It is always worth mining the fringes. With its childlike attention span and memory, the capital can forget or lose interest in the likes of Daniel Ellsberg.
Sitting at home, working on a memoir, he has much to contemplate in a rich life. Last week brought purely coincidental reminders of several chapters.
India and Pakistan tested nuclear devices. An independent counsel went to the U.S. Supreme Court in a fight with the president. And a cable television channel profiled a devilishly fascinating Army colonel who covertly publicized the errors of our ways in Vietnam.
Ellsberg has ties to, and reason to thoughtfully discourse on, all.
Nuclear disarmament has been a concern, even obsession, for many years. Before that, it was Vietnam and his leaking of documents that challenged a presidency and prompted a fight at the Supreme Court. Along the way, there was a friendship with the colonel who’s the subject of HBO’s “A Bright Shining Lie” and helps explain Ellsberg’s successful demand that the character based on him be renamed.
Ebert and Siskel, watch out: “The finished film, which I have now seen, is somewhat less atrocious than the earlier film script on which I commented to HBO,” Ellsberg wrote me last week. “Some of the most obscenely slanderous lines have been removed, though most of the scenes to which I objected remain intact.”
And even if they’d changed all the names, including that of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann (played by Bill Paxton), he said, “It would remain a shallow, vulgar distortion and trivialization of important history, filled exclusively with cardboard stereotypes and caricatures, an eighth-grader’s account of one side of an unending controversy.”
Of course, in the caricature most of a certain generation probably carry of Ellsberg, he’s “the Pentagon Papers fellow.”
Born in Chicago to a structural engineer and musician mother who forced him to practice the piano eight hours a day, he won a scholarship to Harvard University and graduated with a degree in economics. He volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1954 and ultimately proved an aggressive infantry officer.
He was so gung-ho, he extended his tour so he could go to the Middle East during the Suez Crisis in 1956. He returned to Harvard for doctoral work and then joined the Rand Corp. to study long-term military planning and nuclear risk. Later, he became one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids” and later spent long periods in Vietnam, often on patrol, as part of a McNamara study of ways to exit honorably.
More Top Picks Best Outdoor Saunas
Over time, he became more involved in Vietnam-related analyses and, also, was slowly convinced we had made a huge and bloody error. It explains how he ultimately exploited his top-secret clearance, made copies of the internal Pentagon study of the war and leaked it to then-New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. The two had met in Vietnam when Sheehan labored for United Press International, the once grand wire service that now seems to consist of not much more than White House reporter Helen Thomas and some photocopiers.
The publication of the documents led to the government getting an injunction preventing any further publication. The New York Times and Washington Post won an important 1st Amendment case. Ellsberg was indicted on a variety of charges, including theft and violation of the Espionage Act. But the case was dismissed amid outrageous government misconduct, notably a Richard Nixon-inspired break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s former shrink.
Ellsberg, 67, has spent much of his time in recent years working for nuclear disarmament and warning about weapons of mass destruction. He became director of the Manhattan Project II, a takeoff on the original government research project that produced the first atomic bombs in the 1940s.
It’s why he attended the 1995 United Nations conference on renewing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. India and Pakistan did not sign.
“They felt it discriminatory, and obviously it is,” he said, referring to a small group of nations that keep their nukes while everybody else is warned against getting any. But the theory, as Ellsberg notes, is that “this is a transient condition and the nuclear states are supposed to move toward elimination of such weapons.”
Which, of course, is not really happening.
“The administration position under (George) Bush and (Bill) Clinton has been that there is no real connection between disarmament by the nuclear powers and non-proliferation by the non-members. The theory is that they’re goaded by the worries of their non-nuclear neighbors, thus India looks at and worries about China and Pakistan.”
A problem with that notion, he believes, is that it ignores how India has for many years said, ” `We will get (nukes) for regional reasons unless you guys move seriously to disarmament.’ We, instead, prefer to hear that as mere rhetoric because if we took it seriously, we would have to move toward real disarmament.”
While working on Vietnam as a “whiz kid,” he was involved in top-level discussions related to the 1964 testing of a nuclear device by China. One question was whether the United States should help India counter with a weapon.
“We were informed that Secretary of State (Dean) Rusk wanted to help the Indians in some way, theoretically ranging from giving them a weapon to blow up and saying it was theirs to giving them technical assistance to develop one.
“That was 34 years ago. But even before that, this government had been of two minds,” he said. “In secret, we were more tolerant toward our friends getting the weapon than the public knows.”
Some critics have bashed the Clinton administration for being surprised by the Indian and Pakistani tests. Ellsberg does find it amazing, especially since the “European press was predicting this,” but was quick to rebut my suggestion of an intelligence failure on a par with our Vietnam stumblings.
“I wouldn’t call Vietnam an intelligence failure,” he said. “It was a military and political failure. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the president was given pretty good intelligence. The CIA estimates looked so good, people thought I was doing this to benefit the CIA! The analogy might be to the Cuban missile crisis and Pearl Harbor. It’s a major intelligence failure, though it’s unclear if we could have headed this off.”
As for other failures, he’s adamant that HBO’s “A Bright Shining Lie,” which premiered Saturday evening, is one as far as authenticity. Based on the similarly titled, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Vann by his old chum Sheehan, its original script included an Ellsberg character.
He saw the script and went ballistic, as did journalist-author David Halberstam, also a character. Their names now have been changed, with Ellsberg “David Elders.” He saw a special screening, gagged and wasn’t planning on watching Saturday (same with author Sheehan).
And if his past and present weren’t intertwined enough in last week’s news, there was Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr winning fights over executive privilege with the White House and with the Secret Service. Of course, it was President Nixon and Watergate that made a mess of the privilege and made its invocation an inherent cause of suspicion.
Ellsberg was initially inclined to support the Secret Service people but changed his view when reading a letter to the editor that said if you let them be above the law, you have the makings of a Watergate-like plumbers group.
“Clinton’s argument has some merit but we should be concerned. Presidents act illegally all the time,” said Ellsberg, a capital figure who knows.