Daniel Ellsberg visited UMass Boston on Monday, March 3 to discuss the suppression of facts by the U.S. government in relation to his newest book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg, a graduate of Harvard who formerly worked for the Department of Defense, released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and Washington Post in 1971, infuriating President Nixon and his administration. A more detailed record of secrets the U.S. government has kept from the public is described in his newest book.
Hearing Ellsberg speak is particularly relevant in light of current affairs. In Secrets, Ellsberg reveals what goes on behind closed doors in the U.S. government. Chapter 31: “The Road to Watergate,” captures the anger of the Nixon administration when he copied 7,000 top secret government documents which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and leaked the information to The New York Times. The papers include a Pentagon history of U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam from the end of World War II until the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Robert McNamara, who served as the Secretary of Defense during Kennedy’s and Johnson’s presidencies “…oversaw and promoted the escalation of the Vietnam War…that engaged more than 500,000 American troops in a difficult war.”
Ellsberg was put on trial for leaking this information in 1973. According to his lawyer, Leonard Boudin, he hadn’t violated any law, but his odds for walking out of the courtroom a free man were still fifty-fifty. This was simply “because, when the U.S. government goes into a courtroom and says to a jury ‘the government of the United States versus Daniel Ellsberg’…you can’t be sure you will walk out of that courtroom a free man.”
President Nixon feared that the public would learn more secrets, such as the covert bombings of Cambodia. Ellsberg explains, “A modern president’s practical ability to secretly drop several hundred tons of bombs on a country with which we were not at war gives our presidents a capability to initiate and escalate a war in secret that was scarcely possessed by monarchs of the past.”
“This leads to the possibility that the Bush administration could be performing similar tasks, given the information about former presidents who lie in order to keep a war going. With so many secrets kept from the public, how can our system of democracy, a government for the people and by the people, work properly when we people don’t even know what’s going on?”
Ellsberg would advise the American public to be more wary about accepting information at face value, especially since many U.S. newspapers are owned and regulated by the government. Daniel Ellsberg’s book is his true story about the U.S. government from an insider’s perspective.