ELLSBERG HURRIED DOWN to the war room in the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices. He found a desk and a phone with a direct line to the American military headquarters in Vietnam. It was late at night in Washington, late morning in Saigon. Ellsberg got an American officer on the line.
“I need blood,” he told the colonel.
There was no shortage. The colonel described a recent incident in which a group of Viet Cong fighters had disemboweled a village chief in front of the entire village. Then they murdered the chief’s wife and children.
“Great! That’s what I want to know!” Ellsberg shouted into the phone. “That’s what we need! More of that. Can you find other stories like that?”
Ellsberg was at the desk all night. At four in the morning, the colonel called with an update—the bodies of two of the American advisors recently killed by the Viet Cong may have been dragged through the streets on chains.
“Good, good, more like that,” Ellsberg said, taking notes. “Wow. Jesus! This is it. Anything else? Anything like this anywhere else?”
At six thirty, Ellsberg gathered his papers and raced back to his own office. He wrote up a quick report, handing each sheet to McNaughton’s secretary as he finished it. McNaughton stood over the secretary’s shoulder, reading as she typed. When she finished the last page, he grabbed the small stack and ran down the hall to McNamara’s office.
When McNamara returned from the White House later that morning, he told McNaughton to thank his assistant for a job well done.
Looking back, Ellsberg would say, “That night’s work was the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
* * *
A few days later, Lyndon Johnson formally approved Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of Vietnam.
“Now we’re off to bombing these people,” Johnson groaned to his secretary of defense. “We’re over that hurdle. I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.”
This was Johnson’s first major escalation of America’s war in Vietnam. He chose not to explain to the American people that the bombing would continue indefinitely.
February 1965. A U.S. warplane bombs targets near Saigon at the beginning of Operation Rolling Thunder, the first major escalation of the Vietnam War.
On February 17, he told the public, “We seek no wider war.”
Over the next three and a half years, American planes would drop a daily average of eight hundred tons of bombs on targets in North and South Vietnam. Yet the supplies and soldiers continued flowing from North to South along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“The brutal fact is that we have been losing ground at an increasing rate,” McNamara warned in a memo soon after Rolling Thunder began. Bombs alone would never stop the bleeding, the secretary explained. Most of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was covered with dense forest, making it hard to hit from the air. And the Viet Cong’s military supplies were mainly coming from factories in the Soviet Union and China. Bombing those targets was not an option, unless the objective was to ignite World War III.
Another alternative was to send in American ground troops.
In early March, General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces in Vietnam, requested that two battalions of marines be sent to Vietnam to help guard the American airfield at Da Nang in central Vietnam.
“I guess we’ve got no choice,” Johnson said, “but it scares the death out of me.”
The number of marines was small—about thirty-five hundred. But it was still a major turning point. These were the first American combat troops sent to the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was in his office at the Pentagon when the orders hit McNaughton’s desk.
“Oh my god! We’re sending in the marines!” Ellsberg heard his boss shouting from the next room. “That means we’ll never get out!”
* * *
On the morning of March 8, 1965, hundreds of United States Marines splashed through shallow water up to the beaches of Da Nang, South Vietnam. The scene looked like something out of a war movie—only there was no enemy fire. As the marines walked, dripping, onto the sand, local schoolgirls stepped forward and placed garlands of red and yellow flowers over their necks.
March 1965. U.S. Marines come ashore in Da Nang, South Vietnam.
The men spent that first day digging foxholes, filling and stacking sandbags to protect their positions. To Philip Caputo, among the marines to arrive that day, the whole thing had the feeling of yet another exercise. The twenty-three-year-old lieutenant got out his binoculars and scanned the landscape beyond the fences of the American base.
Beautiful groves of palm trees and bamboo. Women walking along rice paddies, carrying baskets on long poles balanced on their shoulders. A boy riding a water buffalo.
He thought, “Where is this war we’ve heard so much about?”
* * *
Back in the United States, the antiwar protests began almost immediately.
In April, an organization called Students for a Democratic Society urged members to gather in front of the White House. A twenty-seven-year-old journalist named Patricia Marx packed a bag and flew to Washington. She wanted to be there to cover the first major protest against the Vietnam War.
A slim woman with dark hair, Marx was the host of “Patricia Marx Interviews,” a weekly radio show in New York City. The show featured in-depth conversations with prominent figures in politics, science, and the arts. It was a dream job.
“I really loved to learn,” Marx recalled. “I loved ideas.”
The work took her to Washington often, and on a previous visit she’d actually met Daniel Ellsberg. She had been at a party, and a friend had pointed out some of the more interesting guests.
“Stay away from him,” the friend warned, gesturing to Ellsberg. “He’s brilliant, but dangerous.” Marx took this to mean that the recently single Ellsberg was dating a lot of women.
She and Ellsberg spoke briefly at the party. He asked her for a date. She turned him down.
“I thought Dan was interesting,” Patricia remembered of their first meeting, “but it wasn’t like love at first sight or anything.”
She had not forgotten him, though. Now back in Washington to cover the antiwar rally, Marx decided to invite Ellsberg to a dinner party her sister was hosting. He jumped at the second chance. And the moment he walked into the house, both of their lives changed.
“I opened the door,” Marx remembered, “and I hadn’t seen him for a year, and I hadn’t really connected—and somehow the light hit his blue eyes. I hadn’t seen those blue eyes in that way. And he walked in, and I just instantly went, ‘Ah!’ And I was a goner.”
Dan was equally smitten. “I saw that she had marvelous eyes, green and slightly tilted, pointed at the corners,” he later said. “I’ve never gotten over them.”
Soon after the party, he called her from his office.
“I have tomorrow off,” he said. Washington’s famous cherry trees were in bloom. They should see them together, he suggested.
“No,” she said. “I’m covering the peace rally for the radio program.”
He asked if she could slip away for a quick picnic.
She said no, she’d be doing interviews and taping speeches—but he could come along and hold her tape recorder.
“You can’t ask me to go to an antiwar rally on the first day I’ve had off from the war,” he said, “the one day I’ve had off from the Pentagon in eight months!”
Patricia Marx
“Well, that’s where I’ll be. You’re welcome to come.”
* * *
On the day of the protest, April 17, Daniel Ellsberg and Patricia Marx walked together toward the Washington Monument. It was a warm spring morning with bright blue skies, and the cherry trees on the National Mall were bursting with pink blossoms.
Thousands of protesters gathered at the base of the monument, many waving banners with antiwar slogans. When they began marching toward the White House, Marx held up her microphone to catch the antiwar chants. Ellsberg, feeling absurdly out of place, hurried behind with his date’s heavy tape machine.
When they reached Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, the crowd was bigger than expected, about twenty-five thousand. It was national news, and there were lots of newspaper photographers and TV cameras. Ellsberg tried to keep his face hidden.
I hope this is not going to be a photo in the Washington Post tomorrow, he was thinking. Because it’s going to be a little hard to explain.
The speeches started, and Ellsberg listened to the protestors’ arguments against bombing Vietnam and sending in the marines. When the rally broke up, he headed back to the Pentagon to see how the war was going.
Patricia Marx’s friends questioned her harshly. “How can you be going out with somebody who’s working on Vietnam?”
She tried to explain that there was more to it than politics. “Despite the fact that he was in the Pentagon and I was against the war,” she later said, “I really saw his brilliance and his courage and his integrity.”
She agreed to see him again, and the next day, a Sunday, he picked her up in his convertible and they drove out of the city to a park in Maryland. They sat under a blooming cherry tree. Ellsberg pulled out a wicker basket with bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine. After eating and drinking, he leaned his back against the tree trunk. She rested her head in his lap. They talked for a long time. Finally, he bent down to kiss her.
“By the next morning,” he remembered, “as I drove on the Rock Creek Parkway toward the Pentagon, I realized I was falling in love.”