Why I Did It!: An Interview with Daniel Ellsberg

An interview with Daniel Ellsberg concerning government security, government hypocrisy, and the pentagon papers

Manuel Klausner & Henry Hohenstein from the June 1973 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

ELLSBERG: No. I think that there was an overall policy that can be described as anti-communist, or that can as easily be described as counter-revolutionary, in the sense of maintaining our business and governmental access to as much of the resources of the world as possible. And within this overall policy, usually the most convenient rationale for intervening against a regime that might exclude our influence was the claim that that regime was dominated by Communists or was likely to become dominated by Communists, because that was a claim that would find a good deal of support for intervention-support from a lot of Americans who otherwise would feel more relaxed about the change.

REASON: Was there not an attempt to deny the Communists, in this case the Chinese Communists, access to the vital Rice Bowl of South Vietnam?

ELLSBERG: Well, I don‘t think they felt that would make a great deal of difference. The best experts that were available never really endorsed the idea that Southeast Asia, in any sense, economic or otherwise, had to fall under the total domination either of Vietnam or of China if Vietnam became Communist. I think that they did to some extent worry about dominoes, even if the dominoes, in other words were not sure to fall. They did worry about effects of a Communist success that would be an American failure. But I don't think that the dominoes they worried most about were in Southeast Asia. I think they worried more about whatever effects might occur in the Middle East, Europe and Latin America, and in Russia and above all in the U.S.A.

REASON: Probably much of the American public believed we had a valid right to interfere in the affairs of North and South Vietnam. We'd like to get into your evolution of thought in this area. In other words, whether you at one time supported a concept of Pax Americana-and what your position was initially, at the time you were in the Marine Corps and what your position is now?

ELLSBERG: My position was that of many other people. There's an unquestioned faith in the goodwill and good intentions of the American Government in contrast to the bad intentions of our major adversary, the Russians. And therefore I shared that other widespread belief that even though we might well make mistakes in a given area, it was better that we make the mistakes for those people in the area than that it come under the domination of our major adversaries. I didn't know much then about the history of imperialism, in its various forms, but I have been reading more of the literature recently, and I see how in the late nineteenth century, in Europe, all the Western countries were scrambling for authority, but the central thinking of each one of them was the thought that if they didn't take over and administer the people and resources of a given area, some other influence would prevail that would be much worse, even for the people of the area. The French thought, "If not us, the Germans," and vice versa for the Germans. We thought in connection with the Philippines, "If not us the Germans, or somebody else." And it's this item of faith that although we're undoubtedly not perfect, we're better than those other guys who will run this place if we don't: whether those other guys are foreigners to the area or feudal or criminal elements in the area itself. If we don't control, the alternative is chaos, anarchy, imperialism, slavery and so forth. So we didn't have to feel that we were angelic, entirely altruistic or perfect, to feel that we were still serving the interests of the people of the area when we proceeded to serve our own interests. This is a pretty unquestioned belief.

REASON: When you say that you've been going back to historians on our imperialist activities, have you been reading any revisionist historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes or Gabriel Kolko?

ELLSBERG: I've read little of Barnes since he's very early, but I've read quite a bit now of the literature that has followed William Appleman Williams' theses in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, including that by Kolko, Lloyd Gardner, Gar Alperowitz, and a very interesting new book by Richard Friedland, The Truman Doctrine And The Origins Of McCarthyism.

And it's worth noting I think that what has made this revision of our understanding of American policy possible is the gradual declassification of World War I I records. In fact these books come out year by year as the State Department has gotten around to making records available year by year. They've gone up to about 1949; although Kolko's latest book leaps forward to 1954, really the documentation has been available only to '49 or '50. For the period between World War II and the end after Korean War, between '46 and '54, the Moorehead hearings show that over 300 million pages are still classified, in addition to the 170 million pages from World War II. SO the bulk of the declassification still remains to be done. Now the major reason why I felt the Pentagon Papers ought to come out was the feeling that we couldn't afford to wait twenty-five years to learn what there was to be learned from the documentary history of this period. We have to learn these lessons faster.

REASON: I think our readers would be interested in knowing how you characterize yourself politically?

ELLSBERG: Well, earlier I would have called myself a cold war Democrat using the words cold war without any apology, meaning views like Acheson's in foreign policy and Harry Truman's in domestic policy; that is, liberalism in domestic policy and a sort of hard line approach on foreign policy. Of course, I'm very conscious of the role both parties have played in maintaining the cold war, in Vietnam specifically. I'm in a state of transition now and trying to learn. Certainly though by any standards I've moved towards the left. And I happen to have been very influenced by the people who are radical pacifists and anarchists, which is not a simple political philosophy. It is an attitude toward life and culture and politics would mention for example people in the War Resisters League and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

REASON: How do you feel about government policies such as import quotas or subsidies to corporations?

ELLSBERG: Well, although I've got a Ph.D. in economics—a long time ago at Harvard—l never did study international economics very much and I haven't really practiced as an economist. So I'm not up on such subjects. But the study of the past couple of years has convinced me increasingly that economic motivation did underline a great deal of the policy that I helped to implement-that's the cold war policy-with concern for maintaining trade, investments and sales in undeveloped countries and in Western Europe really as the tacit motive that lay underneath a great deal of our policy. That policy was described to the public as defensive, as addressed to military threats to our allies in Western Europe and other parts of the world; and it appears that this rationale was used fairly consciously as a basis for a very large defense budget which would stabilize the economy and for foreign aid and interventions that would maintain our exports.

REASON: You mentioned that both parties share a great deal of blame in maintaining the war in Vietnam. Do you consider this a function of the parties themselves or of the bureaucratic infrastructure which they may not have any control over?

ELLSBERG: Well, on that point, I have come less and less to emphasize the bureaucratic pressure, to which I did give a lot of importance when I was in the bureaucracy four or five years ago. I think there is currently an academic scholarly trend towards emphasizing the importance of bureaucratic pressures, and I think it's greatly overdone. Even as of a couple of years ago I was inclined to emphasize much more the domestic political pressures rather than bureaucratic-and this is something that I learned from my own experience and from the Pentagon Papers, which made quite clear that the policy the President chose was often one that he alone espoused within the bureaucratic system. It seemed clear that he was responding to pressures outside the bureaucratic system. Elements like the Air Force or the Joint Chiefs of Staff certainly didn't want to get out of Vietnam, But they proposed policies fairly different from the ones the President actually followed. It's not possible to hold them responsible for the actual choice which the President pursued-so I was led to see the very great responsibility of the President himself, and to conjecture what the pressures were that did influence them. These seemed to be domestic political pressures. Now, in the last couple of years I've studied and learned, I think, more and more about the influence on the parties and the party system and on the President himself, of economic interests, corporate interest-and I would include unions and class interests. It so happens that I think that traditional leftists or Marxists have simplified the problem in a misleading way, in such a way as to imply that the President simply takes his orders via telephone from Wall Street. Now I don't think it's possible to explain Vietnam that way. In fact, Wall Street has been very skeptical of Vietnam, for at least several years while the war has gone on. At the same time I think these economic interests are important, but I think that they work through the political system, through the major political parties, through the system of nominations and competition between the parties, and that this is an interaction that has yet to be explored enough or to be understood very well. So I think that to understand Vietnam, and I don't think I do understand it adequately yet, I've a strong feeling that it's necessary for us to come to understand how economic interests structure political competition within the country: determine the kinds of candidates that are able to be nominated and to get campaign funding and media attention, and influence the workings of Congress and the general workings of the political system. I don't think one can afford to ignore either the economic interests, nor to abstract from the political system through which these interests affect policy. I've sketched out a framework there that I think no one to my knowledge has adequately explored yet.

REASON: What do you feel would be a desirable American foreign policy today?