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Filler Episode - The Pentagon Papers
41 Plays1 year ago
M is unwell, so Josh takes you through the story of the Pentagon Papers, the original "thing-starting-with-P Papers". As far as we know.
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Transcript
Introduction and Absence of Dr. Denteth
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison. Dr. Denteth will not be joining us this week, unfortunately. They were busy last week and this week are a bit under the weather, possibly just a result of spending months caring for the mother, then immediately flying to the other side of the country.
00:00:36
Speaker
and diving straight into work, possibly because apparently they were told by one of their students the other day that they are looking good for someone who's almost 50. And as someone who is closer to 50 than him by 18 months, I'm sorry, but that's just true. We are indeed almost 50.
00:00:57
Speaker
but I can imagine that taking someone by surprise. So, En's resting and recovering for this week, so I'm doing a solo one again. We hope that by next weekend we'll be up and about and well and we can get back to a regularly
00:01:13
Speaker
scheduled episode actually no this is a regularly scheduled episode this is the this is the episode we were going to do last week and then put off to this week and now i'm doing it by myself so it's not even really a filler episode it's it's the episode we had planned to do so why don't i just do it and uh then you can go about your day
Pentagon Papers Introduction and Naming Significance
00:01:37
Speaker
So, the topic that we plan to talk about this week, and which I am now going to talk about this week, is the Pentagon Papers. It's one we said, we mentioned a little while ago, and said, oh, another one of those topics where we thought, oh, we must do an episode about this, surely. How come we haven't already? I'm pretty sure we must have, this must have been back in June, earlier of this year, when Daniel Ellsberg, who is the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, he died back in June at the age of 91, I think, so that's not so bad.
00:02:05
Speaker
And so, yes, today, today is the day we have chosen to talk about the Pentagon Papers, which I haven't verified this, I could possibly go and check, but I think, I'm pretty sure the Pentagon Papers is the first something starting with P papers.
00:02:22
Speaker
and more recent times there's the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers and another one as well I think, but much as Watergate, which this is fairly closely related to, set the naming convention for scandals after that, the Pentagon Papers seems to have set the naming conventions for leaked official documents, which is what the Pentagon Papers were.
00:02:46
Speaker
The Pentagon Papers is the name that the press gave to a report or at least excerpts that were published from a leaked report whose official title is Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force.
00:03:00
Speaker
Now the report itself was a chronicle of the United States involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. It went up until 1967 because that's the year it was commissioned by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He formed this Vietnam task force. A bunch of staffers from the US Department of Defense, which of course is why it's the Pentagon papers,
00:03:24
Speaker
And they then spent, from 1967 to 1969, compiling this report. So from the sounds of things, McNamara was frustrated with how the Vietnam War was going. This was 1967, the war had been going for a while and not going particularly well. And from the sounds of things, at this stage he was basically thinking the same thing that many Americans were thinking at that time. Namely, how the hell did we wind up in this mess?
00:03:52
Speaker
That seems to be the impetus for getting
US Government's Actions During Vietnam War
00:03:56
Speaker
it going. And so by coming up with a definitive history of how we got to this point, I think he hoped to learn some lessons from that. Yes, now it was written by the Vietnam Study Task Force under Leslie H. Gelb, who was the Director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense.
00:04:16
Speaker
which is a fairly impressive title, I think you'll agree. So as I said, it took two years to write. Well, it went from 67 to 69, so definitely more than more than one year to write. And it shows the full report apparently is 7000 pages long, split over 47 volumes. Now, this was intended to remain classified, but parts of it were leaked to the public in 1971, two years after it was published.
00:04:44
Speaker
Now, the reason why this document was leaked and why it was noteworthy when that happened is that it showed that the US public had been lied to repeatedly by multiple administrations regarding Vietnam, basically for the entire time the US had been active there.
00:05:06
Speaker
The report showed that the US had expanded the war in Vietnam much further than had been reported in the US media, including the bombings in Cambodia and Laos. There had been unreported attacks on the coast of Vietnam, Marine Corps attacks in Vietnam itself that had all been unreported.
00:05:27
Speaker
So a good summary of it comes from everybody's first stop on any topic, Wikipedia, which says,
00:05:45
Speaker
For example, the Eisenhower administration actively worked against the Geneva Accords. The John F. Kennedy administration knew of plans to overthrow South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem before his death in a November 1963 coup. President Johnson had decided to expand the war while promising we seek no wider war during his 1964 presidential campaign, including back plans to bomb North Vietnam well before the 1964 United States presidential election.
00:06:11
Speaker
President Johnson had been outspoken against doing so during the election and claimed that his opponent, Mary Goldwater, was the one that wanted to bomb North Vietnam. And it also contained other examples of Johnson basically sending in the troops and then
00:06:27
Speaker
After the fact, pretending to consult with people about whether or not he should send troops into Vietnam and then, oh yes, okay, yes, no, my advisors have told me to do the thing that I've secretly actually already done. So that's why there's troops there. And so it's apparently Barry Goldwater.
00:06:45
Speaker
was very interested to see this, because as they said during the presidential election, Johnson was basically saying, Goldwater, Goldwater's the one, he wants to expand the war, he wants to drop bombs on Vietnam, so vote for me, all the while planning to increase the conflict and the bombings in Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg Leaks Pentagon Papers
00:07:06
Speaker
So the paper was leaked in 1971 by a man called Daniel Ellsberg, the man who died earlier this year. He leaked it to, or ultimately leaked it to the New York Times, which started publishing excerpts of it in June of 1971. So Ellsberg was one of the authors of the report. He was part of that Vietnam task force. Previously, he'd worked for the Rand Corporation.
00:07:28
Speaker
So he was a bit of, you know, defense department rank corporation. He seemed to, from the sounds of things, sounded fairly sort of right leaning, but had become increasingly anti-war over the late 1960s. They sort of mentioned a couple of sort of road to Damascus style moments to him where he sort of realized that what the hell is going on here, this is all wrong. And so decided that when this document was produced, whether he knew the contents of,
00:07:59
Speaker
showing how a lot of the Vietnam War had been based on lies and what a cock up the whole thing was. He decided it should be the details and it should be known to the American public. So over a period of time, he surreptitiously photocopied all 7,000 pages with the help of another ex-rand employee by the name of Anthony Russo. And then by 1971, he decided, you know, this needs to be leaked.
00:08:25
Speaker
So he went to a few different senators or congresspeople who could have, had they chosen to leak it, they could have introduced it into the congressional record while being protected by, I don't know, we have parliamentary privilege here in New Zealand. I'm not quite sure what the American equivalent is, but the point is they would be able to hear these sorts of things and not get in trouble for it. But
00:08:50
Speaker
No senators were biting. One of them apparently suggested he should go to the press instead, which of course then opens him up to get him in trouble. But he figured this was important. These truths needed to come to light. So he took it to the New York Times and I think a couple of other papers, but the Times was the one that started publishing it. So on Sunday, June the 13th of 1971,
00:09:16
Speaker
The New York Times began publishing a series of articles which included various excerpts from the report. And people started to know what had really been going on in Vietnam. Now, of course, June 1971, Richard Nixon is president at this time. And he, from what I've read, he didn't seem too troubled by it immediately and didn't plan to do much about it straight away because the documents like I said earlier, they
00:09:46
Speaker
had embarrassing revelations about the Trumanizing Howard Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but they didn't have anything to do with Richard Nixon. Nothing in the report was personally embarrassing to Nixon and even more so, he figured that by getting this report out
00:10:02
Speaker
on the public, that would solidify, that would remind the American public that Johnson and Kennedy, they're the ones who are really to blame for the Vietnam War. Obviously, the Vietnam War was very unpopular among the American public. And so he figured, well, this will remind them that it's not my fault. I didn't get us into this mess. It was the president who came before me. I'm trying to get us out of it. So he couldn't officially approve
Nixon's Initial Reaction and Strategic Advice
00:10:26
Speaker
of this leak. Publicly, he called the leak,
00:10:29
Speaker
And that his only real concern was finding out who the leaker was, not about actually stopping the leaks. But his lawyers, though, encouraged him to take action, figuring we'd probably want to do something about this. And if we're going to, we'd better do straight away, because if we wait until The Times has published a bunch of stuff and then try to put a stop to it, well, then that might hurt their case if they'd already let it continue for a while.
00:10:57
Speaker
Now, one of the things I've read suggested that Henry Kissinger was the one or one of the people who convinced him that he should actually try to stop this stuff from getting published because he figured that you didn't want to set a precedent that people could get away with leaking information that could be embarrassing to presidential administrations.
00:11:19
Speaker
Can't think why he wouldn't want to establish that president, but there you go. Another interesting detail is that apparently Ellsberg and Kissinger had been friends, but had fallen out, I think, over Vietnam. I read about Ellsberg had sort of publicly confronted Kissinger at events sort of standing up and saying, you know, how can you justify the amount of
00:11:45
Speaker
the extra deaths that are happening here had been publicly vocal against Vietnam. And so their friendship had ended over that from the sounds of things. And Kissinger, from what I've read, took the leakers as something of a personal betrayal. This was his former friend now betraying the government, as it were.
00:12:09
Speaker
There's an interesting quote I read from Nixon's Oval Office tapes, Nixon obviously famous for surreptitiously recording everything that went on in the Oval Office. And one of these recordings has him talking to H.R. Haldeman, who was his Chief of Staff.
00:12:27
Speaker
and if you listen to these tapes you can hear Haldeman says Rumsfeld, talking about Donald Rumsfeld, he says Rumsfeld was making this point this morning to the ordinary guy all this is a bunch of gobbledygook but out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing you can't trust the government you can't believe what they say and you can't rely on their judgment and the
00:12:45
Speaker
The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.
00:12:58
Speaker
So here, Haldeman's saying these leaks, they damage the institution of the American presidency. And so that's a reason to get rid of them. Interesting. In reading that, I found out that Donald Rumsfeld was both the youngest and oldest US Secretary of Defense, which I know I've heard people complain about
00:13:19
Speaker
how there seemed to be these characters in American politics who just hung around like a bad smell. And just when you thought you were rid of them, there they were again. And you hear about politicians getting up to dodgy stuff and they go, who is it now? And goes, oh, no, it's just the same, same bunch of bastards who we've been stuck with all this time.
00:13:38
Speaker
Anyway, interesting, interesting little side
Espionage Charges Against Ellsberg
00:13:41
Speaker
note. So, having been convinced that they should do something to stop the leaks of what had been called the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon administration sought an injunction against the Times publishing any more of what they had, so that went to court, but unfortunately for Nixon and his administration, the Supreme Court eventually ruled that the Times could continue publishing these leaked documents.
00:14:05
Speaker
But the courts had ruled that the administration couldn't stop The Times from publishing anything, but didn't say anyone couldn't do anything about Ellsberg himself. So once Ellsberg was known to have been the leaker, he was in a spot of bother. So he had actually turned himself in, and he turned himself in shortly before the Supreme Court ruled in The Times' favor.
00:14:30
Speaker
I sort of just seen a quote from him essentially saying that this was suggesting that he turned himself in because it was the right thing to do. He'd done this thing, he was responsible for this leak, and so he was going to stand up and take responsibility for it. I don't know
00:14:47
Speaker
if there's more to it than that, if he knew that they were on to him and was sort of turned himself in rather than be arrested, I'm not quite sure exactly. But the fact is that he turned himself in, both he and Anthony Russo, the guy who helped him copy the report in the first place,
00:15:03
Speaker
were indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of stealing and holding secret documents. That was the initial indictment but the crimes that he would eventually be charged with under the Espionage Act. Apparently the sentence would have been I think it was 115 years had he been found guilty on all counts that he was
00:15:23
Speaker
accused of, so they did appear to be throwing the book at him. And to begin with, kind of from what I've read, it kind of sounded like he was being railroaded a bit. He wasn't allowed to speak in his own defense, to an extent. Apparently his defense, what he wanted to argue in his defense was that
00:15:48
Speaker
the files that he had leaked had been illegally classified in the first place. He wanted to say that the specific reason why the report had been classified was not to stop America's enemies from learning its contents, which is the reason you normally classify stuff. He said it had been classified specifically to stop the American public from finding out what was in it because it was embarrassing to
00:16:16
Speaker
past presidential administrations. Now I don't know, I mean obviously I'm not even close to being a lawyer, so I don't, on the face of it that doesn't sound super convincing anyway, like whether or not you're arguing that they shouldn't have been classified. They were, they were classified documents that he had chosen to leak, so I don't know if that's a great argument, but apparently that, so that argument had been dismissed and he'd been told he wasn't
00:16:44
Speaker
to give that argument. There was a quote from the court case where his lawyer, he wasn't allowed to say why he had done it, why he thought.
00:16:56
Speaker
he was justified in making these documents. And his defense attorney apparently said to the court, starting along the lines of, you know, I've never heard of a case where the defendant isn't allowed to say why they did the thing they're accused of. And the judge said something along the lines of, well, now you have. Interestingly enough,
00:17:15
Speaker
After this all shook out, Nixon's Solicitor General, a man called Erwin N. Griswold, later on would call the Pentagon Papers an example of, quote, massive over-classification with no trace of a threat to the national security. So, I mean, it seems like Ellsberg was possibly right, but that's not quite the same. It takes more than that to
00:17:40
Speaker
defend yourself in court. There was also, there was another business where the judge in the case had met with the FBI who was suggested they'd offered him a fancy position if he saw to it that Ellsberg went down or something like that, which he turned down, but people would say, you shouldn't, shouldn't have been, while you're in the middle of a case, a federal case against a guy where the FBI is bringing evidence against him, you shouldn't
00:18:08
Speaker
be meeting with the FBI for any reason, so that was a little bit dodgy.
00:18:12
Speaker
So things, it seemed like things were stacked fairly heavily against Daniel Ellsberg, but luckily for him, the other side just went too far. They had what you'd think would be a bit of, pretty much a slam dunk case against the guy, but they just had to take it too far. The FBI illegally wiretapped him, and this came out in court, and good old Nixon, good old Tricky Dick got up to some of his dicky tricks.
00:18:40
Speaker
And so once these dodgy things that had been done, which we'll get into in a sec, came out in court, the judge basically had no choice but to dismiss the case. And so Ellsberg got off scot-free, from what I can tell.
Nixon's Administration's Illegal Tactics
00:18:56
Speaker
So these dirty tricks, a good old Nixon dirty tricks, he established a group of fixers who are sometimes called the White House Plumbers because they want to stop the leak. It's a pun or play on words. So the White House Plumbers became somewhat notorious and a bunch of them would go on to be involved in the Watergate break-in, but that happened after this.
00:19:21
Speaker
So in this particular case, one of the things they did was break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. They broke open the guy's filing cabinet to steal Ellsberg's psychiatric file, basically hoping it would have dirt on him. It would reveal he had
00:19:42
Speaker
either embarrassing, mental, who knows what, or whether they could show, you know, look, this guy is obviously unstable. He's, he's, he's, you know, they were hoping they could say, oh, this guy's crazy. So we can, we can, we can disregard anything he has to say. From the sounds of things, though, once they looked at his file, they found there wasn't anything in there they could use and apparently just left it, left it lying on the floor and and in a way they went.
00:20:10
Speaker
Ellsberg claims that after the trial he was told of a plot to quote, incapacitate him, that they'd hide some guys to incapacitate him when he appeared at a at a rally that he was going to go to after the trial. And it's not clear if incapacitate means
00:20:30
Speaker
they wanted to kill, you know, if that's a euphemism for kill him or simply abduct him or, you know, who the hell knows what? Drug him and keep him in a nonsensical state for him before he could do any more. I don't know. He claims there was this plot about him.
00:20:47
Speaker
So yes, and unfortunately Nixon's paranoia basically that caused him to do this ended up biting him in the bum because once it found out they'd done this illegal stuff trying to get dirt on him and that the FBI had been illegally acquiring wiretapping evidence against him, the case got thrown out. If they'd just done nothing, who knows how things would have turned out.
Leak's Impact on Nixon and Watergate
00:21:10
Speaker
But it's quite, it's interesting because, as I say, the Pentagon Papers business happened before Watergate, but it's, some people have suggested from the reading that I've done, that the Pentagon Papers leak really, really sort of exacerbated, really brought out Nixon's paranoia that people were conspiring against him. Because remember Kissinger sort of took the leak kind of personally, and
00:21:36
Speaker
after a time Nixon also started to think, you know, did they do this specifically to damage him? Was it a conspiracy against Nixon to be people leaking during his presidency? So yeah, the suggestion is that because of what went on with the Pentagon Papers, Nixon's paranoia was really ramped up, which would eventually lead to the whole Watergate affair.
00:22:00
Speaker
And so that's the basic story of the Pentagon Papers. Now, what was reported at the time, and what were all the attention, was that it showed that the American public had been lied to, that throughout the history of America's involvement in Vietnam, administrations had been lying about what was really going on, concealing things from the US public.
00:22:24
Speaker
Les Gelb, if you recall, was the head of the Vietnam Study Task Force that authored the Pentagon Papers. In later years, he's kind of hasn't defended the paper or the classification of the paper, but he has
Educational Opportunities Lost and Lessons Unlearned
00:22:43
Speaker
A tact isn't quite the right word, but he's expressed dissatisfaction with the leaks and the way they were reported because he thought it meant that people kind of missed the main point of the report. He believed that this report, which was designed to show how we get into this mess in Vietnam, what would we do wrong? And he believed that the report showed exactly what they'd done wrong.
00:23:09
Speaker
But because the message that got out about the report was simply the government lied to the people, all of the lessons that could have been learned from the Pentagon report were not learned at the time.
00:23:22
Speaker
So from an interview he gave not too long ago, back in 2018, he's quoted as saying, my first instinct was that if they just hit the papers, people would think that this was the definitive history of the war, which they were not, and that people would think it was all about lying rather than beliefs. And look, because we've never learned that darn lesson about believing our way into these wars, we went into Afghanistan and we went into Iraq.
00:23:46
Speaker
It goes on to say, you know, we get involved in these wars and we don't know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, people on top, and even down below. And my heavens, these are not wars like World War II and World War I. We have battalions fighting battalions. These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, what the culture is like, and we jumped into them without knowing. That's the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.
00:24:09
Speaker
And then also, I don't deny the lies. I just want the American people to understand what the main points really were. So that's an interesting view on it, I guess. I mean, he's basically saying, yes, Vietnam was a cockup.
00:24:25
Speaker
And if we'd actually read everything that the report said, we'd know why Vietnam was a cock up, and we wouldn't have made the exact same mistakes in other countries in the future. Which, of course, had the papers remained classified in the first place, the public certainly never would have known all that.
00:24:44
Speaker
It doesn't sound as though the people who were behind America's involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq presumably would have had access to the report and went ahead anyway. So yeah, it's an interesting way to look at it. And that is the Pentagon Papers, the original papers.
Conclusion and Teaser for Future Topics
00:25:09
Speaker
So that's
00:25:11
Speaker
That's the main topic of this episode. Because it's just a filler and things have been a little bit wonky this week, we don't really have content for a bonus episode. I should say, though, when we do, we're going to have to look into the fact that someone's been arrested over the death of Tupac Shakur 30 years later, which I think we were planning last week had just been announced. This week, there's been a bit more details. So hopefully by next week,
00:25:39
Speaker
when we have a proper episode and a proper bonus episode, we can see what's been going on there. And who knows what else will have happened by then. But for now, I think that'll hold you for this week until Emma's back in the saddle and able to record a full episode. So fingers crossed for a speedy bit of resting and recuperation for Ian. And we should see you next week. But for now, there's really nothing I can do but say goodbye.
00:26:11
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.