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Daniel Ellsberg

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers Paperback – September 30, 2003

by Daniel Ellsberg (Author)

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The true story of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the event which inspired Steven Spielberg’s feature film The Post

In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers - a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man's exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.

"[Ellsberg's] well-told memoir sticks in the mind and will be a powerful testament for future students of a war that the United States should never have fought." -The Washington Post

"Ellsberg's deft critique of secrecy in government is an invaluable contribution to understanding one of our nation's darkest hours." -Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle

Print length

528 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

September 30, 2003
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.1 x 8.4 inches
ISBN-10

0142003425
ISBN-13

978-0142003428
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Review

"[Ellsberg's] well-told memoir sticks in the mind and will be a powerful testament for future students of a war that the United States should never have fought." (The Washington Post)

"Ellsberg's deft critique of secrecy in government is an invaluable contribution to understanding one of our nation's darkest hours." (Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle)

About the Author

Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate, ex-Marine, and Rand Corporation analyst, was one of the "whiz kids" recruited to serve in the Pentagon during the Johnson administration. In 1971, Ellsberg made headlines around the world when he released the Pentagon Papers. He is now a prominent speaker, writer, and activist.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

On the evening of October 1, 1969, I walked out past the guards’ desk at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, carrying a briefcase filled with top secret documents, which I planned to photocopy that night. The documents were part of a 7,000-page top secret study of U.S. decision making in Vietnam, later known as the Pentagon Papers. The rest of the study was in a safe in my office. I had decided to copy it all and make it public, perhaps through Senate hearings or the press, if necessary. I believed this course, especially the latter possibility, would probably put me in prison for the rest of my life. How I came to do this is the focus of this memoir.

For eleven years, from mid-1964 to the end of the war in May 1975, I was, like a great many other Americans, preoccupied with our involvement in Vietnam. In the course of that time I saw it first as a problem, next as a stalemate, then as a moral and political disaster, a crime. The first three parts of this book correspond roughly to these emerging perceptions. My own personal commitment and subsequent actions evolved along with these changing perspectives. When I saw the conflict as a problem, I tried to help solve it; when I saw it as a stalemate, to help us extricate ourselves, without harm to other national interests; when I saw it as a crime, to expose and resist it, and to try to end it immediately. Throughout all these phases, even the first, I sought in various ways to avoid further escalation of the conflict. But as late as early 1973, as I entered a federal criminal trial for my actions starting in late 1969, I would have said that none of these aims or efforts—neither my own nor anyone else’s—had met with any success. Efforts to end the conflict—whether it was seen as a failed test, a quagmire, or a moral misadventure—seemed no more to have been rewarded than efforts to win it. Why?

As I saw it then, the war not only needed to be resisted but remained to be understood. Thirty years later I still believe that to be true. This book represents my continuing effort—far from complete—to understand my country’s war on Vietnam, and my own part in it, and why it took so long to end both of those.

For three years starting in mid-1964, with the highest civil service grade, I had helped prosecute a war I believed at the outset to be doomed. Working in Washington under top decision makers in 1964‒65, I watched them secretly maneuver the country into a full-scale war with no real promise of success. My pessimism during those years was not unbroken, and for about a year—from the spring of 1965 to the spring of 1966—I hoped for and worked toward some sort of success. That was after the president, despite many misgivings, including his own, had committed us to war. Once we were fully committed, I volunteered in mid-1965 to serve in Vietnam as a State Department civilian. My job came to be evaluating “pacification” in the countryside. In this I drew on my earlier training as a marine infantry commander to observe the war up close. Whether we had a right—any more than the French before us—to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me. But during two years in Vietnam, its people and plight became real to me, as real as the U.S. troops I walked with, as real as my own hands, in a way that made continuing the hopeless war intolerable.
Knocked out of the field with hepatitis and back in the United States in mid-1967, I began to do everything I could imagine to help free our country from the war. For two years I did this as an insider, briefing high officials, advising presidential candidates, and eventually, in early 1969, helping the president’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, discover uncertainties and alternatives. But later that same year I felt called on to go beyond this approach and so to end my career as a government insider.

One of these actions risked my own freedom. In 1969 and 1970, with the help of my friend Anthony Russo, a former Rand associate, I secretly photocopied the entire forty-seven-volume Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of U.S. decision making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968, which were then in my authorized possession, and gave them to Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971 I also gave copies to the New York Times, to the Washington Post, and ultimately, in the face of four unprecedented federal injunctions, to some seventeen other newspapers, all of which defied the government in printing them for the public to read.

I wasn’t wrong about the personal risks. Shortly thereafter I was indicted in a federal court, with Russo later joining me in a second, superseding indictment. Eventually I faced twelve federal felony charges totaling a possible 115 years in prison, with the prospect of several further trials for me beyond that first one. But I was not wrong, either, to hope that exposing secrets five presidents had withheld and the lies they told might have benefits for our democracy that were worthy of the risks. This truth telling set in motion a train of events, including criminal White House efforts to silence or incapacitate me, that led to dismissal of the charges against me and my codefendant. Much more important, these particular Oval Office crimes helped topple the president, an act that was crucial to ending the war.

This is the story of the greatest change in my life, which began well after my return from Vietnam. The disillusionment of the brief hopes that I experienced in Vietnam and the skepticism toward the war that I brought back in mid-1967 were not really new for me. On the contrary, they were a return to the pessimism that I had acquired on a first trip to Vietnam in 1961 and that had been reinforced in my first year in the Pentagon from mid-1964. By 1968 this skeptical mood was widely shared inside the government, perhaps even more than in the public. This was a time when my general desire to see the war ended did not distinguish me from almost any of my colleagues in the government or government-sponsored research, whether or not they had served in Vietnam. An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable. I was like them in most respects, no different in character or values, no less committed to the cold war, to anticommunism, to secrecy, and to the presidency. By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war. Indeed this poses a question that I have worked at understanding ever since: How could it be, under these circumstances, that after the massive disillusionment of the Tet offensive in early 1968 the war still had seven years to go?

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 1st Edition (September 30, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0142003425
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0142003428
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #120,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #207 in Vietnam War History (Books)
- #652 in Political Leader Biographies
- #4,024 in Memoirs (Books)

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pulling cheek swirl better shake up

All Ellsberg would want you to know

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 16, 2002

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One of the photographs in this book shows Ellsberg, with the rapt attention of 14 children, holding a scarf. The caption says, "My knack for magic tricks always worked with kids in Vietnam." It is on the same page as a picture of "Randy Kehler giving the talk at Haverford College on August 28, 1969, that opened my eyes to the possibilities of resisting war." The big question, who looks less like a fool? 14 kids who don't know what is going on, or the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) on the wall behind Randy, or Ellsberg having lunch with Henry Kissinger at San Clemente in August 1970, after Kissinger complemented Ellsberg on the Lowell Lecture series, "The Art of Coercion" which Ellsberg had given to Kissinger's seminar at Harvard in 1959, when Ellsberg got to explain Hitler: "Hitler had deliberately cultivated among his adversaries the impression of his own irrational unpredictability. He couldn't be counted on not to carry out a threat to do something crazy, mutually destructive." (p. 344).
Secret activities generate an aura, THOU SHALT NOT ADMIT, which Daniel Ellsberg's book, SECRETS, is all about. Early in the book, on pages 7 to 20, the cable traffic of August 4, 1964, from Captain John J. Herrick in the Gulf of Tonkin, is explained as Ellsberg attempted to figure out what it meant from the Pentagon. The information provided is far less complete than in TONKIN GULF AND THE ESCALATION OF THE VIETNAM WAR by Edwin E. Moise, which analyzed the radar "skunks" picked up by the destroyers and the confusion caused by their inability to decide whether there had been three or five `(The fact that "N," "O," and "P" never got within twenty miles of the destroyers has been downplayed or completely ignored by most of the authors who have interpreted these skunks as North Vietnamese PT boats waiting in ambush for the destroyers.)' (Moise, p. 120). Mostly I think Ellsberg is wrong, as information coming from the government is typically wrong in ways that will protect intelligence gathering sources and methods, which really tried to maintain the illusion that everything the North Vietnamese had done had been unprovoked. I don't believe "intercepted North Vietnamese cables supposedly confirming an August 4 attack actually referred to the attack on August 2." (Ellsberg, p. 10). It seems far more likely to me that North Vietnamese cables confirming an attack on August 4 actually referred to a covert OPLAN 34A maritime operation 70 miles from the Maddox and the Turner Joy, about which McNamara testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1968, "that the President had announced publicly on 3 August that our patrol would continue and consist of two destroyers. It is difficult to believe, in the face of that announcement, and its obvious purpose of asserting our right to freedom of the seas, that even the North Vietnamese could connect the patrol of the Maddox and the Turner Joy with ... action taking place some 70 miles away." (Moise, pp. 104-5). The secret circus stunt interpretation that I'm inclined to believe was that it was American intelligence which, interpreting cable intercepts of North Vietnamese reactions to the covert operation, convinced Captain Herrick 70 miles away that he was about to be attacked.
Ellsberg's book, SECRETS, has an index which lists a lot of people and incidents, but I found it a bit confusing on the major questions of our lifetimes. Checking out "Kennedy, John F.: assassination of, 194, 272," the emotional outpourings on pages listed seem to apply more to Bobby than to JFK. "Being his own man in the Senate after losing his brother, and with his father disabled, must have had a lot to do with it." (p. 194) He quotes Bobby on Nam, "We didn't want to lose in Vietnam or get out. We wanted to win if we could. But my brother was determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam." (pp. 194-5). A lot of people concerned about Nam in 1961, when the number of American military troops assigned there started to increase into the thousands, had trouble seeing a distinction between advisers and soldiers actually taking part in a war, and the distinction was not that American troops would only fire if they were fired upon. On the other assassinations in November, 1963, Ellsberg wrote:
Lansdale left Vietnam, and Diem and his brother were eventually assassinated in a U.S.-authorized coup, in which, ironically, Lansdale's former CIA team member Lucien Conein was the liaison between the coup plotters and the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, who strongly favored the coup. (p. 99).

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Old Jarhead

Like a new book - Library book withdrawn from service

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2023

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The book arrived on time, loose in a box with no padding - but also, without damage. Great price for an important old (2002) book about a mostly-forgotten event, despite its stunning revelations about our Country’s most divisive War, written by a deeply informed Marine. Semper Fi, Mr. Ellsberg.

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D. J. Leedham

Greek Tragedy, Roman Irony and Nixonian Farce

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 8, 2013

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This is a brilliant book. During the time Ellsberg relates, he was constantly called upon to write lengthy and detailed reports for officials already over burdened with endless reports they had to consume. He had to be clear, precise, cogent, and articulate. This highly developed skill is amply demonstrated in this book. Which reads more like a work of fiction than what it truly is: A personal account of what was going on INSIDE the government during the build up and eventual crisis of the Vietnam War. And in the fields and hamlets of Vietnam.

Two quotes to frame the context:

"A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or, perhaps, both. knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." James Madison. Quoted by Daniel Ellsberg (p431)

"Once in 1967 after a somewhat pessimistic briefing by John Vann, Rostow, slightly shaken, said, "But you do admit that it'll all be over in six months." "Oh," said Vann somewhat airily, "I think we can hold out longer than that." - The Best And The Brightest p.637 David Halberstam.

Ellsberg's memoir was published before the Snowdon revelations about the true breadth and depth of NSA foreign and domestic data mining. So there is that additional perspective to ponder. Ellsberg, one of Halberstam's Best and Brightest. A true cold warrior, third in line under McNamara. One of the very best and brightest, who came too late to question Vietnam Policy and ordered the compiling of the Pentagon Papers. The history of Presidential folly, self deception and fear of the primitives and isolationist anti communist("You Lost China") lobby. The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg released to the press.

So we have two profoundly important themes - the abuse of power and executive efforts to restrict access to any remotely pertinent information "top secret". And, in Ellsberg's memoir the circumstances and thinking that made him break with the establishment and publish that top secret information.

"Plus ca change" as the French say. We seem condemned to deprecate the British Empire while seriously intensifying both that Empire's moral (self righteous) certitudes and its most egregious failings and obtuseness.

The one thing that most impressed me about this book is what Elleberg did NOT say. Did not NEED to say, because he writes so clearly the picture is so clear, in all its awful complexity. To be sure he has his own moral point of view. And he lets this show from time to time. Only, I think, to underscore the fallibility of everyone and anyone involved with or observing the unfolding and unravelling of US Vietnam policy. But, for the most part he has chosen his examples and sequence of events and policy decisions to paint a complete portrait, showing far more than he tells. For me this is brilliant.

Not a jeremiad. Just a cool and personal report for the ages. Which, judging by more recent military adventures, we are doomed to repeat and not learn from. There will always be honorable souls, like George Ball, Vann and several others Ellsberg quotes and acknowledges, who will see to the heart of the matter. And there will always be "primitives" (Roosevelt's term) who will scare enough people enough of the time for this tragedy to be repeated. If it isn't being so already....

Compelling reading.

11 people found this helpful

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Hande Z

Ellsberg reveals all

Reviewed in Singapore 🇸🇬 on February 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

If you knew that you would be facing up to 115 years in prison if you were to divulge state secrets to the public, even though you believe that it is information that the public ought to know, and that the government had been deliberately lied to keep these away from them, would you do it? Daniel Ellsberg would and did.
This book is the account of what he did, and why he did it. What he did was straightforward enough – he released what became known as the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was in a position in which he had access to information that were given to not just one but several successive presidents of the United States. He also had first hand knowledge of the presidents’ decision-making process, in particular, the decision to go to war in Vietnam.
He was horrified to discover that the US military had deliberately provoked Vietnam into firing at them; that the US military ships had incurred into Vietnamese waters and opening fire at the Vietnamese first, and then claim that the Vietnamese attacked the US vessels in international waters.
This book lays out the deep, first-hand experience Ellsberg had in Vietnam; experience which led him to realise that the US was propping up a corrupt and hated South Vietnamese regime; and that given the circumstances, there was no way the South Vietnamese, even with American help, could have beaten the North Vietnamese.
He discovered the hawkish circles that kept suggesting that the president of the United States ought to consider using nuclear weapons. The Pentagon Papers that he copied and released, showed that the US government intended to use tactics of bombing against North Vietnam that were tantamount to torture – the slow, drip, start, stop, intense bombing to increase the pain.
In this personal and touching memoir, Ellsberg describes how he fell in love with Patricia Marx, and how she became a pillar of strength in his darkest hours. He talked about friends were there when he needed them, and the painful decision-making process that led him ultimately to believe that disclosing the top-secret documents was a public duty.
The book ends with the two exciting chapters on Ellsberg’s trial, and Richard Nixon’s alarm at the thought of his role in the US military incursions into Laos and Cambodia would be exposed, led him down the path that culminated in the debacle known as “Watergate”. This is an exciting and illuminating book that is the perfect foil to the Pentagon Papers. The latter reveals the what, and this book reveals the how and why.

Mr. Amazon

I would recommend that you read this book before the 'Papers on ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

I have not completed this book yet, but so far I am enjoying and finding it very interesting. This book details the actions taken by the powerful men in Washington from the President right down to the military.

I would recommend that you read this book before the 'Papers on the War, which is also written by Daniel Ellsberg. This book gives the entire background of his career and his actions. I up to chapter 10, and have another 22 to read.

However, I have been able to answer why the Vietnam started. I was always fascinated by the Vietnam War, when I took history for my O-levels 18 years ago. The next book I plan to purchase is 'The Pentagon Papers', written by Neil Sheehan, the journalist who Daniel Ellsberg leaked the 7000 page war papers too.

LAST UPDATE: 03/04/2018: Just finished reading this book and wow, like the previous book (The Papers on War), this was a book that I did not want to put down. An exciting and interesting read of Daniel Ellsberg life from start to finish. I do not think that any movie on the subject can capture the writings of the authors life. The book consisted of both long (22 pages) and short (10 pages) chapters.

5 people found this helpful

Barry Ryder

Hero or villain?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

Daniel Ellsberg may not have been the first `whistle-blower' and he certainly isn't the last but, he is, most assuredly, one of the most courageous and effective voices ever to shout above the din of governmental deception.

He did betray his pledge of secrecy and he did break the law. But, ultimately, his actions hastened the end of the Vietnam War and prevented any further carnage. His revelations and refusal to be silenced was also the Genesis of the Watergate scandal which ended with the ignominious resignation of Nixon and the imprisonment of those who had sought so hard to cover-up the duplicity of the White House.

On balance, this reader remains convinced that Ellsberg - and the many who assisted him - is and are heroes.
This book chronicles the author's early involvement and support of the expanding war in Vietnam. Ellsberg believed in the war and its aims and he was deeply committed to it. However, after tours of the battle zones, he began to be struck by the `credibility gap' of what he was seeing and what his government was reporting to the American people.
`Secrets' takes the reader through Ellsberg's crisis of conscience and his eventual `turning'. It's a compelling read. He - and others, too - risked jail and public acrimony for being `traitors' but they did what they believed to be right and carried public opinion with them.

There is much here about how the press, at first wary of involvement, soon became galvanised to publish the Pentagon Papers as the White House sought to silence it. It's gripping from beginning to end.
Some of the most chilling parts are the transcripts of Nixon's taped conversations with Kissinger and others. The reader will be able to examine particular exchanges in which Nixon `sounds out' Kissinger on the possibilities of bursting the dykes and drowning two-hundred-thousand Vietnamese. In another segment, Nixon broaches the possibility of pursuing the nuclear option. When Kissinger baulks, Nixon berates him and chides him, saying, " The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ sakes."

To appreciate the maximum effect of these and other taped exchanges, readers might wish to view the DVD `The Most Dangerous Man In America'. It follows this book very closely and actually hearing the voice of Nixon saying these things really is shocking.

barry

9 people found this helpful

Bollard

Some things never change

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 8, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is one of the books I suggest you read to orientate yourself into the general Vietnam area. The others are 'A Bright Shining Lie', 'Dereliction of Duty' and 'War Without Fronts'. If you have the stamina, 'The Best and the Brightest' too. These will introduce you to the possibilities that were allowed to drift, the political shenanigans, and the military madness. Read these plus this one and you will see - as others have commented - that more recent problems with US involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a continuum rather than one-off moments of madness. I would also defy anyone to treat uncritically any statement made by any politician after reading them!

I was at uni when they impeached Nixon, and a bewildered observer of the Vietnam involvement throughout the 1960s and 70s. Frankly, I had no idea what was really going on, and when I now discover in these books how many downright lies were being told by successive administrations to the nation's elected representatives; how the Joint Chiefs compromised their sworn obligations and connived in creating the fog of confusion; how administrations told some of their own people one thing while executing a different policy via alternative routes; and how some of Nixon's taped conversations sound more like an organised crime tea party than a leader of his people ... and that's only for a start! (And don't think that Nixon's predecessors were any better, either. The ghost of Senator McCarthy still stalked the corridors of power.)

Ellsberg comes across here as passionate, bordering on the volatile (a 60-minute crying session on a lavatory floor after attending a peace seminar) but, with all that, a man of grit and guts. He was an officer, he is a smart guy - PhD - and, as a consultant, he rode the country roads of Vietnam with John Vann, just the two of them, poking sub machine guns out of their windows along the riskier stretches. Make no mistake, Ellsberg's got guts. You need his passion if you are going to defy the state and risk spending a large chunk of your life in prison. (And frankly, these days, what with the Patriot Act an' all, I doubt you'd get away with leaking top secret papers the way he did then. Apparently there was no law against it at the time.)

Most of the book explores his changing view of the Vietnam involvement. The last 100 pages or so take us through the trial, exploring, as the story develops, the worrying side of the US justice system too: for example, at one stage the judge was offered the post of FBI boss but didn't regard that as grounds to recuse himself. Ellsberg was lucky he had friends - a lot of them - who stored his photocopies, distributed them to successive newspapers after previous journals were injuncted by the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, back at the White House ... well, just read some of the taped conversations reproduced in the book and you will gasp. The problem is, the question I ask myself, is - how much has really changed since?

At the end of this, even after reading 'Dereliction of Duty' - which overlaps with this book and complements it in some areas and timeframes - I still do not really 'get' (a) just what the Americans were trying to achieve in Vietnam; nor (b) how they were going to define 'success'; nor (c) what their exit strategy was. These are the absolute fundamentals of managing any project, yet they were all fumbled by some pretty smart people, year after year after year. It's amazing. It seems pretty clear that the politicians told the public one thing, the Joint Chiefs another, and their own closed circle something else. Ultimately, it seems to have been one great, thick, blood-soaked 'cloud of unknowing'. It took Ellsberg to break through that, then. But who would dare do it today? Even so, it wasn't the Pentagon Papers themselves that breached the dam, but the way Nixon and his cohorts responded to the leak in unlawful ways and undermined the trial in the process. You have to read it to believe it.

5 stars for overall impact and contribution to the picture; 1 off for some rambling and, ultimately, lack of the sustained crystal clarity of which Dr Ellsberg is surely capable. Recommended.

7 people found this helpful

Chris Jackson

Dont beleave what they tell you

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 3, 2014

Verified Purchase

If ever a book that defines an era its this one. Daniel Ellsberg had the bravery to take on the American establishment and won. It is a great insight into what governments do in private and what they tell the public. Vietnam was a gamble that did not pay off and it took the USA on and off twenty years and Every President From Eisenhower to Nixon and Ford to end it. A failure of foreign policy and Successive administrations who do not learn from their Predecessors. Now 40 years later were still making the same mistakes. Fantastic read.

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Buy new:

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$3.99 delivery: Monday, June 26

Ships from: Becker Inc.

Sold by: Becker Inc.

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$10.75