Daniel Ellsberg: The Rolling Stone Interview
Daniel Ellsberg was perhaps the first highly placed official (at one time the deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) to have ever left the inner government and then reveal, with top-secret documents, its closely guarded secret operations. As befits a man who risks his reputation and ruin, to fight a corrupt and unlawful government, he is vain, egocentric and completely convinced of the lightness of his action.
It is a grandiose attitude – one that seems to have especially offended the press. It supposes the power of truth, of the man who speaks it, and the moral example it sets. Ellsberg quotes Madison’s statement that, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and the people who mean to be their own governors must take care to arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.”
I decided to avoid, as far as possible, discussion of his several years in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers trial and his personal life. The interview was directed toward an exploration and understanding of his intellectual life, his experiences in the secret decision-making processes inside the Defense Department, and conclusions about the motives and methods of the inner government.
His answers were intricately detailed, with many ideas interwoven and cross-referenced into a dissertation of extraordinary complexity, some 500 typewritten pages long. During a week-long siege, it was roughly organized into two sections and the first part was edited, re-edited, and ultimately reduced in half (by myself, David Felton and Bill Sievert). The organization here is not how the interview was originally conducted. For example, the discussion of Henry Kissinger did not actually begin the interview. As we go to press, Part II remains in the wings, unedited and unorganized. We plan to put it into shape and publish it soon.
“We were facing a massive and urgent threat to our remaining democratic institutions, a coup on the eve of its completion. People who carried out this coup are still in power, starting with the president.”
There is a natural tendency to be suspicious. To some degree, we have all been affected by the notion that no matter how necessary and important Daniel Ellsberg’s act was, to risk a life in prison, vilification as a traitor, and personal slander, there “must have been something else behind it.”
But examine his statement: a dark picture of what has been occurring in American government. He acted on one of the basic democratic beliefs, that “a man can make a difference.”
What was your relationship with Henry Kissinger?
He had been at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and before I went to Rand in 1959, I gave a couple of seminars to his group, discussions about strategy and politics. Over the years I would see him occasionally at a conference or at a Rand symposium. It was not a personal relationship, nor even a close professional relationship, but an intermittent business or analytical association.
I had a very negative attitude toward him because he was pushing the idea of limited nuclear war as a substitute not only for all-out war but also for no nuclear war. He thought that if we forewent the possibility of nuclear weapons the world would be taken over by stronger nations; and that if we limited our options to threats of unrestrained nuclear war, the prospect would be so horrendous that we would be paralyzed and unable to use nuclear weapons at all. He thought the proper strategy was to build and threaten to use, as appropriate, small tactical nuclear weapons the size of the Hiroshima bombs and up to 10 times that size.
Kissinger has no originality whatsoever as an intellect. I read all of his writings, since they were within the field that I was working in, and thought of them as extremely derivative. They were well-written, good expositions of other people’s ideas and often contained analytic criticism. He changed his sources from book to book and the quality of the thinking pretty closely reflected the quality of his current sources.
His first book was admired by Nixon who gave it a great boost with a photograph on the front page of The New York Times of him going into a meeting of the National Security Council with it under his arm. This was the limited nuclear war book, strongly influenced by Edward Teller, General Gavin, a few other Air Force exponents of this limited war concept, and a major source was Bernard Brodie, a Rand colleague; another was Bill Kaufman. Later, he wrote a book – one that almost reversed, temporarily, the drift of his thinking on nuclear weapons – which was very strongly influenced by Rand associates of mine, such as Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn and Tom Schelling. Some of his articles on arms control were taken almost verbatim from work by Tom Schelling.
The sources would never be directly acknowledged. And he had a trick of covering himself by including people in his bibliography, but in entirely misleading ways. He’d include references to secondary works by these people, or works from which he had not drawn, but no mention whatever of the works he was paraphrasing. He wanted to be thought of not only as an able intellect – which he is in the sense of an expositor and critic, which alone would have been enough for an academic career – but also as an original person, a creative person. His solution to that problem must have put him under a certain tension over the years.
It’s not unlike what must be Nixon’s own tension, the shame and guilt of having succeeded by major deceits and never wholly on his own ability or worth.
I have a very strong feeling that Nixon and Kissinger are similar personalities and feel a great affinity and attraction on that basis. Each of them may be the other’s best friend, at least during business hours. Kissinger – and surely Nixon, too – has a very strong ideological belief in the efficacy and legitimacy of the threat of violence as a tool of power and as a way of “establishing world order.”
I’ve heard him profess sympathy for revolutionary aims, say of the NLF, combined with a sad judgment on the “tragic” implications of revolutionary efforts – that they are unstabilizing, reckless and lead to world disorder unintended by the revolutionary forces – thus the “necessity” for suppressing them, despite the fact that one can sympathize with some of their motives. I think he really wants to have the tragic function of suppressing violently idealistic movements and sees no limits to the amount of violence that is acceptable for him to use to counter threats to world order.
One can guess – and I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a producer of official psychological profiles – that Nixon and Kissinger are people who have very strong desires not only to threaten, but to inflict violence. Kissinger can’t be a rebel, he couldn’t conceive of taking part in violence directed against “authority”; but by all evidence he wants very much to be a party to violence. There’s no question that he likes to issue threats. I would suspect very strongly that he wants some of his threats to fail, so that they have to be carried out.
This is how they come to associate with persons like G. Gordon Liddy.
Yeah, Liddy again is on the side of counterrevolution, like E. Howard Hunt, outlaws on the side of the police. It’s the psychology of a “bad cop”: To adapt a remark by Garry Wills, with each of these men it’s as if the Sheriff of Nottingham had fantasies not of arresting Robin Hood but of mugging him.
It’s not difficult to move from Liddy up to his supervisors like Ehrlichman and fairly describe Ehrlichman as a thug; but would you say it’s fair to describe Nixon and Kissinger as thugs?
After Cambodia and Laos, I’ve always privately thought of Henry Kissinger as a murderer. We’re not talking of persons who burglarize this or that office, but of persons who dropped four million tons of bombs on Indochina. Words are hardly adequate to define people who took those choices and took them in the years 1969 to 1972. They were not confronting Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, nor did they act under whatever misconceptions about Ho Chi Minh may have lingered in the late Fifties or early Sixties. They took those decisions after Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara themselves dropped two million tons, failed, and were thrown out of office; they proceeded to drop four million more tons after 1969, having been elected mostly by people who expected them to end the war…
The story that’s not yet been written – perhaps now it will be – is how Nixon came to manage and complete a massive hoax during that four-year period that he was in the process of ending the war without a victory and had every intention of ending it as fast as possible. It was a marvelously contrived deception. In fact, it led me to have a good deal of respect, from a technical point of view, for the manager of that hoax. After reading Joe McGuiness’ book The Selling of the President, people tended to sneer at the competence of advertising men in campaign politics, but they did an almost miraculous job selling the prolongation of the War to the American public from 1969 to 1973, and beyond.
And Henry Kissinger?
He was a major part of that selling campaign.
When did you come in contact with Kissinger after Rand?
He came to Vietnam in 1966 as a consultant to Henry Cabot Lodge. I was very impressed that he took my advice – which I gave to nearly every visitor but which few of them took – to avoid official briefings and talking to anyone in the presence of his boss or agency head; instead, seek out people who had been around, who were known to know a lot about Vietnam, talk to them privately and separately, and get from them the names of other people and talk to those other people separately. And to talk to the Vietnamese as much as possible. MacNamara never did any of these things in all the trips he made, but always talked to district advisers in the presence of the general in charge and never seemed to realize how much he was being fooled.
Kissinger did see the people I suggested. He is a talented and incisive questioner; he takes notes, listens carefully, and learns very well. In a couple of brief visits he did learn an unusual amount. He became appropriately skeptical and pessimistic and compared to Walt Rostow or others in Washington, he had a pretty realistic picture of the unlikelihood of much improvement. So, that was promising.
I was with him in a couple of conferences during 1967, and he was expressing a view far in advance of any mainstream political figure at that point, namely that our only objective in Vietnam should be an assurance of what he called the decent interval before the Communists took over so that we would not be humiliated at home or in our foreign affairs by an abrupt, naked failure.
McCarthy and Robert Kennedy still felt called on to talk about a negotiated solution with, at most, a coalition government. They were not willing to talk about unilateral withdrawal or acceptance of Communist takeover anytime. Kissinger’s dovish description was exceeded only by people like Abbie Hoffman or Dave Dellinger, who were calling for immediate withdrawal.
Finally, by the way, Kissinger expressed thoroughly and openly a total contempt for Richard Nixon. He worked for Rockefeller and was willing to say things about Nixon, such as his famous statement at the 1968 Republican convention, “Richard Nixon is not fit to be president.” That seemed a little indiscrete for someone in politics.
And a few months later he was appointed foreign policy adviser to the president-elect…
He’d been appointed Special Assistant for National Security Affairs and, in readiness for the first National Security Council meeting, he asked for a study of options on Vietnam. The president of Rand, Harry Rowen, suggested me for the job.
Kissinger accepted me with the first reservation ever expressed during my career as to my discretion. He did not want it known that he had turned to Rand for advice, an outside group, known to be relatively dovish within the defense community. And particularly he did not want it known that I was associated with the study since by that time I was a critic of our involvement. I was surprised to have that question raised; my career had been based on handling secrets and using discretion. He told an official at Rand that he had benefited greatly from our discussions in Vietnam, but was “on the other side of the fence,” and “saw things differently.”
Did you speak personally before you undertook the study?
No. I worked for several weeks putting together the options paper [National Security Memorandum One] and flew with it to his offices, a set of apartments they were using with Xerox machines and typewriters in the Hotel Pierre, on Christmas Day, 1968. We spent a couple of days going over the memorandum.
I suggested that he put a bunch of questions to the various parts of the bureaucracy and ask for parallel, rather than coordinated, answers so that he could compare the discrepancies and get a sense of what the uncertainties and conflicts were – the contradictions. I worked on these questions for him. I wanted him to see how much argument there was.
Did you find yourself liking him?
He tends to be fairly ingratiating, and has a habit of being quite flattering to a person in the presence of associates. Just after the election he gave several talks at Rand, and at one point said to the group, in my presence, “I learned more from Dan Ellsberg in Vietnam than from any other person.” It might have been true, but it was also characteristic of him to say something like that in your presence.
So he is a flatterer…
It’s, let’s say, a nice habit, which, however, is counteracted by certain other traits.
I believed Kissinger was well clued-in on the realistic, pessimistic prospects in Vietnam and that he would be a good adviser to Nixon. However, there was one ominous signal that I didn’t pay too much attention to at the time: He felt that escalation of the war had not been spelled out enough in our discussion of options.
I did take the occasion in my three days there to try to ‘inoculate’ him against the effects of the secret information he was about to start receiving. I had often thought of having a chance to warn somebody new to government, just about to receive a lot of high clearances, and to pass on one of the lessons I had learned not only by participating in the government, but also by studying a lot of the earlier crisis decision-making. I doubt he would remember the conversation.
“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something good for a person that’s entering a job like this to know. You’ve been a consultant for a long time and you’ve dealt a great deal with top-secret information. But you are about to receive a whole slew of clearances, maybe 15 or 20 of them higher than top secret.
“I’ve had these myself, as you know, and I’ve known people who’ve acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed, and of reading the information that will now become available to you.
“First, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written and talked about these subjects – for having criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents – for years without having known of the existence of all this inside information. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having rubbed shoulders for over a decade with officials and consultants who had access to all this information that you didn’t even know they had, and that they kept that secret from you.
“You will feel like a fool, and it will last for about two weeks. Then, after you read all this daily intelligence input – estimates, analyses and so forth, and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information which is much more closely held than mere top-secret data – you will forget there was ever a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and others don’t… and that all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time – not too long, but a matter of two or three years – you will eventually become aware of the limitations of this information: There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it is often inaccurate and it can lead you astray just as much as The New York Times can. But that takes quite a while…
“In the meantime, it will become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances, because you’ll be thinking to yourself as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if in fact he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and you just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues and myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances – since you must carefully lie to him about what you know – from the point of view of what do you want him to believe and what impression do you want him to go away with. In effect, how to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say, and the danger is you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience or knowledge they may have of their particular area and which may be much greater than yours.”
He thanked me and said it was interesting. It was hard for him to fully appreciate because he didn’t yet have these clearances and their effect on you is quite spectacular, learning about operations that the president can call into being at his will that you didn’t imagine were permitted to any human being.
I said to Henry that I thought of this secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers who happened on her island that turned men into swine.
And your feeling after this talk?
As a staff person or consultant, you always feel you’ve gotten your reward if a person has listened to what you had to say and seemed to pay attention – that’s as much as you hope for, and that it will some day have some effect.
What was the fate of your study?
National Security Memorandum One went through one more draft. At the request of Kissinger, the one option for unilateral withdrawal was deleted, which meant that all the alternatives had the property of keeping us in Vietnam. I was, meanwhile, working on this set of questions and answers on Vietnam from various agencies of the bureaucracy.
The answers which amounted to about 1,000 pages showed the range of disagreement and pessimistic attitudes about the performance of the Vietnamese army, and the possibility of stopping infiltration by mining Haiphong or bombing the North. They came from agencies like the CIA, the intelligence branch of the State Department and the civilians in the Defense Department, who would not normally be called on to give direct opinions on these subjects to the president. By this device of asking for parallel reports, I had ensured that the new president got the most realistic estimates any president had ever gotten on these subjects.
They showed clearly, despite some disagreements, that the Vietnamese army would never be capable of withstanding North Vietnamese assault without U.S. bombing and U.S. ground troops. And Nixon was told very flatly by most of the responses, except for the Air Force of course, that bombing of Laos was having no effect whatever, and that the mining of Haiphong would likewise have no effect. We now know that the same month the questions were finished, March 1969, the secret bombing of Cambodia began.
I left town with this satisfied consultant’s feeling of having done all I could to bring realistic information to the attention of the new president and to Henry Kissinger, and with considerable expectation that they would act on this and get us out.
It was the kind of job I would have done for any president, even George Wallace. It seemed that one couldn’t go wrong in improving the understanding the president had of Vietnam politics. Later I came to question the usefulness of even this kind of relationship.
When I left the White House, I made a number of recommendations for new studies. One of them had to do with a study of what the word “accommodations” might mean as used by different agencies, and why that would be bad for the United States. Another one was to conduct an urgent and intensive study of the impact of our artillery and bombing operations on the Vietnamese people with an eye to the possibility of greatly reducing these operations or cutting them out entirely. Another was the adequacy of our information on civilian casualties. No one had ever tried to collect it.
Kissinger sent the word back to me through Morton Halperin that these were very useful suggestions but we had asked enough questions for now. And they were all set aside; they never did get around to asking or answering them. There are some things that these officials know they don’t want to know.
I left Washington without any expectation of working again for the administration. Or desire. They sent me a bunch of forms at Rand to fill out for a White House clearance, since I had been working there without a specific White House clearance, but I never filled them out.
I saw Halperin in Washington in June shortly after Nixon’s most conciliatory speech on the war, and he told me, “For the first time, I’m satisfied with the Vietnam policy of the United States.” Although Nixon had not committed himself to total withdrawal, Halperin was very confident that by the end of the year he would have accepted that idea.
But in June or July, the Russians recognized the Provisional Revolutionary Government, making it clear they would not cooperate with the U.S. in bringing pressure on the North to negotiate a mutual withdrawal. It was then that Kissinger began his secret talks with Hanoi, more or less having given up with the Russians.
The policy that they had come into office with went bankrupt at that point. In Richard Whalen’s book, Catch the Falling Flag, Whalen describes conversations in late ’67 with Nixon – for whom he was the main speechwriter on Vietnam – where he proposed to Nixon that he threaten the mining of Haiphong. This would supposedly present the Russians with a crisis like the Cuban missile crisis, because of their shipping, and encourage them to bring pressure on Hanoi for a settlement. Nixon bought that strategy, but it failed. Still Nixon and Kissinger didn’t believe it; they went ahead with their strategy.
I called Halperin in late June of ’69 with a question that was new to me: “What’s your estimate of the number of Vietnamese who would rather see peace even under a Communist government than see the war continue?”
“Oh, 90%,” he said.
“Do you think your boss thinks that?” I asked.
“I’ve never discussed that with him precisely, but I would guess that he did.”
“Then how can we justify continuing this a day longer, whether to get mutual withdrawal or graceful ending or anything else? I don’t discount some usefulness in papering over our defeat and so forth, but how can we justify killing another Vietnamese when our own guess is that nearly all of them want the war over?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s a good question… let me think about that.”
That was the moment I began to see the need to end the war most urgently. From mid ’67 on, I had been for ending the war “as soon as possible,” but I still had a willingness to see it prolonged by weeks or months in the course of negotiations, in hopes of a somewhat better solution that would leave us with a less controversial ending and perhaps less of a domestic backlash. But by mid-1969 I began to see that domestic politics couldn’t excuse it. I finally saw continuation as immoral, not just mistaken.
In September ’69 I learned from Halperin that the policy had not gone as he had hoped in June; that Nixon and Kissinger had chosen one of the options we had laid out earlier – not the excluded option for unilateral withdrawal – but the option to win the war. A disastrous choice. But not yet public; they were not yet fully committed.
I went to some people at Rand who had been for unilateral withdrawal all along, and said, “I’m with you now; what shall we do about it?” They proposed a letter to The New York Times, calling for unilateral withdrawal which, by the way, no one in mainstream politics had publicly proposed at that point.
I said what we needed was a study that would lay out the facts more exhaustively than a letter, but they said a study would never get cleared out of the Defense Department. The only way we could get past the clearance process was in a letter.
In the course of our drafting the letter, former New York Senator Charles Goodell proposed a Congressional cutoff of funds by the end of 1970. It was the first proposal of that kind by a politician. We went ahead with our plan because Goodell wasn’t recognized as an expert, and our letter would add some authoritative support to his position.
The publication of that letter was as controversial at Rand and in the Defense community probably as my leak of the Pentagon Papers was later. It was a bombshell among our associates – and was very widely quoted in the Moratorium. Meanwhile, without telling anyone at Rand, I started to copy the Pentagon Papers to give them to the Senate.
What was your next contact with Kissinger?
Just after my second marriage in September, 1970, I cut my honeymoon in half to return for an appointment with him. He didn’t keep it although I did see him about 10 days later. I thought it was a good chance to lay several things on him.
He was as bad as I’d ever imagined he was. My earlier feelings were based on his attitude toward a fairly hypothetical situation toward nuclear war. But now we were confronting a man who was managing the actual destruction of Cambodia.
I hadn’t yet heard a great deal about what his own personal role was in all this. It wasn’t completely clear how much of this was Nixon, and how much Kissinger; only that he was implementing a disastrous policy. At that point, I didn’t have the sense of revulsion at the thought of meeting him, which I did acquire later.
When a mutual friend who had an appointment with Kissinger proposed bringing me along, I agreed. It was worth encouraging him to read the Pentagon Papers so that he might discover that pursuing escalation had been talked through before in just as conspiratorial terms, and that it hadn’t worked. Maybe he could learn from that.
Also, I knew that his policy depended on its outlines being invisible to the American public. So I wanted to warn him, in effect, that the trend of policy was visible, at least to some people, including me, who were telling other people about it.
In other words, I thought of leaking information into the White House about what was actually visible from the outside to try to make them understand that their policy was foreseeable. The more foreseeable it was the less viable it might appear to him.
What is San Clemente like?
We went in through a gateway and a voice came out of nowhere like the voice of God from a loudspeaker on top of the guardhouse, telling us where to park. I may be confusing this with parking lots when I would visit friends in prison, but maybe they just borrowed the technology for the White House. It’s my memory that this unseen eye was controlling your movements.
You go into an outer waiting office just like a dentist’s waiting room, but with large color photographs of Nixon lining the wall. In fact, the official photographer stopped in the lobby and chatted with us until he dashed out the door as a pink golf cart went by. There was one person aboard driving it like a little electric Disneyland car about seven and a half miles per hour. It was Nixon, scowling, and looking very grim. His shoulders were hunched over and he was piloting this thing like the engineer of a toy train. Right behind him was another pink golf cart being driven by Bebe Rebozo, and behind that, a third pink cart with two Secret Service men. A convoy.
Finally we saw Kissinger for lunch on a little patio. General Haig was at the table. As we all said hello, Kissinger, in his usual fashion, turned to my friend and said, “You know, I have learned more from Dan Ellsberg…” and I thought he was going to repeat his statement about Vietnam, but he seemed to hesitate, and then said, “about bargaining than from any other person.”
I was taken aback. I didn’t know what he was referring to, although my academic specialty had been “bargaining theory.” And suddenly I remembered that 11 years earlier when I had given a series of talks on “The Art of Coercion,” I had also given a couple of those lectures to Kissinger’s seminar at Harvard. “You have a very good memory,” I said. And he replied, “They were good lectures.”
When I rethought that incident later, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The lectures I had given had to do with Hitler’s blackmail of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the late Thirties, which had allowed him to take over those countries just by threatening their destruction. One of those lectures was “The Theory and Practice of Blackmail.” And another was called, “The Political Uses of Madness.”
News leaks about the Cambodian invasion, obviously coming from off-the-record backgrounders by Kissinger, had revealed a major motive of the invasion was to convince the Russians and the Chinese that our decision-making was unpredictable, and that since we could do something so apparently unpredictable and crazy as invade Cambodia, they could not count on our reasonableness or prudence in a crisis.
That was Hitler’s conscious policy: the threat of unpredictability. I had described it in my lectures as being a possibly effective, but extremely dangerous strategy. It was a commitment to madness. To realize – not that Kissinger had learned this tactic from me, which is very doubtful, but that such a thought truly was in his mind, enough so that he remembered the analogous thesis that I had presented 10 years earlier – this was chilling. It confirmed the nature of his policy and where it might go.
We talked for just a moment before lunch was served. My friend immediately got him into Vietnam, but Kissinger said, “Well, we are not here to talk about Vietnam.” He looked at me quite nervously and made it clear he didn’t want to talk in front of me. I assumed that it was because he wanted to lie to my friend in ways that wouldn’t have been easy in my presence. Kissinger began drumming on the table with his fingertips and then suddenly said, “Tell you what, Dan, why don’t you and General Haig have lunch together while we talk on other matters, then we will all get together.” So, he actually did, after all, pass me off to Haig, with whom I went off to the other side of the house and had lunch.
Haig was very pleasant and relatively forthcoming. I decided that I would try my strategy on him of “leaking in” the Kissinger strategy. We talked about an hour when Kissinger joined us. He said he wanted to talk with me and we should set up a meeting for his next trip out.
Daniel Ellsberg: The Rolling Stone Interview, Page 1 of 2