Daniel Ellsberg, who authored the new book "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," said today: "This leak is potentially more significant than the release of the Pentagon Papers, since it is extraordinarily timely. More officials who know -- as I did in 1964-65 -- that the president, and their bosses, are lying us into a wrongful, reckless, unnecessary war should consider doing right now, before the bombs are falling, what I wish I had done at a comparable point, in the months before the onset of the Rolling Thunder bombing [in Vietnam]: going to Congress and the press with documents that undercut official lies. There is still time to avert this invasion with sufficiently comprehensive truth-telling."
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If only. As hopeful and positive as this idea is, the most appalling thing about Vietnam then or Iraq now, was and is that it doesn't matter. Anybody who wants to, including me at twenty or at sixty already realizes that these wars were and are based on lies fabricated by the US government---before Ellsberg discovered the documentation to prove it in 1964-65 or now as he advocates formal disclosures to prove a different set of lies and manipulations almost forty years later in 2003.
The only question I have been mulling over lately was exactly when did I realize Vietnam was a crock of shit and how? I finally reconstructed enough of the very long sequence to pin point that personal judgement in my memory.
I had to start with the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. These were astonishing events that were positively saturated with obvious and blatant official lying. But in my eighteen and nineteen old mind these were not conclusive proof that there was no greatest lower bound of public deceit and no least upper bound to the atrocities that the US government would entertain. In other words in realpolitik as in analysis there is no convergence, and therefore no limits to these functions.
That discovery in relation to Vietnam came over the spring and summer of 1963. The sequence is a little complex and I had to look it up to recall the details, but it started with stories of losing several helicopters and US advisers in battles against the Viet Cong in the northern Mekong Delta, followed by student and Buddhist monk demonstrations against Diem, the US, and the war. These demonstration culminated in late spring of 1963 with the stunning self-emulation of several Buddhist monks. Madame Nhu dismissed them as Buddhist's barbecues. Diem closed the monasteries and pagodas (looting them), claimed all demands for reform were communist inspired plots and declared marshal law.
Kennedy announced he was changing the US ambassador from whoever to Henry Cabot Lodge, who would take over at the end of the summer. That summer I thought Diem was finished and hoped the US would try to form a coalition government of some sort then pull out. When Diem was assassinated in early November 1963 it was obvious the US was up to its ass in plots and didn't give a damn what anybody thought. The only thing that counted was power and power to stop power.
I have to emphasize I was very late in arriving at this conclusion at twenty. I had already been in endless arguments with more radical friends first with HUAC and then during the early anti-Kennedy demos over Cuba 1961-2. I kept thinking that the Bay of Pigs (`61) and the Missile Crisis (`62) were flukes. Once Diem was blatantly unmasked as a petty police state thug during the Saigon demonstrations (`63), it was obvious my radical friends were right and I was wrong.
I kept holding out to be proven wrong in this conclusion that there were no limits to official lies or official cover ups for planned and accomplished atrocities, partly because I believed that Kennedy would have seen the light. Looking back on it, that idea was a twenty year old's idealism and naivety. I simply couldn't grasp the implication that Kennedy had actually ordered a change of regimes in Vietnam.
This is were Ellsberg picks up the thread in 1964-5. But by that time US student demonstrations and teach-ins against the war were already publicly explaining what we now know were also documented Pentagon assessments. By the summer of 1965 Vietnam was a cynical farce. Farce or not, it was positively mind numbing to watch the slaughter only increase.
In a sense Ellsberg seems to be almost youthful in his naivety and reminded me of my own. His disclosures if they had occurred in 1964 would have done nothing more than prolonged the Gulf of Tonkin resolution debate in early 1965. The Tonkin incident itself was an absurd pretext on its face created by Johnson for Fulbright to use as a curtesy figleaf. Again I kept hoping Fulbright wouldn't use it. He did.
Today, a life time later there is virtually no public disclosure that will stop this war. And there in lays the sad sweetness of Ellsberg for thinking so.
Chuck Grimes