Secrets [Hardcover]

Unlike others such as Chomsky or Vidal--who are reflexively dismissed by some as disconnected, ivory tower radicals--Ellsberg's account of government malfeasance gets its inescapable weight from its personnel nature. Ellsberg was there on the front lines of the cold war through most of the 50's and 60's. As a Marine, a Harvard educated analyst for The Rand Corporation and then the Pentagon, Ellsberg was part of the establishment that pursued an unjust war in Vietnam and lied about it to the American people.

This full reality was not completely apparent to him in his early years and like other dedicated "Cold Warriors" he kept his head down and rationalized that it was all for the best. He hoped that by making the government's decision-making abilities more effective, a more appropriate foreign policy would emerge. What he didn't realize was that for the men making the decisions, the process was as effective as they wanted it to be. He came to discover that these men were fully aware of the consequences of their policies. The problem was not that their decisions were corrupted by lack of information, but instead they were corrupted themselves by the institutions that bore them. The culture of these bodies fostered an arrogant belief that government needed to lie to the ignorant masses. Internal dissent was minimized and punished by an ardent allegiance to the hierarchy. The distance between the comfortable, safe offices where decisions were made and the far off countryside where those decisions spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands made human suffering peripheral to what they conceived to be the greater good. And this detachment ultimately lead to a top down decision-making process where desire and wishful thinking drove policies instead of facts from the ground below. All of these factors contributed to what Ellsberg identified as immoral policies that could only be corrected from outside the institutions that created them.

His super top-secret "Pentagon Papers" showed the folly of four consecutive administrations as they pursued a path that virtually all on the ground said was certain to fail. And despite Nixon's public claims to the contrary, Ellsberg knew that Nixon intended to continue on that path and in fact escalate the War further. Knowing that he was destroying his career and quite possibly giving up his freedom, Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers in an attempt to put pressure on these institutions from the outside. If anyone can tell us why government must be always questioned and monitored, Ellsberg can and does in this book.

This is a very engaging read because it is well written and clearly laid out by Ellsberg. One can see the mind of a top Pentagon analyst in the proficient examination of the relevant issues. If you like foreign affairs and politics this is a very good book for you. If not, you may find it dry and drawn out because as memoirs go, this one is rather unemotional. Ellsberg brings in some emotion at times (when himself and others are brought to tears by anguish over the war), but it seemed to me that the surrounding book did not explain that emotion. Although the emotional landscape of those times is not adequately explored, this observation is not a criticism since that is not the book's purpose. However, if the purpose of this book is to warn all citizens--in and out of government--of the corruptive force inherent in power, it is a success.

This extraordinary work comes at the perfect time, as an Administration is seeking to create new forms of secret operations invisible to Congress and the public, in pursuit of its war on Iraq and-one speculates-other targets of ideological but not public priority. The book covers seven areas I categorize as Background, History, Information Strategy, Pathology of Secrecy, Ethics, War Crimes, and Administrative.

By way of background, the book establishes that the author was not a peacenik per se, as some might perceive him, but rather a warrior, both in terms of Cold War ideology and from actual experience as a USMC infantry company commander and an on-the-ground observer traveling across Viet-Nam by jeep instead of helicopter, generally in the company of the top U.S. ground expert in Viet-Nam, John Paul Vann. The book establishes-as George Allen has also told us in NONE SO BLIND, that intelligence did not fail in Viet-Nam, that Presidents do get good advice from good men, but that the position of President, combined with executive secrecy as an enabling condition, permits very irrational and ineffective policies, conceived in private without public debate, to go forward at taxpayer expense and without Congressional oversight. The author is timely in emphasizing that the "spell of unanimity" is very dangerous and provides a very false image to the public-the stifling of dissent and debate at all levels leads to bad policy.

The author does an effective job of bringing forward the lessons of history, not only from Truman and Eisenhower forward, but from the Japanese and French occupations of Indochina. We failed to learn from history, and even our own experts, such as Lansdale showing McNamara the rough equipment that the Vietnamese would defeat us with because of their "will to win," were sidelined.

As a public administration and public policy text this book offers real value as a primary source. The author provides valuable insights into how quickly "ground truth" can be established; on how the U.S. Government is not structured to learn; on how the best answers emerge when there is not a lead agency and multiple inputs are solicited simultaneously; and most importantly, on how private truths spoken in secrecy are not effective within any Administration. The author stresses that Americans must understand what Presidents are doing in their name, and not be accomplices to war crimes or other misdeeds. He does a brilliant job of demonstrating why we cannot let the Executive Branch dictate what we need to know.

Interwoven with the author's balanced discussion of how to get ground truth right is his searing and intimate discussion of the pathology of secrecy as an enabler for bad and sometimes criminal foreign policy, carried out without public debate or Congressional oversight. The author adds new insights, beyond those in Morton Halperin's superb primer on Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy, regarding the multiple levels of understanding created by multiple levels of classification; the falseness of many written records in an environment where truth may often only be spoken verbally, without witnesses; the fact that the Department of Defense created false records to conceal its illegal bombings in Laos and Cambodia, at the same time that the White House created false secret cables, used Acting Director of the FBI Patrick Gray to destroy evidence, and sought to bribe a judge with the offer of the FBI directorship. The author presents a compelling portrait of an Executive Branch-regardless of incumbent party-likely to make major foreign policy miscalculations because of the pathology of secret compartmentation, while also being able to conceal those miscalculations, and the cost to the public, because of Executive secrecy. He is especially strong on the weakness of secret information. As he lectured to Kissinger: "The danger is, you'll become like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours" [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information. P. 236]

On such a foundation, the author discusses the ethics of Presidential leadership. He is especially strong-and relevant today-in discussing how Presidential appointees regard loyalty to the President as a mandate for lying to Congress and the media and the public. The author excels at bringing forward how our corruption in permitting corruption is easily recognized and interpreted by indigenous personnel-just as how whom we support is quick evidence of how little we know about local politics.

From here the author segues into the ethics of collateral damage and the liability of the American people for war crimes and naked aggression against the Vietnamese because of our deliberate violation of the Geneva accords and our support for a corrupt series of dictatorships in South Viet-Nam. Much of what we did in Viet-Nam would appear to qualify for prosecution under the International Tribunal, and it may be that our bi-partisan history of war crimes in Viet-Nam is what keeps us from acknowledging the inherent wisdom of accepting the jurisdiction of the International Tribunal in future wars. Tellingly, at one point his wife reads the Pentagon Papers and her tearful reaction is: "this is the language of torturers."

Administratively we are reminded that the Pentagon Papers were 7,000 pages in total; that Neil Sheehan from The New York Times actually stole a set of the papers from Ellsberg before being given a set; that character assassination by the U.S. Government is a routine tactic in dealing with informed dissent; and that it is not illegal to leak classified information-only administrative sanctions apply, outside a narrow set of Congressionally-mandated exceptions.

This book is a "must read" for any American that thinks and votes.