DANIEL ELLSBERG WAS WORKING LATE AGAIN. His boss’s office was dark, except for a faint light coming from the open safe in the wall. When he finished for the night, Ellsberg rolled McNaughton’s special bookcase into the safe.
But he did not shut the door.
“It was too much for me,” Ellsberg later confessed.
He pulled out the “McNaughton Eyes Only” binder and opened it. Heart thumping, he flipped through the pages. There were memos in the distinctive typeface used by the White House. There were cables from Vietnam he hadn’t seen, minutes from meetings he hadn’t known had taken place.
He read a few paragraphs—but stopped himself. He quickly replaced the binder on the bookcase, shut the door, and spun the combination dial to make sure it was locked.
The next day, he changed his mind again.
That night, Ellsberg left the office when his boss did, at about eight o’clock. But he did not go home. He walked down to the Pentagon cafeteria, and lingered over dinner.
The suite was empty when Ellsberg returned. He walked into McNaughton’s office and flicked on the light. He went to the safe and turned the dial left and right, stopping at each number of the combination. He pulled the handle of the safe. It wouldn’t open.
He tried the numbers again. Still locked. Then a third time. He was absolutely sure of the combination. Someone had changed it. In the last twenty-four hours.
How had McNaughton picked this up so fast? Ellsberg wondered. Had he put the binder back in the wrong place? Had McNaughton used some trick out of a spy novel, like laying a strand of hair over the binder—a strand that would remain in place only so long as the binder was not touched?
The moment Ellsberg walked into the office the next morning, McNaughton’s secretary told him the boss wanted to see him immediately.
McNaughton was seated at his desk. He looked up from his work.
“He told me,” Ellsberg recalled, “that he had been feeling for some time that I was overqualified for this job.” He offered Ellsberg a different job, in a different office. No mention was made of the safe. “He could not have been more cordial as I left his office.”
Ellsberg never found out how he’d been caught.
* * *
President Johnson sat at the long wooden table in the White House Cabinet Room. Around the table sat his top advisors and military commanders. It was time to make a decision about Vietnam.
“I asked Secretary McNamara to invite you here to counsel with you on these problems and the ways to meet them,” the president began. He outlined the three options in McNamara’s memo. Turning to the military leaders, he asked, “If we give Westmoreland all he asks for, what are our chances?”
July 21, 1965. President Lyndon Johnson during a National Security meeting on Vietnam.
No one could say for sure.
“If you put in these requested forces and increase air and sea effort, we can at least turn the tide to where we are not losing anymore,” commented Air Force Chief of Staff John McConnell.
“Have results of bombing actions been as fruitful and productive as we anticipated?” asked the president.
“No, sir, they haven’t been,” McConnell replied.
“Doesn’t it really mean if we follow Westmoreland’s requests we are in a new war?” Johnson asked. “Isn’t this going off the diving board?”
“This is a major change in U.S. policy,” agreed McNamara. “We have relied on South Vietnam to carry the brunt. Now we would be responsible for satisfactory military outcome.”
“The least desirable alternative is getting out,” insisted General Harold Johnson, army chief of staff. “The second least is doing what we are doing. Best is to get in and get the job done.”
“But I don’t know how we are going to get that job done,” Johnson said. “Are we starting something that in two or three years we simply can’t finish?” The North Vietnamese were vowing to fight for as long as it took to win, Johnson pointed out. Turning to General Johnson, the president asked, “What is your reaction to Ho’s statement he is ready to fight for twenty years?”
“I believe it,” said the general.
Recent polls, an aide pointed out, showed that the public approved of the American commitment to support South Vietnam.
“But if you make a commitment to jump off a building,” President Johnson said, “and you find out how high it is, you may withdraw the commitment.”
* * *
Ellsberg had lost his position in McNaughton’s inner circle, but he was still on McNaughton’s staff and was one of many gathered in front of the television in the boss’s office on the afternoon of July 28. Everyone in the room knew that President Johnson had decided to approve Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 troops. They wanted to watch him tell the country.
“We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else,” Johnson said at his midday press conference. “I have asked the commanding general, General Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting aggression. He has told me. And we will meet his needs. We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand in Vietnam.”
The president announced he was increasing the number of American troops in Vietnam to 125,000. More forces would be sent, he said, “as requested.”
There was an audible gasp in McNaughton’s office. Ellsberg couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “What?” he called out. “Has he changed the decision?”
McNaughton gestured for quiet; he wanted to hear the rest of the president’s statement. But there was no mention of the 200,000 figure. There was nothing about the importance of this decision—that it was a major commitment to long-term war.
As Johnson began taking questions from the press, Ellsberg again asked if there’d been a last-second change of plans.
“You’d better find out,” McNaughton said.
Ellsberg ran down the hall to the Joint Chiefs’ offices. He asked the general whose job it was to schedule the deployment of troops if the president had changed his mind. He had not. Westmoreland was going to get his 200,000 troops.
In the short term, Johnson’s speech was a success. Congress and the public were relieved by the relatively small size of the military commitment.
In the long term, the speech set Johnson’s presidency on a muddy mountainside. If the president wasn’t exactly lying, he certainly was going out of his way to downplay what he knew was a major commitment to war. What would happen when it became clear to the country that the Vietnam War was not going to end anytime soon?
General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew the president was playing a dangerous game. “We felt that it would be desirable,” he later said, “to make sure that the people of the U.S. knew that we were in a war, and not engaged at some two-penny military adventure. Because we didn’t think it was going to prove to be a two-penny military adventure by any manner of means.”
* * *
Ellsberg’s new office had no window. He shared the small space with another analyst, whose desk was pushed up against his so that they worked facing each other—a symbol of Ellsberg’s fallen status. Any chance he’d had at advancing his career in the Pentagon was gone.
But he’d learned a lot in a year. He now knew that the American public had very little idea of how decisions were really made in Washington. That didn’t particularly bother him, though. “If you can’t live with the fact that presidents lie,” he later said, “you can’t work for presidents.”
What bothered him was that American policy in Vietnam was failing. He believed the war was worth fighting. Maybe he could find a way to help win it. But that wasn’t going to happen from ten thousand miles away.
And then, very suddenly, things went wrong between him and Patricia Marx. She went to a conference and met a German poet. When she got back, she couldn’t stop talking about how brilliant and wonderful the guy was. She didn’t deny that she had a bit of a crush on him.
“I took that to mean,” Ellsberg recalled, “that she had fallen out of love with me.”
Marx tried to tell him he was overreacting, but she could see him locking up emotionally; he just wouldn’t listen.
To Ellsberg, his relationship with Marx was the one thing that still felt right about life. Without her, there was nothing keeping him in Washington.
That’s when he decided to go to Vietnam.