Author’s note: The passing of the incomparable Dan Ellsberg has prompted reams of rhapsodic prose about the importance of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. As one who was deep in the Vietnam quagmire itself when the Papers burst into the headlines in 1971 (it happened during my first tour at CIA Station, Saigon), I have a slightly jaded, even heretical view of the immediate relevance of that event to the facts as we saw them on the ground — and to the particular challenges we faced in the unfolding U.S. withdrawal.
Here goes:
It is high time for a sober second look at what the Pentagon Papers meant at trench-level when they were first sprung on us — and the implications of Ellsberg’s actions.
I got to know Ellsberg personally after the war and have the greatest respect for his adherence to his conscientious beliefs. He was a model to me in my own ragged foray into whistleblowing about the war.
But the great irony is that the duplicitous official decision-making documented by the Pentagon Papers was day-before-yesterday’s news and remote from immediate (underscore: immediate) practical policy challenges by the time they were leaked and published in mid-1971.
What the disclosures did was to reinforce anti-war assumptions based on a reality that had been overtaken by Nixon-Kissinger policymaking (for better or worse), Vietnamization, and the obliteration in 1968 of any pretense to an independent revolutionary movement in the South.
The war had been exposed in ’68 as the expeditionary operation it had been since creation of Military Region 559 (the North Vietnamese infiltration authority) in 1959.
Hanoi led at Tet with southern cadre, putting them on the cutting edge of the offensive, letting them be destroyed. Thus was shredded the political cover the politburo had long hidden behind.
Nor was there ever any hint of the General Uprising that Hanoi’s most ardent fanatics had promised. That prognosis was just as delusional as the nonsense promulgated by MACV’s five o’clock follies.
That’s why I can say without equivocation that in terms of the way my CIA colleagues and I viewed the war in 1971 — in terms of our understanding of those vaunted facts on the ground — the publicizing of the Papers had little practical impact.
Curse or mock us if you will. But that is the way it was.
Moreover, had prosecutors known of Neil Sheehan’s theft of the documents from Ellsberg and his decision to publish them behind Ellsberg’s back, both the mythology surrounding publication and Ellsberg’s role and the legal (if not political) environment would have been markedly altered.
(And as U.S. v Snepp proved in 1980, the meaning of the Supreme Court’s per curium decision favoring publication of the Papers had little value as a practical precedent.)
The airing of the Papers inevitably ramified public passion for U.S. disengagement from the war. But the corner had been turned decisively amidst the shocks of 1968, which gave the lie to President Johnson’s outrageously upbeat progress reports on the war and made the credibility gap a searing fact of the nation’s political life.
The bitter coda came in 1970 with the Kent State killings, the belated public exposure of the My Lai massacre of 1968, and the misinformed public reaction to U.S. cross-border operations in Cambodia (as reflected in the “widening of the war” claptrap which even its chief popularizer William Shawcross has repudiated).
The routing of Saigon’s forces during their Lam Son 719 thrust into southern Laos just before the Papers surfaced told us everything that we needed to know about our allies’ inability to wage an effective defense on their own against Hanoi’s aggression.
No doubt conscientious protesters were gratified to learn from the Papers that the Diem regime had been a corrupt screw-up in its own time, and that the China-inflected domino theory had always been a Cold War fever dream.
But that meant little to those of us in the Saigon mission in mid-1971 who were struggling to figure out how to crawl out of Vietnam standing up without betraying our allies or getting our own troops shot in the back on the way out.
Dear friends and fellow cynics, we can draw no useful lessons from Vietnam if we persist in viewing the facts from the overly romantic perspective of the “received truths” of 1971 and the old anti-war protests, valiant as they might have been.
I truly fear for the future because historians both left and right remain wedded to twice told fables about the nightmare that was Vietnam.
Comment by James Nathan (Facebook)
I would have thought the ouster of Sihanouk and [the U.S.] bombing of Cambodia, pushing NVA forces West, widened the war by definition.
Reply by Frank Snepp (Facebook)
During Sihanouk’s time, the occupation of Cambodian border enclaves by North Vietnamese forces and their transshipment of supplies from offload points at Sihanoukville to destinations in the Saigon area and the delta sucked the war deep into Cambodia long before the U.S. cross border operations.
Meanwhile China’s (radicalizing) cooption of the Khmer Rouge to preempt the spread of North Vietnamese influence inside Cambodia created bloodshed and instability there that needed no U.S. stimulus.
What the anti-war lobby, those howling about “a widening of the war,” never understood was that cleansing the Cambodia enclaves of NVA occupiers was essential to promoting sufficient stability in South Vietnam to facilitate accelerated U.S. troop withdrawals and insertion of South Vietnamese troops in the front lines to replace them.
The enclave forays and the bombing advanced the withdrawal agenda by buying time for it.
Perhaps that wasn’t what the stateside protesters wanted. Perhaps they would have preferred a precipitous U.S. withdrawal without any backstopping against NVA assaults on our Vietnamese allies and U.S. troops on their way out.
But those of us assigned to the U.S. mission Vietnam were without the luxury of such selective morality.
Reply by James Nathan (Facebook)
I appreciate your considered response. I think part of the outrage was due to the surprise of the apparent contradiction between the goal of a hand off and the widening of operations. Also, the secrecy surrounding U.S. bombing operations were [sic] not helpful. When I heard about planning for this ground attack, I opposed it as folly. An orderly withdrawal was always possible if the U.S. was going to write off the GSVN (and, hence, the ARVN) as was Kissinger’s ill-disguised intent. Finally, the bombing operations managed to kill an inordinate amount of people, in secret, and the proceeded invasion…. with dubious legal authority.
Reply Frank Snepp (Facebook)
I have no moral brief for Nixon and Kissinger on so many levels.
But essentially Kissinger’s peace agreement was an attempt to impose a Congress of Vienna solution on the immediate contenders, a paralyzing two-cornered stalemate that would have prevented Hanoi or Saigon from attaining sufficient advantage to obliterate the other, with modifying pressure to be applied by the implicit guarantors, the U.S., China and the Soviet Union, each of whom had reason to please or placate the other.
Hence, the provision of the Paris agreement that made every key decision by the direct ground level participants subject to unanimous vote. That was a patently impossible requirement. But it was a ticket to potential stalemate and a hoped-for equilibrium looking towards an uneasy peace.
By early 1974 there was evidence on the ground — including proof of an NVA drawdown in Laos and Cambodia and Moscow’s willingness to cut military aid to Hanoi — that a de facto balancing was taking hold. But then Watergate exacted its final toll, Nixon resigned, and all bets were off.
It was then that Hanoi began preparing for an opportunistic escalation to test for weak spots in Saigon’s defenses and the willingness (or not) of the Ford administration to reintroduce U.S. air power.
Hanoi’s leaders, being contemptuous of law, had never understood the War Powers Resolution and had aways suspected that Madman Nixon would find a way to bomb when necessary. They were not sure of Ford: thus, their initial adoption of a cautious probing strategy culminating in their calculated seizure of Phuoc Long province in early 1975.
Ford’s non-response signaled to the politburo that the road to Saigon was open.
Reply from Joel Bellman (Facebook)
Thanks for an essential and deeply informed—if somewhat unconventional—perspective on the war. Very much appreciate your take.