Chalmers JohnsonFebruary 6, 2003
Ellsberg first approached this problem via the old idea that the President is innocent but deceived by sycophantic underlings: if only Kennedy - or Johnson, Nixon, the Pope, the King, the Tsar, Stalin etc - had known what was going on, he would have fixed things. Ellsberg calls this the standard 'quagmire school' approach to the Vietnam War, led by people like David Halberstam and Arthur Schlesinger. The problem is that a close scrutiny of classified documents will not bear it out: 'For Kennedy, as for Johnson, in fact, it was the President who was deceiving the public, not his subordinates who were deceiving him.'
Ellsberg came to understand that it isn't personality that makes Presidents habitual liars but 'an apparatus of secrecy, built on effective procedures, practices and career incentives, that permitted the President to arrive at and execute a secret foreign policy, to a degree that went far beyond what even relatively informed outsiders, including journalists and members of Congress, could imagine'. The imperial Presidency concentrates power in the executive branch, subverting the elaborate structure of checks and balances contained in the Constitution. Its political effect is to focus nearly all responsibility for policy 'failure' on one man, the President, who is thus at all times concerned not with doing the right thing but with the next election and whether his decisions are supplying the opposition with the weapons needed to unseat him.
All of this has only got worse since the days of Watergate. The current Administration is obsessed with secrecy. Forty per cent of the US defence budget and all of the intelligence budget is secret (in direct contravention of the constitutional stipulation that the public be honestly told how its tax dollars are being spent). The President revels in secrecy and has lied so often about the need for a pre-emptive war against Iraq that most people have stopped listening to him. But individual character hardly matters: what drives the need for official secrecy is imperialism and its indispensable handmaiden, militarism. That was true during the Vietnam War and is much more true today.
The term 'department of defence' has become an Orwellian joke. The actual Defense Department is an alternative government, running not just the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps but numerous intelligence agencies, 725 admitted military bases in other people's countries (the actual number is considerably higher), a hoard of weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out life on this planet many times over, with plans to build battle-stations in outer space from which it can dominate the globe.
The military today intimidates a President, just as it did at the height of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg recalls Lyndon Johnson's fear of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in particular his fear that they would leak their demands to the hawks in Congress. What he dreaded above all was 'the charge that he was too cowardly, too weak or irresolute to do what the military thought had to be done. There was thus a strong incentive for the President to give the Joint Chiefs enough of what they wanted, with the hope of getting more, that they would be appeased.' This, rather than Presidential lying, is the problem.
A second question raised by Ellsberg's memoir is whether a similar act of conscience and sacrifice on the part of a well-informed insider would make any difference today. I doubt it. The Federal Government has become so remote, the corruption of Congress so complete, the meaninglessness of elections so obvious, that it is hard to imagine the revelations that might make a difference. (True: revelations about President Clinton's sexual exploits almost brought him down, but they did not concern or affect the basic system or course of American policy except, perhaps, in so far as they indirectly helped to elect Bush.)
Even in 1971, most people did not read what was in the Pentagon Papers. As Senator Fulbright said to Ellsberg: 'After all, they're only history.' The public was far more interested in the business of the leaks, in the Mafia-like quality of the Nixon White House, and in the resignation of a President facing the certainty of impeachment. If there was anything American militarists learned from the Vietnam War it was the need - and the way - to control and manipulate the news.
The extent to which they have now become masters of damage control is evident when you consider the fact that US troops killed as many innocent bystanders in Afghanistan as New York office workers were killed on the morning of 11 September 2001. A future Watergate remains a possibility: there won't, however, be another case like the Pentagon Papers.
Daniel Ellsberg was part of the system. 'Like so many,' he recalls, 'I put personal loyalty to the President (and to my career, my access to inside information and influence, however I idealised my purposes) above all else.' It took a decade-long exposure to evidence that his loyalty was misplaced to crack his amour-propre as a Cold Warrior. But when it did crack, he discovered that
"an entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable. I was like them in most respects, no different in character or values, no less committed to the Cold War, to anti-Communism, to secrecy and to the Presidency. By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war."
My own experience suggests that this is right. But it leads me to my third question: is the US Government today staffed with the same kind of people - loyal, smart and hardworking, but aware that the course set by the President is violating virtually everything the United States has stood for as a nation? In short, are there any Ellsbergs in the apparatus today?
I fear not. In the 1960s, service in the Armed Forces was an obligation of citizenship for all able-bodied males (I was a naval officer on active duty from 1953 to 1955). This has not been the case since 1973. The advance of militarism has produced a huge organisation of careerist officers and enlisted unfortunates, young people who see service as a way out of one or another poverty-stricken ghetto.
Even more important, not all American militarists wear uniforms. Partly as a reaction to the defeat in Vietnam, partly as a result of the Reagan Presidency, the United States now has a cadre of neoconservative war-lovers. These are today's 'chicken hawks', men and women with an abstract knowledge of war who have never come under attack of any sort. They are enthusiasts for the notion that the United States has become a New Rome, a colossus unconstrained by any values, loyalties or ideals of international law. When the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush President, they came to power.
The President himself avoided combat during the Vietnam War by wangling a commission as a second lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard, then failing to report for duty between May 1972 and May 1973. Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that he 'had other priorities in the 1960s than military service' (very probably the 58,202 people whose names are inscribed on the Vietnam War Memorial also had 'other priorities').
Neither the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, nor the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has ever worn a uniform. The Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had a university deferment at Princeton during the Korean War (he later joined the peacetime Navy). The Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and Cheney's influential Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, are both innocent of garrison life. Although many veteran warlords - people such as Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and Anthony Zinni - question the Pentagon's current Middle East plan, I fear the culture of the present Government has become extremely hostile to the kind of courage shown by Ellsberg.
After the charges against him were dropped, Ellsberg expressed himself satisfied that the United States had reaffirmed its identity as 'a democratic republic - not an elected monarchy - a government under law, with Congress, the courts and the press functioning to curtail executive abuses, as our Constitution envisioned'. I wish that were true.
My own conclusion is that it was more like the final surge of a consumptive, the false sense that good health has returned actually signalling that death is near. I believe that the advance of militarism in the United States is irreversible. If I am wrong, I will be forgiven because people will be so glad I was wrong.
* See, for example, Harold Ford's CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-68 (CIA, 1998).
Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. His new book, forthcoming in late 2003, is The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country
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