IN THE WEEKS following the Gulf of Tonkin action, Daniel Ellsberg was at the Pentagon twelve hours a day. He was supposed to be at his desk when McNaughton showed up in the morning; some days he didn’t quite make it. And not until his boss left for the night could he go home.
This was a lonely time for Ellsberg. He was going through a divorce from his wife of thirteen years, Carol Cummings. Their two young children, Robert and Mary, lived with Cummings in California. To Ellsberg’s Pentagon co-workers, it was obvious he was struggling with the break-up of his family. His eyes would tear up anytime he talked about his kids.
“He was sad,” one McNaughton staffer remembered. “He was like a scruffy, lost puppy.”
The demands of the job, at least, kept his mind occupied. Every morning when Ellsberg walked into his little office in the Pentagon, there were tall stacks of documents waiting on his desk. Most were top secret cables and reports on Vietnam from the U.S. military, the CIA, and other agencies. He would pull a paper off the top of the stack and start reading. If it looked important, he’d set it aside to show to his boss. If not, he’d drop it in the burn bag—a large, brown paper sack standing by his desk. The moment the bag was filled, a secretary would come in and replace it with an empty one. The full bag was hauled to the basement and burned.
“All this was exciting,” Ellsberg remembered. “Both the incredible pace and the inside dope make you feel important, fully engaged, on an adrenaline high much of the time. Clearly it was addictive.”
Nearly everything he read was stamped with a secret classification such as: “McNaughton Eyes Only” or “Eyes Only of the Secretary,” meaning McNaughton’s boss, Robert McNamara. Some were marked: “Literally Eyes Only of the Secretary.” He read them anyway. McNaughton didn’t mind—so long as Ellsberg kept the fact he was seeing this stuff secret.
He learned that the hard way. One day, on the phone with a State Department official named Mike Forrestal, Ellsberg quoted from a cable that had just come in from the American embassy in Saigon. It was stamped “Eyes Only for the Secretary,” but Ellsberg suggested that Forrestal read it.
Later that same day, McNaughton called Ellsberg into his office.
“Did you have anything to do with telling Mike Forrestal about the new series from the embassy?” McNaughton asked. He was as upset as Ellsberg had ever seen him.
“He didn’t seem to know about it,” Ellsberg said, “and it was obvious he needed to see these.”
McNaughton tapped his fingers on his desk, staring at his new employee for an uncomfortably long moment.
“I’ve been told to fire you,” he finally said.
Ellsberg’s mind raced—was the document really that secret? Why was one department of government keeping secrets from another? How did they trace it back to me so quickly?
“Well, you’re new on the job,” McNaughton said. “My father used to say, ‘Every dog gets one bite.’ Really, Dan, watch out after this.”
* * *
“You will stay here.”
With those words, a guard shoved Everett Alvarez into room 24 of the Hao Lo prison in Hanoi. After crashing into the Gulf of Tonkin, the American pilot had been pulled from the water by North Vietnamese militiamen. He’d been tied up with rope, interrogated, and driven to this prison.
There was a bed in his cell, a table, and a sharp-edged, rusty bucket for a toilet. A bare bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling. It stayed on, day and night. Rats wriggled under the door, coming and going between his cell and a small, walled courtyard outside.
Twice a day, a guard brought water and, to use the term loosely, food. One day he got a chicken head in grease; another day an animal hoof, a few carrots on the side. Suffering from a miserable mix of dysentery, headaches, and dizziness, Alvarez quickly slipped from 165 pounds to 135.
“I began to fear that I might indeed be trapped for weeks or even months to come,” the pilot later wrote. “How much longer would it take for my government to get me out of this hellhole?”
As the weather grew colder, Alvarez heard more truck traffic on the roads outside. At night he heard the city conducting air-raid drills. The prison guards seemed to be growing increasingly edgy.
“We know there’s going to be a war,” they told Alvarez.
* * *
According to the president of the United States, there would be no war.
In campaign speeches that fall, Johnson told voters again and again: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” The line always got a loud cheer.
And there’s no doubt he hoped it was true. In twenty-four years of representing Texas in the House and Senate, Johnson’s focus had always been on domestic policy. His talent was for muscling bills through Congress, using what became known in Washington as “The Johnson Treatment,” which involved planting his giant frame in front of a fellow legislator, standing nose to nose, and letting loose a stream of stories, statistics, arguments, jokes—until the other guy gave in. As president he envisioned what he called his Great Society—an ambitious set of programs including civil rights legislation and expanded access to quality education and health care. Vietnam was, at best, an unwelcome distraction.
“I don’t think it’s worth fighting for,” Johnson told an aide during the campaign. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is it worth to this country?”
But he could not ignore Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had begun using a series of forest-covered paths known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to move soldiers and supplies from North to South. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were now working together, and getting more aggressive in their attacks. Advisors warned Johnson that the government of South Vietnam would not survive long without increased U.S. military support.
Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president, blasted Johnson for not doing more to stop the Communists. Goldwater called Johnson “soft on communism,” and when asked what he would do if elected, Goldwater suggested he might use atomic bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
That kind of talk terrified more voters than it won over. Polls showed that a large majority of Americans wanted no part of a war in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson told them what they wanted to hear. Again and again he declared, “We seek no wider war.”
* * *
Daniel Ellsberg did not vote in the presidential election of 1964. He was too busy planning a wider war.
On the morning of November 3, Election Day, Johnson’s advisors secretly met to discuss how the American military could most effectively come to the aid of South Vietnam. Johnson had known all along that American intervention would be necessary to prevent the fall of the South.
“We all knew that within the government, and not one of us told the press or the public,” Ellsberg said later. “It was a well-kept secret by thousands and thousands of people. Including me.”
Johnson crushed Goldwater, getting 43 million votes to Goldwater’s 27 million. It was the largest margin of victory in American history.
“On the day the electorate, as expected in polls, was voting in unprecedented numbers against bombing North Vietnam or otherwise escalating the war, we were working to set such a policy in motion,” Ellsberg recalled. “It didn’t matter that much to us what the public thought.”
On the morning of January 27, 1965, a week after inauguration day, Johnson and his top foreign policy advisors met to discuss the crisis.
“The time has come for harder choices,” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told the group.
Bundy and Robert McNamara presented a memo that laid out the stark reality as they saw it. “Our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat,” they warned. “Bob and I believe that the worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role which can lead only to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances.”
It was time, Bundy and McNamara urged, to begin bombing North Vietnam.
“Both of us understand the very grave questions presented by any decision of this sort. We both recognize that the ultimate responsibility is not ours.”
“I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway,” President Johnson confided to his press secretary. “I can’t run. I can’t hide. And I can’t make it stop.”
* * *
One of Ellsberg’s many tasks at the Pentagon was to catalogue assaults carried out by Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam. They were getting increasingly vicious, and they were beginning to target Americans. On February 8, communist guerrillas attacked a U.S. helicopter base, killing eight American advisors. Two days later they struck another American base, killing ten more. Johnson authorized U.S. planes to hit targets in the North, the first American air strikes since the August 5 raids the year before.
Normally, part of Ellsberg’s job would be to monitor the American strikes. Instead, McNaughton told him to spend the night gathering grisly details about the recent Viet Cong attacks. Secretary McNamara was going to the White House in the morning, McNaughton explained. McNamara wanted to use the details to help convince the president to begin a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
Ellsberg felt a moment of doubt.
As a kid during World War II, he’d sat in movie theaters, horrified by newsreel images of the smoking rubble of European cities that had been flattened by German bombs. His school held terrifying air-raid drills, and in each classroom was a large bucket of sand—to be used to extinguish fires sparked by incendiary bombs.
Enemy planes never got anywhere near Detroit. Still, the experience stuck with him. “Nothing else,” he later recalled, “seemed so purely, incomprehensibly evil as the deliberate bombing of women and children.”
Now he had until early the next morning to gather the stories McNamara wanted. There was no time for qualms. “An order from McNamara,” he later said, “was like an order from God.”