he asked for a show of hands—who believed that the majority of the people in South Vietnam were hoping for a victory by the Viet Cong?
Almost all the students raised their hands.
“You could be right,” Ellsberg said, “but I don’t think so.”
Based on what he’d seen in Vietnam, Ellsberg explained, most people were neither communist nor strongly anti-communist. They didn’t see the world in Cold War terms. “I suspect that for some time now,” he told the class, “most of the people of South Vietnam have preferred that the war be over—with a victory by either side—than that it should continue at anything like the present scale.”
It was only later, after the class had left, that he followed this thought further.
“What was the implication of saying that the majority of South Vietnamese wanted the war to be over no matter who won?” he wondered. “What did that say about the legitimacy of imposing our will to continue the war?”
He thought late into the night. In the morning he called Mort Halperin.
“Let me put a question to you, Mort. What would be your best guess of the proportion of Vietnamese, by now, who would rather see the war over, no matter what?”
“I suppose about 80 or 90 percent.”
Ellsberg agreed. “But here’s a question that’s new for me. It’s starting to bother me a lot. If it were true that most of the South Vietnamese wanted the war to be over,” he asked, “how could we be justified in prolonging the war inside their country? Why would we have the right to keep it going even one more day?”
Halperin said, after a long silence, “That’s a very good question.”
* * *
With the question still burning in his brain, Ellsberg spent the summer reading the Pentagon Papers.
McNamara’s study was a beast, weighing in at forty-seven volumes in thick three-ring binders. There were about a million words worth of secret government and military documents, and another 1.5 million of narrative history written by the researchers. Ellsberg knew the story, so there was no single item he found shocking.
What struck him was the pattern of deception—and how clearly it was documented.
It was all there, starting with Truman’s decision to back France’s war to recapture its former colony, knowing a majority of people in Vietnam supported independence and Ho Chi Minh. Other documents covered the years after France’s defeat, as Eisenhower worked with the government of South Vietnam to delay and undermine elections they knew Ho Chi Minh would win.
“So we opposed elections,” Ellsberg concluded as he read, “while pretending to support democracy.”
The pattern continued in the 1960s. Documents showed that President Kennedy sent Special Forces troops to South Vietnam in the spring of 1961, putting Americans into combat in Vietnam for the first time. The public was not told. Most of the study focused on the Johnson years, covering Johnson’s misleading public statements about the Tonkin Gulf incident, and everything that followed. Here were CIA reports stating that the bombing of North Vietnam was having “no measurable or direct effect on Hanoi’s ability to mount and support military operations,” and that casualties from the bombing in 1965 and 1966 alone were about thirty-six thousand, “about 80 percent civilians.” Here was evidence that Johnson knew Americans were dying to prop up a South Vietnamese government that was corrupt and unpopular.
“What I had in my safe at Rand,” Ellsberg would later recall, “was seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years.”