Robert McNamara's Copy of the Pentagon Papers
McNAMARA, Robert S. (1916-2009). Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vietnam Task Force. United States - Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967 (“The Pentagon Papers”). [Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1969]. 47 volumes, 4to., blue wrappers, bound at sides with clips. Covers detached, but present, on two volumes. The text crudely printed from mimeographs and photocopies of (once) classified documents going back to the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Each volume stamped at lower right: “Sec. Def. Cont. Nr. X-295.” With June 23, 1971 cover sheet.
First edition. One of only 15 original copies, distributed to high-ranking current and former government officials. The secret Pentagon study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, owned by the man who was the key architect of the war under two Presidents, and who authorized the study to be undertaken. The Pentagon Papers would not only become a key document in the antiwar movement, but the subject of a landmark Supreme Court decision on press freedom in wartime. It would also initiate a set of choices and actions in the Nixon administration that led directly to the crimes of the Watergate scandal. A complete, original set, containing the four volumes on peace talks that were withheld by Ellsberg and which were absent from the editions later published by The New York Times and the Beacon Press.
“On June 17, 1967,” Leslie H. Gelb writes in his introduction to the Pentagon Papers, “Secretary Robert S. McNamara directed that a Task Force be formed to study the history of the United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present.” McNamara’s only instructions were to be “encyclopedic and objective” and “to let the chips fall where they may.” The idea was to finish the study in three months. But it took a year-and-a-half, involved 36 authors from inside and outside the government, and ran to 47 volumes. Supervised by Defense Department analysts Gelb and Morton Halperin, it wasn’t completed until January 15, 1969, five days before Johnson left office. The secret study was not even disclosed to LBJ, or to his Secretary of State Dean Rusk or to the National Security Advisor Walt Rostow (Gelb and Halperin feared they would kill the project if they knew about it). Of the 15 copies produced, five went to the incoming Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird. One each went to the LBJ and JFK Presidential Libraries. The remaining eight copies were sent to McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Clark Clifford, Paul Nitze, Nicholas Katzenbach, William P. Bundy, Paul C. Warnke and (jointly) Gelb and Halperin.
Robert McNamara had long since left the Defense Department. Convinced since the end of 1965 that the war was unwinnable, he had ordered the historical study as a way of guiding discussions and deliberations as to how to get out of what was becoming known as “McNamara’s War.” But by February 1968 he was burned out and resigned to become head of the World Bank. The pressures of trying to defend and implement an unworkable strategy had left him on the brink of a nervous breakdown. President Johnson worried that he might follow the grisly example of Truman’s defense secretary James Forrestal and commit suicide. In 1995 McNamara would admit that his stance on the war was “wrong, terribly wrong.” It was a tragic end to a career that seemed to sparkle with brilliance from his days as a young professor at the Harvard Business School at the beginning of World War II, to his service in the Army Air Corps where he developed statistical models for everything from requisitioning supplies to selecting bombing targets. After the war he and his team of analysts offered their expertise to the Ford Motor Company and by 1960 he was the company president. President Kennedy tapped him as Defense Secretary, and he stayed on to serve under LBJ. McNamara thought his analytical, statistics-based approach to problem-solving would serve him in Vietnam. But no matter how he crunched the numbers about troop deployment or bombing tonnage, he was still faced with a more determined adversary, prepared to simply wait out the Americans and achieve their goal of creating a unified, independent Vietnam.
Ellsberg Copies and Leaks the Pentagon Papers
After passionately supporting the war as a Harvard junior fellow, as a Defense Department analyst, and even briefly as a combat soldier, Daniel Ellsberg had turned against not just the Vietnam War, but what he saw as the militarist, violent character of U.S. foreign policy. He thought the United States guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people and hoped the publication of the secret Pentagon study would help make that case. In his job as a Rand consultant he had access to the document—he was working on a paper titled, “The Lessons of Vietnam”—and in October 1969 he began surreptitiously taking portions of it home to photocopy. At first he shopped it to members of Congress, whom he hoped would publish it in the Congressional Record. He started with William J. Fulbright, who had conducted critical hearings on the conduct of the war in 1967. But as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright was reluctant to release classified documents. Besides, he said to Ellsberg, “Isn’t it after all only history?” Well, yes, Ellsberg replied, but history that showed how four previous presidents had committed the nation to a war they knew could never be won—just as Nixon was now doing. That was worth knowing. Over the course of 1970 and 1971 prominent anti-war Senators such as George McGovern and Charles Mathias also turned Ellsberg down, as did Congressman Pete McCloskey. He even met with Kissinger and urged him to publicize the report, to no avail.
With no other takers, and fully cognizant of the risk of criminal prosecution, Ellsberg approached Neil Sheehan, a veteran Vietnam reporter for the New York Times. After an anguished and angry internal debate, the Times agreed to publish the Papers. Sheehan’s front-page story on June 13, 1971, reported how Lyndon Johnson contemplated military escalation even before the Tonkin Gulf incident. Indeed, the whole thrust of the report, Sheehan wrote, was that over a period of decades the United States spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives in Vietnam knowing full well that “neither accommodation inside South Vietnam nor early negotiations with North Vietnam would achieve the desired result.” Later Times installments would go on to show how the U.S. undermined the provisions of the 1954 Geneva accords calling for elections; it showed Washington’s deep involvement both in propping up and, ultimately, getting rid of president Ngo Dinh Diem; it showed that American officials all along understood that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and a communist second, and that he was no mere puppet of either Moscow or Beijing. This undermined the so-called “domino theory” that officials had used to justify U.S. involvement.
Ellsberg told a reporter in 1971 that for him the most “startling thing” to emerge from the study “was how the same sets of alternatives began to appear to each President, and ultimately the choice was neither to go for broke and adopt military recommendations, nor negotiate a settlement to get out. The decisions year after year were to continue the war, although all predictions pointed to a continued stalemate with this kind of approach and thus to prolong the war indefinitely.” The war was no “quagmire” into which the U.S. “stumbled.” Instead it was the product of a series of clear-headed, often cynical choices made more for the sake of America’s domestic cold war politics, than out of any perception of a genuine communist threat to U.S. interests.
What began as a shocking revision of the government’s official line on the origins and purpose of the Vietnam War quickly became a historic Constitutional confrontation between the Nixon administration and the New York Times, as the federal government, for the first time in American history, sought a prior restraint against a newspaper. This was a fight that Nixon could have avoided. His initial reaction to the story on June 13 was placid. Basking in the glow of his daughter Tricia’s Rose Garden wedding the previous day—a story that shared the front page with Sheehan’s exposé—he hadn’t even read the Times story. When briefed on it, he took pleasure in the fact that the documents would embarrass Kennedy, Johnson and the Democrats. But when Henry Kissinger called in from California, things began to change. A master at plucking the chords of Nixon’s insecurities, Kissinger pointed out that allowing the Times to get away with this would be a sign of weakness to other world leaders. Frequently criticized by Nixon and Haldeman for his cozy relations with the press, Kissinger may have found it useful to be especially outraged at the Times leak in order to deflect attention from his long-standing professional ties to Ellsberg. (As recently as March 1969 Kissinger had turned to Ellsberg at Rand for advice on Vietnam policy—something he never revealed to Nixon.)
As more details began to emerge, Nixon’s rage required no further manipulation. When Ellsberg’s name emerged as the leaker, the president’s sulfurous prejudices enveloped his thinking about the case. He made much in the coming days and weeks of the prominence of Jewish names among those associated with both the study and the leak. “They’re all Jews,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ziegler on July 5. “Every one’s a Jew. Gelb’s a Jew. Halperin’s a Jew.” He likened Ellsberg—sometimes he called him “Ellstein”—to the Rosenbergs, saying, “The Jews are born spies. You notice how many of them are? They’re just in it up to their neck.” The stolen documents also put him in mind of his halcyon days of the Hiss case, with the Rand safe standing in for Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. Ellsberg was just like Hiss: an elitist intellectual betraying his country. Nixon became convinced that this was no isolated leak, but part of a conspiracy amongst his enemies—leftists, intellectuals, the newspapers, the Jews—to betray the country and embarass his administration. He urged his White House aides to “get that son of a bitch Ellsberg,” eventually leading to the disastrous and criminal decision to break into the files of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
U.S. v. New York Times
On the third day of the Times’s series, Tuesday, June 15, the government went to Federal court in New York and obtained a temporary restraining order halting further publication until the judge —a recent Nixon appointee named Murray Gurfein—could hold a hearing that Friday on the government’s request for a preliminary injunction. With the Times momentarily silenced, the Washington Post joined the fray, publishing excerpts supplied by Ellsberg, and they too were promptly restrained. Later The Boston Globe and St. Louis Post-Dispatch were also enjoined when they published excerpts fed to them by Ellsberg. But after his Friday hearing, Judge Gurfein ruled that Nixon’s lawyers failed to show any connection between the publication of the study and damage to the nation’s security. The fact that it was classified top secret was not enough to criminalize its publication. “The security of the nation is not at the ramparts alone,” he wrote in his opinion. “Security also lies in the value of our free institutions.” An appellate judge —none other than Irving R. Kaufman, the trial judge in the Rosenberg case—continued the stay on publication until both the Times and the Post cases could move rapidly to the Supreme Court. There, on June 30, the Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Times and the Post. Justice Hugo Black wrote that “far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting,” the newspapers “should be commended.” By “revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted they would do.” They revealed the secrets and lies by which successive American presidents had sent American soldiers “to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shells.”
The White House Plumbers and the Road to Watergate
“If we can’t get anyone in this damn government to do something about the problem [of leaks],” Nixon told John Ehrlichman after the Supreme Court decision, “…then, by God, we’ll do it ourselves.” He ordered Ehrlichman to “set up a little group right here in the White House. Have them get off their tails and find out what’s going on and figure out how to stop it.” On July 24, 1971 Ehrlichman established the White House Special Investigations Unit (informally known as the “Plumbers”). Their first task was to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, to obtain damaging information to use against the whistle blower in his criminal trial in Los Angeles federal court (McNamara, incidentally, was prepared to testify in Ellsberg’s defense during that trial). But the disclosure of the Fielding break-in would result in the government’s case being thrown out. For Ehrlichman and for many Nixon insiders, the Ellsberg case was a turning point, and they dated Nixon’s downfall from his decision to contest the Pentagon Papers in court, and then to take on his enemies with break-ins, wiretaps, and other crimes. Several of the men who organized and carried out the Fielding break in would later be arrested at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972: G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt. Eugenio Martinez and Bernard Barker. These and other “White House Horrors,” in John Mitchell’s colorful phrase, would ultimately force Nixon to resign in disgrace.
Later editions
Within weeks of their victory at the Supreme Court, the Times joined with Bantam Books to put out a single volume 677-page edition titled, The Pentagon Papers. It reproduced the Times’s stories, with additional select documents and photographs. It was an immediate best-seller, and eventually sold over a million copies. In September the U.S. Government Printing Office put out a 12-volume edition entitled, United States - Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967. They only printed 500 copies, priced at $50. Daniel Ellsberg was one of the few to buy a set. The Beacon Press published a five-volume edition, titled, The Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam. They had a 20,000 print run, but sold very few copies. All three of these editions were, of course, incomplete. After their declassification in 2011, the National Archives has digitized all 47-volumes on its website. Robert McNamara’s set is the only original and complete edition of the Pentagon Papers to come to market.