The Barnes & Noble Review
Daniel Ellsberg came to international attention in 1969 when he smuggled out the Pentagon Papers, an act that flung open the gates of secrecy that surrounded American conduct and policy in Vietnam, and changed United States history. Now he tells the whole exciting story in this impassioned memoir.
In the 1960s, ex-Marine Ellsberg was a high-level government adviser, spending considerable time in Vietnam. Upon his return Stateside, he worked for the Rand Corporation, a private think tank with close ties to the Pentagon. There, he took part in the creation of a comprehensive history of the Vietnam conflict for former defense secretary Robert McNamara. After reading the completed 7,000-page document -- which became known as the Pentagon Papers -- Ellsberg's disillusionment with U.S. policies turned to outrage. He discovered that, from the start of U.S. military involvement in Indochina in the 1950s, our government had systematically misled the public about its actions and objectives. With the Vietnam War still going strong under the Nixon administration -- despite official statements that it was winding down -- Ellsberg felt compelled to go public with this top-secret history of government duplicity.
At considerable personal risk to himself and his family, Ellsberg made the Pentagon Papers available to the media, and they were published in their entirety by The New York Times. The reverberations were titanic. Ellsberg was arrested and put on trial. At the same time, President Nixon's paranoia grew, resulting in illegal actions that led to his political fall from grace.
Whether he was crawling on his belly in the rice paddies of Vietnam's Plain of Reeds or fleeing the FBI in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ellsberg's actions demonstrated that he was a man of conscience. This memoir should inspire the reader's sense of civic duty. It raises serious questions about our responsibilities, what it is we owe our government and our community, and asks whether there is a path of integrity that can be taken to preserve both. Dana Isaacson
It is a chilling tale of life at the bureaucratic top, and what profound compromises it takes to stay there.
[Ellsberg's] story reminds us that to fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship is to always ask questions and demand the truth.
This is an honestly and lucidly told narrative by someone who single-handedly changed the course of history.
If our nation could absorb its lessons we might all face a better future.
...timeless...
The most important expose of Washington since the Pentagon Papers themselves, Secrets is essential reading for any American who wants to understand true patriotism.
...written with breathtaking excitement...
Washington Post
Ellsberg's transformation from cold warrior and Defense Department analyst to impassioned antiwar crusader who released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in June 1971 makes a remarkable and riveting story that still shocks 30 years later. Avoiding, for the most part, self-justification and self-aggrandizement, he clearly relates the experiences that led him to reject as arrogant lies the premises six presidents presented to the public and Congress to secure support for the Vietnam War. He describes the disjunction between what he saw during visits to Vietnam in the early and mid-'60s, driving through dangerous Viet Cong-held territory, and what was told to the press and public. And he recalls his first reading of the classified documents later known as the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the motives, in his view unprincipled, behind American involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg creates page-turning human drama and suspense in both his descriptions of his early experience accompanying U.S. combat missions in Vietnam and his days spent underground evading an FBI manhunt after the Times's publication of the Papers. Another strength of this memoir is Ellsberg's vivid recollections of meetings with prominent policymakers, from Henry Kissinger to Senator William Fulbright, that re-create the deep tensions of the Vietnam era. Ellsberg raises serious ethical questions about how citizens, politicians, the press and officials act when confronted with government actions they consider immoral and perhaps illegal. Ellsberg's own answer is history. (Oct. 14) Forecast: Broad and prominent review coverage is guaranteed, and boomers, especially those who opposed the war, will grab this. But it remains to be seen whether a post-Vietnam generation will be similarly moved.
Ellsberg's memoir recounts the story of how he came to leak the Pentagon Papers (the history of the American intervention in Vietnam) to The New York Times in 1971 and how his subsequent trial unfolded. Ellsberg draws attention to the need for public servants to guard against government mendacity and speak out against reckless policies instead of confining their doubts to safe internal channels. The bulk of the book, however, is a candid and detailed account of Ellsberg's own involvement in the Pentagon's policymaking during the critical years of the Johnson administration and the early deliberations of the Nixon administration. He paints a striking picture of intelligent people persevering and tinkering with a war policy that could never be successful, given the inherent limitations of the U.S. military and its South Vietnamese ally. He also describes the complex interaction between the various forms of opposition to the war as it continued under Richard Nixon, and how the president's fury with Ellsberg's own act of dissent led to Watergate and to the added bonus in addition to Ellsberg's own acquittal of Nixon's resignation.
Before leaking the Pentagon Papers, which documented U.S. foreign-policy failures and deceit in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968, Ellsberg was a gung-ho advisor to the State and Defense departments. One fascinating part of this story is his growing disenchantment with the war during these years. He came to believe that leaking the top-secret papers and other classified documents was a patriotic act that could help end the war. Other fascinating aspects of this account include Ellsberg's frustrated attempts to find a member of Congress who would accept and use the papers to build a case against the war as well as his growing role in the antiwar movement. President Nixon failed in his strong-arm tactics to discredit Ellsberg, and the case against him was dismissed because of the illegal break-in at the office of Dr Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Interestingly, Ellsberg speculates that the break-in by Nixon's "Plumbers" was as much an attempt to blackmail Fielding as it was a gambit to stop Ellsberg. The book suffers somewhat from the overabundance of detail and repetition that also flawed Tom Wells's Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg. However, Ellsberg's autobiographical account provides insight into the disturbing abuses of presidential power that plagued the Vietnam/Watergate era. Recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/02.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
A well-crafted, windmill-tilting autobiography by the famed cold warrior turned antiwar activist. A former Marine officer and civilian employee in Vietnam, Ellsberg knew early on that the war would lead to heartache for America; as early as the fall of 1961, he recalls, he believed "that nothing we were trying to do was working or was likely to get better." Armed with "go-anywhere" clearance and allied with the likes of John Paul Vann (the subject of Neal Sheehan's A Bright, Shining Lie, 1988), Ellsberg had ample opportunities to prove himself right. What is more, he writes here, just about everyone in the American command knew full well that the Vietnam War was a senseless slaughter, the product of think-tankers' fond wishes and blind faith in American might and technological prowess; still, the habitually blundering leadership ignored clear signs of disaster, and when it did, Ellsberg writes, "I foresaw very strong tendencies to try to recoup early failures and break out of a stalemate by expanding the war still further." Determined to bring this folly to a conclusion, Ellsberg, by the late 1960s an analyst for the Rand Corporation, decided to expose more than 7,000 pages of secret material that provided "documentary evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder." When portions of the so-called Pentagon Papers were released by the New York Times and other publications, he writes, sitting president Richard Nixon at first seemed happy to have support for his don't-blame-me argument, then worried that secret documents from his own administration would be leaked to the media-which, Ellsberg writes, set inmotion the chain of spying that ended in the Watergate affair and Nixon's resignation. Throughout, Ellsberg is convinced of the justice of his cause-as will be many of his readers, on seeing the evidence amassed here of the criminality of our recent politics. Thoughtful, full of righteous indignation-rightly so-and likely to be of great interest to students of the Vietnam War and domestic resistance thereto.
In SECRETS, Daniel Ellsberg finally reveals the how and why behind his disclosure of the top-secret study about decision-making in Vietnam, which came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” The story is fascinating, and one that anyone interested in Vietnam should hear. Ellsberg has a gruff voice, and he gives a true measure of himself as he reads his story. On the other hand, Dan Cashman reads the book as though it were a novel. While Cashman seems to understand and convey the passion that led Ellsberg to become a leading antiwar activist, at times he reads with a sense of happiness inconsistent with the events and inconsistent with Ellsberg’s own tone. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine