And so it was clear to Mort and me by the spring that this thing is a dead letter that’s not going to happen. So what do you do? What’s next? As we saw it, a unilateral U.S. withdrawal was what you ought to do. If they weren’t going to agree to a mutual withdrawal, we had to get out. But that was not the conclusion that Nixon and Kissinger drew. Rather, they thought they would get mutual withdrawal by threatening that if the North did not accept those terms, they would be wiped off the map, both by conventional and nuclear weapons. So the threat was communicated by Kissinger to the North Vietnamese when he started talking to them in Paris August 4, 1969.
MORTON HALPERIN
When a story about the secret bombings in Cambodia appeared in the New York Times story by William Beecher on May 9, 1969, there was much detail in the story that I did not know. I could not have been the source for most of that story, because the only thing I knew was the fact that we were bombing. I didn’t know anything about the double targeting and all this other stuff.*4
The day the story was published, Kissinger called FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and said, “The president’s very disturbed about this. He wants to know what you think should be done.” And of course, Hoover’s answer to all problems was wiretap people. So Hoover then called his sources, who were journalists friendly to the administration, and said, “Who do you think leaked this?” And one of them said, “It must be Halperin. He’s against the war. He was trying to get us out of Vietnam when he was in the LBJ Pentagon. He would do anything to get us out of the war.” So Hoover told Kissinger, “My sources tell me Halperin leaked the thing.” And then Hoover, without waiting for White House approval, put a wiretap on my phone.
DANIEL ELLSBERG
I knew from Mort that Nixon was threatening escalation, and I was sure that it would not lead to mutual withdrawal, which was what he was asking, because his earlier offers of mutual withdrawal had been rebuffed. After studying the Pentagon Papers, I felt that Nixon, having made such threats, was likely to carry them out, and that would do nothing but escalate the war and prolong it. My incentive for deciding to start the process of trying to publicly expose the Pentagon Papers was that Nixon’s plan would ultimately lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
ROGER MORRIS
By the end of summer ’69 my stock was reasonably high with Kissinger. I think it must’ve been August that he began to ask me to sit in on meetings dealing with Vietnam, and he was obviously putting together a little working group. By the summer, time was running out with the antiwar movement, it was running out on the Hill, and it was plain that the covert bombing in Cambodia and a lot of other covert stuff, a lot of raiding across the parallel and mucking around with North Vietnam, was not going to affect policy. So something more forceful in terms of coercion of [North Vietnam] would have to be done to open things up.
Kissinger convened a special NSC staff planning committee called the September Group, and we were asked to look at the political, military, and economic contingency plan of a massive strike at North Vietnam, including what would later materialize as the carpet bombing of Hanoi*5 and the very risky bombing of the Haiphong Harbor, which involved a lot of Soviet and Chinese shipping, the bombing of the rail line to the North, through China, and through the Mu Gia Pass [to Laos]. There was talk of using a nuclear weapon on the Mu Gia Pass. The code name for this escalation plan was Operation Duck Hook.
TONY LAKE (White House national security expert)
I was Kissinger’s special assistant. Kissinger knew that I did not believe that after all of that effort and sacrifice, we could win, and therefore we should find the best negotiated settlement we could, as quickly as possible. He had me be his Vietnam person as well. So I accompanied him to the secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris, and it gave me an entry point for writing him occasional memos on why I thought the administration was taking the wrong approach.
ROGER MORRIS
So in August of 1969 there began a succession of secret meetings with the Vietnamese that goes through the winter and spring of 1970. We’d get flown to Paris, land in an outlying military airfield, and be whisked off to a safe house. The French government knew something was going on but they were not informed. They would have had the house bugged, so they probably knew. But we were not telling anybody.
TONY LAKE
Kissinger argued that we had to be more threatening with the North Vietnamese in an effort to bring them to the table to reach a better diplomatic solution, which was a part of the strategy leading up to November 1, 1969, the anniversary of Johnson’s bombing halt. Nixon threatened the North Vietnamese with measures of great force if they didn’t come across with the kind of deal that we were looking for by November 1, and the North Vietnamese called what turned out to be Nixon’s bluff.
MORTON HALPERIN
My decision to resign was a long, gradual process. After the wiretap, Kissinger cut down my access and I kept saying, “Henry, I’m going to leave. I don’t have enough to do. I don’t like just knowing about parts of things.” And he would say, “You can’t leave.” I resigned in September of ’69.
DANIEL ELLSBERG
In September, a month before I started copying the papers, I contacted Ted Kennedy and Averell Harriman and various other prominent Democrats like Harry McPherson, who was assistant to Johnson, and Paul Warnke, and tried to get them to make a statement saying, “This is not your war, this is our war.” That was the message. What I knew from the Pentagon Papers is no president will get out of Vietnam if he has to take the full responsibility for it. It would only work politically if the opposition party will take responsibility, which was fair enough for the Democrats. It was the Democrats’ responsibility, and if they assured Nixon that they will not call him weak on communism, and a sellout, but on the contrary will say, “We stand with you, this is the right thing to do”—only if he could share that responsibility with them, I thought, would the president ever get out.
What I found in each case, one by one, was that none of them was willing to do that. Not the right time, you know, later, and so forth. And what I came to realize was they wanted it to be Nixon’s war. Not just the Democrats’ war—and then they could conceive of giving him a break and standing with him. But my conviction was that by then it will be too late. Once he has made it his war, and has committed a lot of troops, and suffered a lot of casualties, he ain’t going to get out, even if you are willing to stand with him. It’s his war by then. So either you do it now or it’s not going to happen. That was my feeling.
Credit 9.1
President Richard Nixon convenes his war council on September 1, 1969, to discuss Vietnam War strategy. From left: National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Attorney General John Mitchell, Vice President Spiro Agnew, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., General Creighton Abrams, CIA director Richard Helms, peace delegate Philip C. Habib, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, Secretary of State William Rogers, President Nixon, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and General Earle Wheeler.
I started copying the Pentagon Papers on October 1, or the day before. Tony [Russo] and I were never able, best we tried, to decide whether it was September 29 or the 30, or October 1. So in my book I say it’s October 1. I tell the whole story in the book:
In the early evening of October 1, 1969, I opened the top secret safe in the corner of my office and started to pick out volumes of the McNamara study to copy that night. The forty-seven volumes filled two drawers, about eight feet. I thought I’d better start with the highest-priority studies….I chose the volumes on 1964–65 to start with. They had the most relevance to the current movement. That was history I was trying to keep from recurring: a president making secret threats of escalation, and secret plans to carry them out if they didn’t work, as was almost certain; a war on the way to getting much larger and longer, with the public wholly unaware….
I opened the doors to the lobby [of RAND in Santa Monica]. There were two guards behind the desk as usual. I was wearing my badge, but the
y knew everyone by sight. They said, “Good night, Dan,” friendly as usual, and I waved my free hand good night as I passed the desk, where one of them was checking my name off on a list and noting the time. I walked past the posters on tripods that had World War II security reminders on them: “Loose Lips Sink Ships”; “What You See Here, What You Say Here, Let It Stay Here.”…
I went over directly to my former colleague Tony Russo’s apartment. Lynda Sinay [his girlfriend] was with him….We drove to her office at the corner of Melrose and Crescent. It was on the second floor, above a flower shop….The Xerox machine was just inside the glass door at the top of the stairway, on the left in the reception room….
The top secret markings on the top and bottom of every page reminded me constantly of the stakes. I didn’t know yet how I was going to get this information to the public, but however that happened, it was going to change my life very drastically and suddenly.*6
Meanwhile, during the daytime, the next thing I thought of was, Let’s get a bunch of people from RAND who are against the war, who know how hopeless it is from their research, to write a personal letter. We spent days drafting this letter. I was not a key drafter because I was spending the nights copying the Pentagon Papers, which none of them knew about of course. They were all naturally concerned about their jobs. I wasn’t too concerned about my job, because I expected to be in prison within weeks. I was also pretty tired during the day. I was copying all night, so I think I was rather passive in the group get-togethers where we were drafting this letter, but we all took part in it. There was a lot of back-and-forth, and then we all agreed that we would not send it out without showing it to Harry Rowen, who was the president of RAND.
I think they all assumed that this was a good exercise but that Harry would never agree to let the letter out. And to their surprise, Harry’s reaction was, “Why isn’t this on RAND letterhead?” We said, “Well, we weren’t trying to embarrass RAND here. We put it on a plain letter.” And he said, “No, no, it’ll come out that you were all from RAND, and it’ll look as though we had censored you.” He said, “Put it on RAND letterhead.” The whole point was we were people who have had access to the classified information, and we say America should get out of the war. We were opposed to the attitude that the only people who supported withdrawal had to be either irresponsible, reckless America haters or totally ignorant of the situation. On the contrary, we had all worked on the Vietnam War for the government, and we had seen the information, and we say it’s not going to get any better. There may be some bad consequences to withdrawing now, but they will not be better a year from now, or two years from now if you postpone it.
Dear Sirs,
Now that the American people are once again debating the issue of Vietnam, we desire to contribute to that discussion by presenting our own views, which reflect both personal judgements and years of professional research on the Vietnam war and related matters. We are expressing here our views as individuals, not speaking for Rand, of which we are staff members; there is a considerable diversity of views on this subject, as on other issues, among our Rand colleagues.
We believe that the United States should decide now to end its participation in the Vietnam war, completing the total withdrawal of our forces within one year at the most. Such U.S. disengagement should not be conditioned upon agreement or performance by Hanoi or Saigon—i.e., it should not be subject to veto by either side….
We do not predict that only good consequences will follow for Southeast Asia or South Vietnam (or even the United States) from our withdrawal. What we do say is that the risks will not be less after another year or more of American involvement, and the human costs will surely be greater.
Daniel Ellsberg, Melvin Gurtov, Oleg Hoeffding, Arnold Horelick, Konrad Kellen, Paul F. Langer
THE RAND CORPORATION
I called up New York Times correspondent Steve Roberts and said, “Be in the parking lot at RAND, and I’ll come out. I have a letter for you.” I walked out to the parking lot, and there was Steve, and I said, “Okay, Steve. Here’s your letter. Now, stay away from the phone until this thing appears, don’t take any message from me or anybody else on this. Get it out.” I thought there would be second and third thoughts, and they’d want to take it back.
In the end, it was printed as a news story on October 9, 1969, which we had mixed feelings about, because it meant they didn’t print the whole letter. We had been very careful to express ourselves and show how nuanced and broad-thinking we were but only a few paragraphs of the letter got in the news story. But because it was a news story, it got a little more attention. It was news that six people at RAND said this. The headline was “Six Rand Experts Support Pullout: Back Unilateral Step Within One Year in Vietnam.”
Because the Times hadn’t carried our letter in full, we offered it to The Washington Post as well, and it printed the whole letter prominently in the center of its editorial page on Sunday, October 12, with the headline “A Case Against Staying in Vietnam.” I was told later that it was the most quoted item in the Moratorium rallies, which took place all across the country on October 15. That was what I was hoping for. It was the very point I was making. You didn’t have to be ignorant of the specifics of the war to be for getting out. Our letter had the kind of authority I wanted these Democratic policy makers to use, and since they wouldn’t do it, we did it.
The only other people who’d called for unilateral withdrawal before now were great men like Abbie Hoffman and Howard Zinn—who’d written a little book on it, The Case for Withdrawal. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the hippies and Yippies, people like that, were dismissed as radicals who didn’t know anything. No establishment figure had come out publicly for getting out altogether. Bobby Kennedy had told Johnson that we should get out in early ’68. He’d come back from Vietnam, and Johnson shat all over him and said, “It’s unthinkable.” Bobby didn’t say it publicly after that, and he did not run on saying we should get out unilaterally. Eugene McCarthy did not run on it, either. No establishment person had done it. After the RAND letter came and got nationwide press coverage, we got over two hundred and fifty letters from professionals at RAND denouncing us.
About a week after the letter was published, Senator [Walter] Fritz Mondale wanted to see me. So I met him in the cloakroom, off the floor of Congress. I remember him saying he wanted to congratulate me on the RAND letter. He said that took real guts, real courage. He said, “I don’t have that kind of courage.” And I said, “Well, you don’t know what kind of courage you have until you come up against the actual situation.” And he said, “No, I know myself. I don’t have it.”
* * *
*1 The RAND Corporation is a large think tank based in Santa Monica, California, that originally provided quantitative research and analysis to help the U.S. armed services during the Cold War. It has since expanded its mission but is still a major Pentagon contractor.
*2 Ngo Dinh Diem was the first president (and an anticommunist Catholic) of South Vietnam from the nation’s formation in 1955 until his assassination in 1963.
*3 The Nixon administration’s secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese military bases in (neutral) Cambodia and Laos, code-named “Operation Menu,” began on March 18, 1969, and ended May 26, 1970. Nixon authorized the use of B-52s to carpet bomb the region along the border of Vietnam, and the campaign was kept secret and records falsified or destroyed so that even members of the military command didn’t know about the bombing.
*4 William Beecher, “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested,” New York Times, May 9, 1969, p. A1. The government kept the bombing raids secret by officially reporting false bombing targets in Vietnam.
*5 In December 1972, B-52s carpet bombed Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, in the so-called Christmas bombings.
*6 Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002), pp. 299–303. I interviewed Daniel Ellsberg at his house in Berkeley, California, on March 10, 2014
. During our five-hour meeting, Ellsberg resisted describing his experience of copying the Pentagon Papers and asked me instead to quote directly from his memoir.
CHAPTER 10
MORATORIUM
(June–October 1969)
ATTENTION ALL PEACE MARCHERS: Hippies, Yippies, Beatniks, Peaceniks, Yellow Bellies, Traitors, Commies and their agents and dupes—HELP KEEP OUR CITY CLEAN…just by staying out of it.
—HEADLINE OF THE Manchester (N.H.)
Union Leader, October 15, 1969
What might be referred to as a singular peace movement of the 1960s was in fact a loose coalition of many organizations, each with its own distinct agenda: SNCC, SDS, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, MOBE, the Resistance, the Yippies, Women Strike for Peace, McCarthy supporters who were “Clean for Gene,” Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and many more. By October 1969, none was more threatening to the Nixon administration than an organization with only thirty-one paid staffers called the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Made up of young Democratic Party operatives who were alumni of Senators Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaigns, the M-day committee appealed to moderate middle Americans—housewives, priests, white-collar professionals, and midwesterners—which is why it was so menacing.
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