What I Had to Do
I am in the process of writing a memoir, reliving
the 12 years, from 1964 through 1975, when the
Vietnam War was my life. In the years since the
war ended, my obsession with it has subsided, but
its impact on my thinking and activity has not. Every
political activity I’ve engaged in over the past quarter-
century, the way I read each day’s news, every thought
I’ve expressed in lectures and writings, has been influ¬
enced by my experience of Vietnam and my reflections
on it, by my twin struggles to understand it and, for
most of those 12 years, to end it.
Nevertheless, 1 find myself somewhat uneasy about
the theme of this magazine’s symposium. Too many
Americans for too long focused only on their “inner”
Vietnam while being oblivious to the “outer” Vietnam
10,000 miles away, with its own people,
geography, history, and culture.
I was one of those. I worked in the
Pentagon in 1964 and 1965 and
watched as top decision-makers secretly and deceitfully
maneuvered the country into a full-scale war with no
prospect of success. Whether we had a right to pursue
by fire and sword in Indochina—any more than the
French before us—the objectives our leaders had chosen,
was a question that never occurred to me. But in the
course of two years of service in that “outer” Vietnam,
its people became real to me—as real as the U.S. troops I
walked with under fire—in a way that made prolonging
our war in their country intolerable.
If I may rephrase the question proposed by Modern
Maturity, Vietnam shaped my inner America, my
sense of what we had become, and what I had to do,
with the help of others, to steer us toward our declared
ideals. That experience changed my outer life as well.
Before and during the war, I wanted to serve my coun¬
try by serving my President, and I did that for 15 years
under four of them. But Vietnam taught me a better
way, for me, to serve my country.
In 1968 I met American men and women as brave and
patriotic as any I had known in Vietnam or the govern¬
ment. Many of them were draft resisters. Although
some were inspired by Gandhi, they were also following
an American tradition that stretched from the Boston
Tea Party to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Thoreau’s
nonviolent civil disobedience against the Mexican
War to the Underground Railway, from women’s suf¬
frage to lunch-counter sit-ins. I had read Gandhi and
King, but the day I met a young man named Randy
Kehler at an antiwar conference in Au¬
gust 1969 was like meeting Rosa Parks on
her way to the Montgomery jail.
When Randy spoke about nonviolence
and his hopes for a better future, I listened with almost
a parent’s pride. I thought, “He’s as good as we have.”
Toward the end of his talk, he said he would soon join
his friends David Harris and Bob Eaton, who were in
prison for draft resistance. There had been no fore¬
warning of Randy’s announcement, so it took me sev¬
eral moments to grasp what he had said. Then it was as
if an ax split my head, and my heart broke open. I
thought: We are eating our young. In Vietnam and at
home, we are using them up. Is this what my country has
come to? Is this the best thing for our best young peo¬
ple to do with their lives—go to prison? I found my way
to a deserted men’s room, sunk to the floor, and sobbed
for more than an hour. (continued on page 50)
By Daniel Ellsberg
A WIDOW S TALE
(continued from page 41)
compelled to speak. I often think
about what former President Dwight
D. Eisenhower said: “People want
peace so much that one of these days
government had better get out of
their way and let them have it.”
When I was in Vietnam, I heard
terrible stories from the victims of
the war on all sides. Americans today
have never seen warfare on our own
land. What would it be like to live
with bombs dropping day and night,
napalm burning our children on
their way to school, Agent Orange
destroying our forests, poisoning
our food and water?
In the process of talking to widows
and veterans on both sides, of hear¬
ing their stories of suffering, my
anger began to melt. As I traveled
through Vietnam with my friend
and translator, we kept asking one
another, “Who suffers more, the
victim or the perpetrator?” In the
early '90s the Balkans fell back into
century-old blood feuds. In 1995 I
went to Cambodia to interview
widows of the American bombings
and Khmer Rouge atrocities. I came
across a group of Buddhist monks
and other Cambodians who were
leading walks of forgiveness through
Khmer Rouge territory in the hope
that the killing would not continue
into the next generation. I thought
that if the Cambodian people can
forgive the Khmer Rouge for the
genocide of as much as a quarter of
their population, I have nothing to
be angry about. I realized that by
holding on to my rage, I was contin¬
uing the war. It still lived inside me.
With this realization, my anger fi¬
nally melted into compassion. ^
Barbara Sonnebom’s documentary, Regret
to Inform, was nominated for an Acade¬
my Award in 1998. She recently formed
the Widows of War Living Memorial,
where women can tell their stories and
work for peace. For more information, call
877-END-WARS [363-9277] or visit her
Web site at www.regrettoinform.org.
WHAT I HAD TO DO
(continued from page 43)
When I emerged, I realized that my
range of options—my power as a citi¬
zen—had suddenly expanded. I was
now ready, like the others, to go to
prison if it would help end the war. A
month later I copied the 7,000-page
top-secret history of U.S. decision¬
making in Vietnam from 1945
through 1968 (which was later dubbed
the Pentagon Papers) from my safe at
the Rand Corporation and began read¬
ing it. I learned that President Tru¬
man, followed by President Eisenhow¬
er, had fully financed the French
colonial war from 1945 through 1954.
I also learned that President Nixon
was as determined as Lyndon Johnson
had been to avoid U.S. failure in Viet¬
nam, and he had a secret plan to
achieve this: by threatening to enlarge
the war dramatically if North Vietnam
did not withdraw its troops from the
South (as we withdrew ours). I be¬
lieved that the threats would fail, so I
gave the document to the Senate For¬
eign Relations Committee. Almost
two years later, defying four court in¬
junctions granted at the President's re¬
quest, I gave the document to The New
York Times , The Washington Post , and
15 other newspapers.
I was indicted on 12 federal charges
and faced 115 years in prison. Two
years later, a federal judge dismissed all
charges against me and my co-defen¬
dant, Tony Russo (a former Rand co¬
worker), after discovering that “gross
governmental misconduct” had been
directed against me by President
Nixon, which led to his impeachment
and resignation, and more important,
helped shorten the war.
I feel grateful every day to the draft
resisters who showed me another way
to be a good American, to be free to fol¬
low Thoreau's advice to “cast your
whole vote: not a strip of paper merely,
but your whole influence.” Since the
war ended I have campaigned against
nuclear weapons and subsequent un¬
lawful U.S. interventions. My efforts
included lecturing, lobbying, demon¬
strating, and approximately 60 arrests
for nonviolent civil disobedience, all
of which the war taught me were nec¬
essary and powerful actions in order to
make democracy work.
The recent movie The Insider, about
Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco industry
whistle-blower, is a reminder that or¬
ganized activities that are kept secret
from Congress and the public be¬
cause of their recklessness, illegality,
and danger to life are not limited to
matters of state or of war. Merrell
Williams, a paralegal at the law firm
representing cigarette manufacturer
Brown & Williamson, copied thou¬
sands of pages of documents that
have been called the Pentagon Papers
of the tobacco industry. Wigand's
and Williams's ordeals demonstrate
once again that a readiness to expose
the truth at whatever cost can save
lives and turn the course of history.
When I look back at my actions to
end the war, I wish I had done in 1964
or 1965 what I did do five years later:
go to Congress, tell the truth, with docu¬
ments. From my first day in the Penta¬
gon—August 4,1964—I witnessed lies
about U.S. provocations and imagi¬
nary torpedos in the Tonkin Gulf. I be¬
came a participant in secret plans to
escalate the war as soon as President
Johnson won in a landslide by promis¬
ing voters just the opposite. If I (or
others) had done then what I did later,
the war could have been averted.
That's a heavy thought to bear, and
I'm still carrying it. It's easy to say
that it simply didn't occur to me at
the time. Like so many others, I put
personal loyalty to the President
above all else—above loyalty to the
Constitution and above obligation to
the law, to truth, to Americans, and to
humankind. I was wrong.
That's one reason why I'm writing
my memoir, to convey that lesson to
future officials as well as the more
positive one I learned later: Telling
the truth can have a power more than
worthy of the risk. ***
Daniel Ellsberg is a former Defense and
State Department official. Since the
Vietnam War he has been a writer, lec¬
turer, and activist.
50 MODERN MATURITY MAY-JUNE 2000
