Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War

Working late one night, Ellsberg finally caved to temptation and opened the classified binder in McNaughton’s office. He only read a few pages before he lost his nerve and replaced the files. When he tried to revisit the documents, the combination on the safe was different; somehow, McNaughton knew that Ellsberg had looked through the binder. The next day, McNaughton held a “cordial” meeting, telling Ellsberg he was “overqualified” to be his assistant and assigning him a new job in a different office.

After much deliberation, Johnson agreed to send Westmoreland the 200,000 troops he asked for. However, when he announced his decision in an evening press conference, he told the American public that he would be sending only 125,000, and he made no mention of the deployment being “a major commitment to long-term war” (69). While the speech was a success in the short term, Johnson’s presidency was on “a muddy mountainside” as he made the public believe that the war in Vietnam would not be a long-term military commitment (70).

Ellsberg might have lost his chance at a prestigious career at the Pentagon, but he had learned a lot about how things worked in the government. While he could “live with the fact that presidents lie” (71), he was concerned about the American policy in Vietnam. Holding onto his “Cold War perspective,” he still “believed the war was worth fighting” and wanted to do what he could to help (71). Meanwhile, the romance between Ellsberg and Patricia was going poorly; she had met a German poet, and Ellsberg thought she didn’t love him anymore. So, he decided to go to Vietnam.

American strategy in Vietnam consisted of “kill[ing] enemy troops faster than they could be replaced” (73). Therefore, the “kill ratio” of Vietnamese to American troops had to remain high. However, although “the kill ratio was favorable” (75), American soldiers still could not gain any ground, and the Viet Cong continued to “mov[e] unseen” through the terrain. Johnson’s advisors presented him with a new strategy that consisted of blocking support from Soviet and Chinese ships by mining the North Vietnamese harbors and beginning a “massive bombing campaign” targeting Hanoi (75). Johnson became very angry at his commanders, accusing them of asking him to start World War III.

Ellsberg, meanwhile, had been hired by the State Department to “find non-military ways to defeat the Communists” (77). He spent his days driving around the South Vietnamese countryside with retired army colonel John Paul Vann, meeting Vietnamese villagers. 

Back in the US, Patricia Marx was angry with Ellsberg. She thought he had overreacted to the German poet and was “furious” that he went to Vietnam without discussing it with her. However, while he was away, the two began to exchange letters, and Ellsberg finally sent her a postcard asking her to marry him. Patricia wasn’t sure, but she decided to visit Ellsberg in Vietnam. The couple enjoyed a romantic trip through Thailand, Nepal, and India, and Ellsberg proposed to Patricia again. This time, she said yes, but she began to experience doubts as they headed back to Vietnam. Ellsberg was “so intense, so impulsive” (83), and they continued arguing about the war.

By December 1965, Westmoreland requested another 200,000 troops. McNamara warned that North Vietnam would match any military escalation, and the US would find itself in “the same standoff they had now, just at a much bloodier level” (84). Marine General Victor Krulak wrote a detailed report proving that a “war of attrition was doomed” (84). However, McNamara never showed this report to President Johnson.

While President Johnson was “torn,” he was also “determined as ever not to go down in history as the first American president to lose a war” (85). He approved Westmoreland’s request to double the number of US troops in Vietnam in 1966. An average of 25,000 young men were drafted into the military each month, bringing the war home for millions of Americans.

Back in Vietnam, Ellsberg still nursed “a personal desire to beat the Communists” (86). However, walking through a destroyed village that the South Vietnamese had targeted after hearing of Viet Cong activity in the area “[shook] his confidence” (86).

As Ellsberg spent more time in Vietnam, he saw how the war affected the Vietnamese people. Confronted with burned villages, injured children, and forests destroyed by Agent Orange, he began to wonder: “How were we serving American purposes in raining down punishment on the people in these houses?” (90).

Back in Washington, Secretary McNamara had concluded “that the United States could not win the Vietnam War” (90). The United States’ bombing campaign was not working, and soldiers from the North continued making their way south. However, publicly, he continued to support the war. The CIA delivered a report stating that the damage the US was inflicting was not enough to dissuade the communist forces from “their commitment to eventual victory” (90). President Johnson told McNamara to “put the clamps” on the report and show it to no one (91).

In the summer of 1966, Patricia visited Ellsberg in Saigon. He couldn’t get leave from work, so she spent her time conducting interviews and visiting refugee camps. The suffering she saw only strengthened her antiwar stance, and she and Ellsberg fought again about his role in the war. He insisted that he was trying to “moderate the killing” (93), but the future of their relationship was cast into doubt when Patricia returned to the US.

Even though the US continued to increase the number of troops in Vietnam, the situation stayed “the same.” After a visit to the country, Secretary McNamara argued that the stagnation meant that the “underlying situation [was] really worse” than the year before (95). However, when he returned to the US, he told the reporters who greeted his plane that “great progress” was being made in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, protests were increasing on college campuses. McNamara visited Harvard University to speak to a class of graduate students and was greeted by an angry crowd of antiwar student protestors. McNamara tried to speak to the crowd but faced boos and murder accusations and “sprinted” away to escape. However, the confrontation with these students sparked an idea. McNamara knew “the war was not going as hoped” (98), and he thought future generations should have the opportunity to study what went wrong and learn from their mistakes.

Back in Vietnam, Ellsberg was feeling increasingly depressed. Having tea with an elderly Vietnamese couple while “artillery fire shook the building” (98), he asked the old man who he hoped would win the war. Through an interpreter, the man replied that he didn’t care who won; he just wanted the war to end. Then, the man asked Ellsberg when the war would end. Ellsberg didn’t know how to answer him. He decided he had “one thing left to understand” in Vietnam (100): Although it was dangerous, he needed to “see combat up close” (100).

In the Mekong Delta, south of Saigon, Ellsberg joined an American battalion that was working to push Viet Cong forces out of the area. He spent a week patrolling with the platoon, slogging through rice paddies and taking enemy fire from clumps of trees. Occasionally, the soldiers would see “a flash of black clothing” (106), and once, Ellsberg saw a young Vietnamese soldier firing at him. However, when the American soldiers approached, the enemy always vanished into the water of the rice paddy or among the trees. There were never bodies or any evidence that the American soldiers had hit their marks. The Americans were “chasing a highly motivated enemy that moved faster and knew the local geography better” (109).

After nearly two weeks observing combat, Ellsberg went on one last patrol before returning to Saigon. The soldiers opened fire on a small village that Viet Cong forces were reported to be using. However, no soldiers were in the huts—just some food and toys. It was impossible to know if the huts belonged to the Viet Cong or to “families just trying to survive the crossfire” (112). Nevertheless, the Americans burned the huts to the ground in “the first thing they had done in two weeks that had any visible effect at all” (112).

Back in Saigon, Ellsberg spent months recovering from a bad case of hepatitis. He read, typed reports, and “had a lot of time to think” (113). It reminded Ellsberg of his adolescence when he had spent months in the hospital recovering from a car accident that killed his mother and sister. His father had fallen asleep at the wheel, and this had caused the accident. Ellsberg “grappled” with the realization that “an authority” like his father “had to be watched. Not because they were bad, but because they were inattentive, perhaps, to the risks” (116). This realization had an “unsettling relevance” to his experiences in Vietnam.