I’m reading Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg, the economist, former State Department staffer, and self-described “cold-warrior” who leaked the Pentagon Papers. The book is a memoir of the Vietnam War era. It chronicles how the Johnson administration deceived the electorate, escalated the war despite public opposition, and cultivated in the Executive a culture of secrecy and subordination that ensured the conflict would drag on. Given our current entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan and the seemingly ever-present voices calling for even more war, I have found the book very relevant to our time. I wish I had read it sooner.
In particular, Ellsburg quotes from a Defense Department memo to which he contributed in 1964 that argued against the so-called “Rostow approach,” a strategy advocated by hard-liners who wanted to open the wider war with an intense and unprovoked campaign of bombing–the 60′s equivalent of “shock and awe.” Ellsberg writes:
Application of the Rostow approach risks domestic and international opposition ranging from anxiety and protest to condemnamtion, efforts to disassociate from U.S. policies or alliances, or even strong countermeasures. . . . Currently, then, it is the Rostow approach, rather than the measures it counters, that would be seen generally as an “unstabilizing” change in the rules of the game, an escalation of conflict, an increasing of shared international risks, and quite possibly, as an open aggression demanding condemnation . . .
This seems to be a cogent rejoinder to the Bush Doctrine. And in 1964, at least initially, it was heeded: the Johnson Administration pursued a less aggressive policy than Rostow, gradually escalating the bombing in the hopes that, if necessary, it could be terminated. In Iraq, of course, we did no such thing. I wonder, did Rumsfeld, or Bush himself, consider Ellsberg’s logic in 2003, the year after his book was published?
While Ellsberg’s old memos are fascinating, the most interesting aspect of the book, in my mind, is not the discussion of policy but the exposition of Washington’s inner workings: how officials manipulate the bureaucracy, and especially the press, to further their own agendas. Of his boss at the Defense Department, Assistant Secretary John McNaughton, Ellsberg writes:
As he got into areas where he had to be especially untruthful or elusive, his Pekin, Illinois, accent got broader till he sounded like someone discussing corn at a country fair or standing at the rail of a riverboat. You looked for hayseed in his cuffs. He simply didn’t mind looking and sounding like a hick in the interests of dissimulation. My future boss in Vietnam, Edward Lansdale, had the same willingness to appear simpleminded when he wanted to be opaque . . .
Most people thought Bush was an idiot, but I always thought he was a lot smarter than he looked. He was no puppet. He had a strong hand in lots of decisions, now attributed to Cheney and Rumsfeld, that led us into the war. His apparent slowness, I would guess, was effected for the same reasons as McNaughton’s: to ingratiate, to head off deeper inquiry.
Now that we have a less hickish President who seems less evil, many of Ellsburg’s lessons seem, for the time being, less relevant. But the following passage, which discusses how decisions were made in the frantic days between the 1964 election and the initiation of major combat, reminded me of the predicament Obama finds himself in today:
The image that often came to mind as I watched John [McNaughton] . . . move from one caller to another on the phone, one crisis to another, was that of the juggler in a circus who keeps a dozen plates spinning in the air . . . I asked myself more than once: Can they really get away with decision making like this? . . . Can men even as brilliant and adroit as these . . . manage safely and wisely so many challenges at once, with so little time to acquire more than a shallow understanding of any one? Can you really run the world this way?
I hope, for everyone’s sake, that Obama develops a better way to make policy than did Johnson, McNamara, McNaughton, and the rest of the crew that got us into Vietnam. What Ellsberg makes plain is that if he doesn’t, we may find ourselves fighting yet another needless war.
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