Daniel Ellsberg: The Rolling Stone Interview

Daniel Ellsberg was perhaps the first highly placed official (at one time the deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) to have ever left the inner government and then reveal, with top-secret documents, its closely guarded secret operations. As befits a man who risks his reputation and ruin, to fight a corrupt and unlawful government, he is vain, egocentric and completely convinced of the lightness of his action.

It is a grandiose attitude – one that seems to have especially offended the press. It supposes the power of truth, of the man who speaks it, and the moral example it sets. Ellsberg quotes Madison’s statement that, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and the people who mean to be their own governors must take care to arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.”

I decided to avoid, as far as possible, discussion of his several years in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers trial and his personal life. The interview was directed toward an exploration and understanding of his intellectual life, his experiences in the secret decision-making processes inside the Defense Department, and conclusions about the motives and methods of the inner government.

His answers were intricately detailed, with many ideas interwoven and cross-referenced into a dissertation of extraordinary complexity, some 500 typewritten pages long. During a week-long siege, it was roughly organized into two sections and the first part was edited, re-edited, and ultimately reduced in half (by myself, David Felton and Bill Sievert). The organization here is not how the interview was originally conducted. For example, the discussion of Henry Kissinger did not actually begin the interview. As we go to press, Part II remains in the wings, unedited and unorganized. We plan to put it into shape and publish it soon.

“We were facing a massive and urgent threat to our remaining democratic institutions, a coup on the eve of its completion. People who carried out this coup are still in power, starting with the president.”

There is a natural tendency to be suspicious. To some degree, we have all been affected by the notion that no matter how necessary and important Daniel Ellsberg’s act was, to risk a life in prison, vilification as a traitor, and personal slander, there “must have been something else behind it.”

But examine his statement: a dark picture of what has been occurring in American government. He acted on one of the basic democratic beliefs, that “a man can make a difference.”

What was your relationship with Henry Kissinger?
He had been at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and before I went to Rand in 1959, I gave a couple of seminars to his group, discussions about strategy and politics. Over the years I would see him occasionally at a conference or at a Rand symposium. It was not a personal relationship, nor even a close professional relationship, but an intermittent business or analytical association.

I had a very negative attitude toward him because he was pushing the idea of limited nuclear war as a substitute not only for all-out war but also for no nuclear war. He thought that if we forewent the possibility of nuclear weapons the world would be taken over by stronger nations; and that if we limited our options to threats of unrestrained nuclear war, the prospect would be so horrendous that we would be paralyzed and unable to use nuclear weapons at all. He thought the proper strategy was to build and threaten to use, as appropriate, small tactical nuclear weapons the size of the Hiroshima bombs and up to 10 times that size.

Kissinger has no originality whatsoever as an intellect. I read all of his writings, since they were within the field that I was working in, and thought of them as extremely derivative. They were well-written, good expositions of other people’s ideas and often contained analytic criticism. He changed his sources from book to book and the quality of the thinking pretty closely reflected the quality of his current sources.

His first book was admired by Nixon who gave it a great boost with a photograph on the front page of The New York Times of him going into a meeting of the National Security Council with it under his arm. This was the limited nuclear war book, strongly influenced by Edward Teller, General Gavin, a few other Air Force exponents of this limited war concept, and a major source was Bernard Brodie, a Rand colleague; another was Bill Kaufman. Later, he wrote a book – one that almost reversed, temporarily, the drift of his thinking on nuclear weapons – which was very strongly influenced by Rand associates of mine, such as Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn and Tom Schelling. Some of his articles on arms control were taken almost verbatim from work by Tom Schelling.

The sources would never be directly acknowledged. And he had a trick of covering himself by including people in his bibliography, but in entirely misleading ways. He’d include references to secondary works by these people, or works from which he had not drawn, but no mention whatever of the works he was paraphrasing. He wanted to be thought of not only as an able intellect – which he is in the sense of an expositor and critic, which alone would have been enough for an academic career – but also as an original person, a creative person. His solution to that problem must have put him under a certain tension over the years.