The Pentagon Papers at Fifty and America’s Willful Hubris
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the front-page splash in The Washington Post was the White House wedding the evening before of President Nixon’s daughter Tricia to Edward Cox. The Post played the event especially big because its reporter, Judith Martin, had not been allowed to attend and the story was therefore an act of journalistic brio.
The New York Times’s front page that same Sunday morning was dominated by a different story: the first installment in its planned series on the contents of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history compiled by the Department of Defense detailing what became known as the official “lies and secrets” promulgated by the U.S. government about its actions and goals in Vietnam. On the fiftieth anniversary of the papers’ publication, the Times has published a special section on what it considers one of the greatest achievements in its history. It is worth reading, especially for those in the audience who hadn’t yet been born.
I was in Vietnam as a reporter for the Post at the time. For my colleagues and me, there was still a war raging, and our reaction to the revelations was mostly a shrug. This was a Washington drama that at least initially belonged to the Times. It was only after the Times was enjoined by a federal court from continuing its publication of the papers that the Post started publishing them. (Years later, this would become the basis for Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, baffling people at the Times, who wondered whythe also-ran Post was getting the Hollywood treatment.) But even then we felt distant from the drama back home.
Over the years I have read much of what was in the papers and was the editor of Robert McNamara’s Vietnam memoir In Retrospect, in which the former secretary of defense detailed many of the same mistakes as were in the documents. And it was McNamara who had originated the papers project in 1967 to develop a full record of U.S. decision making on Vietnam up to that point.
My conclusion about the Pentagon Papers differs a bit from the focus on duplicity as successive administrations deepened American engagement in a war that the United States would eventually lose. My takeaway — encouraged by the perspective of Leslie Gelb, who led the Pentagon task force that compiled the documents — was what it showed about the scale of profound American ignorance about Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular. Cambodia and Laos were the “sideshows” with serious consequences for both countries and the same outcome after the conflicts.
(It can also be said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, forty years later, were in the same ignominious tradition of American misadventure.)
Gelb, who was later a New York Times editor and columnist and a much-admired sage about U.S. foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century, considered that ignorance an inexcusable American failing — on a par with the government’s myriad public deceptions.
In conversations when the Spielberg movie revived interest in the topic, Gelb emphasized how little the United States understood about Vietnam in the years following World War II: the country’s history, the language, the national aspirations after a century of French colonialism, or the tenuous likelihood that it could become a security threat to the United States. Vietnam’s most revered leader, Ho Chi Minh, issued declarations identifying with Jeffersonian principles of democracy, but when that fact was reported in CIA memos meant for President Harry Truman’s desk, they never got there, Gelb said.
By the time in 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg, who had also worked on the papers project, gave the documents to the great Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the Pentagon itself had moved on from the project. McNamara was long gone. Gelb recalled that he had brought a set of the multivolume history to McNamara in his new post as the president of the World Bank, but the former defense secretary barely looked at them. When I worked with McNamara on his book in the 1990s, I understood the extent which he was not ready back then to fully confront the disaster in which he had been so involved.
Michael Dobbs has written an excellent new book, King Richard: Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, which includes the text of Nixon’s conversation with his aide Alexander Haig on the day the first Times story appeared. The conversation started on a light note, being the day after the wedding. Then Haig described what was in the newspaper.
As he absorbed what he was hearing, Nixon said that the revelations would be a problem for the Democrats defending past presidencies, and not for him. It was only after it became clear how much the outrage over the Pentagon Papers might affect his own Vietnam stance that he acted to suppress further publication. The revelation that the war was based on fallacies — and ignorance — was enough to make the White House furious, when it recognized that its policies were on the same trajectory.
One small fragment of the Times special section caught the essence of the Pentagon Papers for me, a toxic mess of willful hubris:
At a press conference on December 21, 1963, McNamara declared, “We reviewed in great detail the plans of the South Vietnamese and our military advisers during 1964. We have every reason to believe they will be successful.”
The same day, in a secret memo to the newly installed President Lyndon Johnson, McNamara wrote: “The situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2–3 months, will lead to a neutralization at best and more likely to a communist controlled state.”
The war would go on for eleven and a half more years, at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives (and countless Vietnamese casualties), just to reach the same conclusion that McNamara — and so many others — foresaw
