Whether we are headed for a turning point toward bringing liars to justice will become clear when the investigations of President Donald Trump’s administration are concluded. Today, similar revelations do not occasion equal shock because in the current administration in Washington, lying is routine rather than exceptional. This outcome had seemed impossible after his landslide reelection in 1972. The retaliatory crimes Nixon committed against me out of fear that I would expose his own continuing threats––including nuclear threats-ultimately helped to bring him down and shorten the Vietnam War. I was not yet moved to leave government, though I had come to view US military action as ineffective, illegitimate, and deadly, without rationale or endgame.īy 1969, as the war progressed under Richard Nixon, I saw such evil in government deceit that I asked myself, “What can I do to shorten a war that I know from an insider’s vantage point is going to continue and expand?” When the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, the extent of government lies shocked the public. In short, the Gulf of Tonkin crisis was based on lies. Johnson and McNamara’s claim that the US did not seek to widen the war was the exact opposite of reality. In fact, the US had covertly attacked North Vietnam the night before and on previous nights. That night, I saw President Lyndon Johnson and my boss, Secretary McNamara, knowingly lie to the public that North Vietnam had without provocation attacked the US ship. This completely fabricated incident became the excuse for bombing North Vietnam, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had wanted to do for some months. On my first day, I was assigned to a team tasked with devising a response to the alleged attack on the US naval warship USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese. Three years later, I moved from RAND to the Department of Defense. It was clear to me that military intervention was a losing proposition. In 1961, in that role, I went to Vietnam as part of a Department of Defense task force and saw that our prospects there were extremely dim. What inspired you to take such a risky action?Īfter graduating from Harvard with an economics degree and completing service in the US Marines, I worked as a military analyst at the RAND Corporation. You became a pivotal figure in the anti-Vietnam War movement when you released the Pentagon Papers, a large batch of classified documents that revealed a quarter century of official deception and aggression. Daniel Ellsberg, peace activist and Vietnam War whistleblower, discusses with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White the continuing existential threat posed by the military-industrial complex-and what needs to be done about it. The growth of the military-industrial complex poses an existential threat to humanity.
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