A Valedictory for Daniel Ellsberg: Handing Out The Pentagon Papers to GI’s at Ft. Devens
Following Daniel Ellsberg’s death on June 16th, 2023, most obituaries praised his moral courage as a whistleblower who helped end the Vietnam War, and also his tireless efforts to sound the alarm over the ever-growing dangers of nuclear war. Of course there were still critics branding him a traitor who compromised national security, or at best a well-intentioned, muddle-minded activist.
But when I heard of Ellsberg’s death, my thoughts flashed back to a scene at Ft. Devens, an Army base outside Ayer, Massachusetts. There, in the fall of 1971, I led a group of 10 or 12 civilians who entered the base and attempted to hand out recently published paperback copies of the Pentagon Papers to GI’s stationed there.
We knew it was an act of civil disobedience to enter the base for this purpose. We knew we would all be arrested. But we believed that active duty soldiers, like all American citizens, had a right to know, even a need to know, the truth about the war in Vietnam.
We were not savvy enough to alert Boston area media, so there was no coverage of our action. Someone may have taken photos, but I have none. Except for a few activists at the Common Sense Bookstore in Ayer, and whatever arrest records may have been kept by the military police and Judge Advocate General’s Office (JAG, or the Army’s legal division) at the now defunct Ft. Devens, our effort to distribute free copies of the Pentagon Papers to active-duty GI’s took place without notice. As I read through the Ellsberg obituaries, it occurred to me that I was probably the only one still alive who could tell the story of this small act of resistance.
The Common Sense Bookstore was created in 1969 or 1970 by a group of Boston-area anti-war activists, including veterans returning from Vietnam, who banded together to purchase a dwelling in Ayer where the bookstore was housed. Like anti-war coffee houses created around the country near military bases, our mission was to offer support and counseling to active-duty soldiers who were questioning the war and their role, or potential role, in it.
At the time, I was a young faculty member in the English Department at Boston University. Unlike most of my peers who had draft deferments of one kind or another, I had served in the Army as an infantry private from 1961–67, doing 6 months active duty and 5 ½ years in the active reserves. As the Vietnam War intensified in the mid-60’s, and as the draft ramped up, I fully expected that as an infantry reservist, a “grunt,” I would be recalled to active duty, even though I was already married, the father of three young children, and just beginning my academic career.
The more I learned about the war, the stronger my opposition to it grew. I found myself trying to work up the courage to refuse any call-up order, fully recognizing this would mean serving a prison term.
As it turned out only a few specialized reserve units were activated as the war effort accelerated, but I was already in the ranks of the growing anti-war movement.
I received my discharge in the fall of 1967, and just weeks later I joined a draft resistance protest at Boston’s Arlington St. Church. Acting in solidarity with hundreds of young men facing the draft, I turned in my Selective Service card, which by law I was still required to carry. Protest leaders (Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Michael Ferber and others) traveled to Washington and turned over the draft cards they had collected to officials on the steps of the Justice Department. It was a newsworthy event, and resulted in FBI investigations of all who participated in this draft resistance protest, including me, though I had already completed my military service.
Only years later did I realize that Ellsberg’s resolve to oppose the war, like mine, had been strongly influenced by his response to the growing draft resistance movement. As Ellsberg recalled in the 2009 documentary film, The Most Dangerous Man in America, he was in the midst of growing out of his role of military analyst and into his role as anti-war activist when he found himself in attendance at a draft resistance rally.
There he heard a young draft resister, Randy Kehler, speak about preparing to go to prison rather than participate in an unjust war. Ellsberg was deeply moved by the young man’s unwavering moral courage, and experienced a transformational moment as he listening to the young draft resister, a moment that strengthened his resolve to move forward with his own act of civil disobedience as he set in motion his plan to release the top secret documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
The draft resistance movement was also gaining strength in Boston with support from organizations like Resist, the Boston Draft Resistance Group, and Vets for Peace, which focused on the unjust race and class inequities in the draft, a system that exempted many middle class whites while increasingly conscripting working class and low-income whites, African-American. and Latino young men to fight the Vietnam War.
Opposition to the draft also came from the Catholic anti-war movement, especially in high-profile actions of civil disobedience aimed at disrupting the functioning of local draft boards. There were the Catonsville Nine, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the Camden Twenty-eight, all ending in arrests, trials in federal courts, and serious prison time for the participants. And in the 1970’s Catholic groups like Plowshares began entering missile production and nuclear submarine facilities, where they engaged in acts of civil disobedience by hammering dents and splashing blood on these weapons of nuclear war. Some of us in the draft resistance movement worked closely with these Catholic anti-war activists.
It was harder, though, to seek common ground with active-duty soldiers serving in the military. Many in the anti-war movement viewed active-duty soldiers as part of the war-waging establishment we were protesting against. After all, it was American soldiers we were accusing of committing atrocities in Vietnam, and American soldiers who were called out to put down our demonstrations at home.
But having served in the military, I was troubled by drawing such sharp dividing lines between “us” and “them.” I decided to focus my anti-war efforts on working directly with draft resisters and active-duty GI’s, knowing that my resistance to the Vietnam War had grown out of my own military service, limited as it was. I understood how hard it was to break ranks, to assert the very individual moral agency, the capacity to make choices, that the military is so effective at crushing; how hard it was to assert your own personhood in the face of overwhelming pressures to conform. These were Ellsberg’s themes too. He knew them well.
Around the same time, active-duty GI’s were beginning to refuse orders to Vietnam. Some just went AWOL and disappeared, some fled the country, but a few sought support from local anti-war groups and were willing to bear the consequences of going public with their refusal. Drawing on religious traditions of offering sanctuary to fugitives, spontaneous vigil groups sprung up to support these soldiers in churches and universities around the Boston area and elsewhere in the country.
I joined what we then called the sanctuary movement, in which we formed round-the-clock support vigils for those brave, often scared GI’s, who knew very well that their public refusal to obey orders would lead to arrest at any moment and inevitably to imprisonment. But the sanctuary vigils gave civilians a chance to bear witness to these courageous acts of resistance by active-duty soldiers, and each one became another dramatic demonstration that opposition to the war was growing, even within the military.
From there it wasn’t much of a step, or no step at all, for me to start volunteering at the Common Sense Bookstore in Ayer, where I worked with active-duty GI’s, offering poetry workshops, informal counseling, and generally encouraging opposition to the war, which is what I was doing when the stunning revelations in the Pentagon Papers were first published.
* * *
On June 13th, 1971, the New York Times began publication of the Pentagon Papers, revealing secret documents that shocked the nation and brought a furious response from the Nixon Administration, including using the Justice Department and federal courts to enjoin the Times from further publication. But the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and other papers around the country dared to pick up the publishing baton, resulting in an intense legal battle and the rapid-fire Supreme Court decision in late June that allowed publication to continue. The decision was hailed as a great First Amendment victory, affirming the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press against prior governmental restraint.
There was a sickening satisfaction for protestors in finding our worst fears about the Vietnam War confirmed in these secret documents, along with a renewed sense of outrage at the cynicism, the lies, the utter disregard for human life, American and Vietnamese alike, revealed in these documents.
The Times, the Post and other papers had a duty to protect the identity of their source(s), but once publication began it sparked a media frenzy to discover the identity of anyone involved in providing these top secret documents to the press. There was also an intense FBI effort along the same lines. Very soon Daniel Ellsberg’s name began to surface in media reports as the source, but this remained unconfirmed.
Knowing he faced certain indictment and the real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, Ellsberg and his wife left their home in Cambridge, MA, shortly after publication of the Pentagon Papers began. They remained informally underground over the next several days, moving from one sheltering location to another, though never leaving the Cambridge-Boston area. With media sources pursuing him feverishly, Ellsberg agreed to two or three clandestine interviews, always trying to sidestep efforts to get him to identify himself as the source, though it was becoming increasingly obvious.
Meanwhile federal authorities had not been idle, and on Friday evening, June 25th, a warrant for Ellsberg’s arrest was issued by a U.S. magistrate in California, where his alleged crime originated. But Ellsberg did not immediately surrender to authorities, as his lawyers informed him he was required to do. Instead, he continued his underground life for two more days, now technically a fugitive from justice, probably the most-wanted man in America, while he busied himself sending out remaining batches of top secret documents to newspapers around the country. His work completed, on Monday morning, June 28th. Ellsberg surrendered to authorities at the federal courthouse in Boston’s Post Office Square
Word had spread that Ellsberg was about to surface, and Post Office Square was jammed with reporters and TV crews when he arrived. Of course there were also many detractors and supporters in the crowd, some who came to vilify him, and some who came to valorize his courageous act, as I would have done had I known then of his time underground and his impending arrest.
Before surrendering himself, Ellsberg made a statement to the press that included the following,
(My) acts contradicted the secrecy regulations and, even more, the information practice of the Department of Defense. However, as a responsible citizen I felt I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I acted of course at my own jeopardy, and I am ready to answer to all the consequences of my decisions. That includes personal consequences to me and my family; whatever these may be, they cannot after all be more serious than the ones that I, along with millions of Americans, have gladly risked before in serving this country.
(Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir…Ch. 29, Going Underground)
Two days later, on Wednesday, June 30, the Supreme Court handed down a 6–3 decision affirming the freedom of the press to continue publication of the Pentagon Papers. For Ellsberg, though, his legal jeopardy was just beginning.
* * *
One day in July or early August, I was walking past a bookstore in Harvard Square when I noticed a display in the window featuring a thick paperback edition of the Pentagon Papers that had just been published by Bantam Books. Almost immediately the idea came to me that a group of activists could walk onto the base at Ft. Devens and simply start handing out copies of the Pentagon Papers to GI’s stationed there. They were not only soldiers: they were also citizens. And who had a more urgent need to know the contents of the Pentagon Papers than GI’s themselves, the ones being sent to fight in the Vietnam War?
Of course the Army would not permit it. Of course we would be arrested. But it would be an act of civil disobedience that carried forward the urgent work that Daniel Ellsberg had begun.
I presented the idea at a steering committee meeting at the Common Sense Bookstore attended by a mix of GI’s and civilians. Initially there was a lot of enthusiasm, but concerns were raised about the Bookstore being identified as sponsoring such an action. It had thus far functioned as an off-base presence where war-worried GI’s could come to seek out education, counseling, support, etc. But if the Bookstore were identified as the source of a direct action protest that took place on the base itself, there were concerns that the whole bookstore operation could be targeted and declared off-limits to military personnel.
The consensus decision was that no GI’s should have any role in the action, both for their own protection and to protect the Bookstore. Even though in reality the volunteers who would go onto the base would come from supporters already in the orbit of the Common Sense Bookstore project, we could maintain the fiction that we were civilians acting entirely on our own, with no direct or indirect support from the Bookstore. Since I had come up with the idea, it was understood at the end of the meeting, whether by acclimation or default, that I would become the lead organizer.
But turning an Ellsberg-inspired idea, however noble, into a civil disobedience anti-war protest on a military base with arrest as its certain endpoint was a much bigger job than I had anticipated. For the next several weeks heading from summer into fall, I was swept up in a blur of activism of my own making: finding like-minded participants, fund-raising to buy copies of the book, coming up with a statement of purpose to fold into the books, shuttling back and forth to the Bookstore, studying maps of the base to work out logistics… All this while trying to function as a husband and a parent of three young children, and, oh yes, showing up to teach my courses at B.U. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it.
There was unexpected help along the way, though, as when a friend mentioned that a successful Boston-area bookstore had its own social action committee. I came up with a proposal, submitted it to the committee, and quickly got back their reply: Would 500 copies of the paperback edition be enough?
But another serious problem kept worrying us. We knew that there was a military intelligence training unit at Ft. Devens. We joked constantly that probably half the GI’s who set foot in the Common Sense Bookstore (and there weren’t that many, as a soldier was taking a risk just to come through the door) were there on intelligence gathering training assignments. It would be foolish to think that the Ft. Devens commanders were unaware of what we were up to, even though we tried to keep our planning outside the day-to-day operations of the Bookstore. We had to assume that they were shadowing our every move.
So instead of trying to hide our planning, we took what seemed to us a radical step and decided to inform the Ft. Devens’ JAG Office of our intention to enter the base and to argue that we had a legal right to do so. On behalf of our small group of volunteers (we didn’t even have a name), I requested a meeting with the chief JAG officer. To our surprise the request was granted.
About two weeks before the October date we had settled on to enter the base, I met with the top JAG officer at Ft. Devens. Our meeting was polite, efficient, and brief. The captain, himself a lawyer, listened without interruption as I informed him of our intention to come onto the base and distribute copies of the Pentagon Papers. I said that soldiers were also citizens who had a compelling need to know the contents of the Pentagon Papers, since they were the ones being ordered to wage the Vietnam War. As fellow citizens, I argued, we had First Amendment protection to offer the books to soldiers, urging them to ask themselves as a matter of conscience whether they would participate in the war effort or refuse to do so. That, after all, was what Daniel Ellsberg had done when he decided to break secrecy laws in order to bring the Pentagon Papers into the light of day.
The captain responded that apparently I did not understand the federal laws that prohibited civilians from conducting protests on military installations. He warned that our group would be arrested and could be charged with a range of crimes, including trespass on a military base, distributing a prohibited publication, creating a clear danger to the loyalty, discipline or morale of military personnel, or materially interfering with the accomplishment of the military mission. Some of these charges carried heavy fines and lengthy prison terms. He said it was his duty to caution us not to attempt to distribute copies of the Pentagon Papers to troops on a military reservation, and warned us that the world didn’t need more Daniel Ellsbergs.
* * *
On a bright October morning, our little group met at an intersection just outside the main entrance to Ft. Devens. At the last minute we had lost two or three people who felt unable to take the kinds of risks I had described to them after my meeting with the JAG officer. We all understood their decisions, but it added to our nervousness and nagging questions of self-doubt. Did we really know what we were doing? Would it be worth it? What difference would it make?
But then we gathered around my car (I had transported all the cartons of donated books),and started loading knapsacks and shopping bags with copies of the Pentagon Papers, about 50 books per person. We rehearsed the appeals we would make to passing soldiers, reminders that helped us strengthen our own resolve.
At about 10:00 AM, we entered the base, armed only with copies of the Pentagon Papers. At that time, Ft. Devens was basically an open access base that anyone could enter. We drove onto the base in two cars without going through any checkpoints and without attracting attention. We fanned out to pre-designated locations where we knew there would be GI foot-traffic, moving smartly, because we guessed that our action would have a total life expectancy of about 15 minutes before we were arrested.
I found myself at a busy corner trying to hand out books. A few soldiers took a book, their curiosity stirred, a knowing look in their eyes. Some stared at me blankly when I said, “Pentagon Papers! You have to read this! It could save your life!” But most of the GI’s simply shunned me, wanting no contact at all with someone whom they sensed correctly was there to stir anti-war unrest. I felt part newsboy, part Bible salesman, and just about a through and a complete failure what I had set out to do.
The MP’s swept down on us quickly. Fifteen minutes was indeed about all the time we had. I was arrested and my remaining books confiscated. Up and down the roadway I could see the same thing happening to my outlaw comrades.
We were whisked to some kind of detention center where, all idiot grins because it was over, because we had at least done something, because we had been spared a beating and not even handcuffed, jabbering excitedly to one another as though we had triumphed in some obscure way, we were lined up to be mug-shot and fingerprinted, then herded into a main room where awaiting us was the same JAG captain I had met with two weeks before.
For the benefit of our whole group, the captain recited again the list of serious crimes with which we could be charged. He told us that henceforth each of us would be under a lifetime ban from entering any military base in the United States. The records of our arrests would be kept, and federal charges would be brought against any of us who tried such a stunt again. MP’s would escort us back to our cars and follow us until our expulsion from Ft. Devens was complete The captain admonished us that we were playing with fire. “You’ve been warned,” he told us. “You have been warned.”
* * *
None of us suffered any further legal consequences for our actions that day. Likewise, the Common Sense Bookstore continued to operate in the Town of Ayer without impediment. It was never declared off-limits by the Army, if for no other reason than it served as a convenient field lab for all those military intelligence trainees.
Me? I went on teaching at B.U., my family did not disintegrate as a result of my activism, and I continued to offer my poetry workshops for GI’s at the Bookstore, some of them combat veterans returning from Vietnam. It was my hope that through their trauma-driven writing they might find words powerful enough to cast out demons not of their own making,. Some of that may have happened, but I’m not sure.
Did our action on the base accomplish anything? Looking back at that long-ago day of protest, I can’t report a single instance of a soldier who refused orders to Vietnam as a result of having a copy of the Pentagon Papers thrust into his hands. No doubt we should have known, and probably did know, that you don’t change people’s minds, especially military minds, by handing out books on a military base. Maybe it was a good symbolic action, but nobody knew about it. Did our civil disobedience hasten the end of the war? Did it prevent even one Vietnamese or American death? We could never make such a claim.
But like any teacher, I want to believe that somehow our reach exceeded our grasp. Perhaps one of those knowing-eyed soldiers hid a book in his footlocker and read it in snatches at night. Perhaps one of the military intelligence spooks hanging out at the Bookstore got wind of our plans and started wondering what was actually in the Pentagon Papers. Perhaps the JAG captain himself began to rethink the First Amendment, or maybe it was one of the white-gloved MP’s who, after arresting us, settled into a corner and started reading one of the books he had confiscated to see what all the fuss was about, his eyes widening at the revelations that spilled from every page. There were such cases… You never knew. You just never knew.
Regrets? Yes, I have plenty. We should have tried for media coverage. I wish there were other accounts, not just this one based on my own incomplete memory. I should have reported back to the generous social action committee of the Boston-area bookstore and apologized about all those books that were confiscated (a quick Google search shows that a single copy of the first edition Bantam paperback that we distributed to the troops is priced at $243.86).
Most of all I regret that I never thought to let Dan Ellsberg know about our actions on Ft. Devens that day. I think he would have known that we were trying to carry on the work he had begun. I’d like to think that he would have been pleased.
