Daniel Ellsberg, the US Regime, and the Vietnam War

  

Daniel Ellsberg, the US Regime, and the Vietnam War

Peter Schultz

 

                  The key players in the Johnson administration thought they were acting on “the problem of Vietnam,” that is, acting on what Vietnam needed. But they weren’t. They were acting on the US regime and what it needed or required. And that meant war. There was no way out.

 

                  Regimes are ways of life, constructed ways of life, of living. Once constructed, they are architectonic, they are controlling. As a result, the empowered ones in any regime, the elites, are like prisoners or captives of the regime. To act against the regime’s requirements is subversive of the regime and of their own status therein. This is why what may be called “contra regime advice” is kept secret and goes unspoken publicly by those with power within the regime.

 

                  Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets, his memoir, illustrates this phenomenon. Despite his doubts and disagreements with the official policy of expanding the Vietnam war and America’s role in it, he kept his doubts and disagreements quiet as he went along with that policy and even helped the war’s expansion. Ellsberg was far from along. His boss, John McNaughten also disagreed with US policies to the point that once, exasperated, he said to Ellsberg: “You don’t understand, Dan. I don’t want us to be in Vietnam six months from now! I want us out! Out, Out, Out!” [87] Others, significant others like George Ball, Hubert Humphrey, Mike Mansfield, Richard Russell, and Clark Clifford felt and acted the same.

 

                  Ellsberg realized this advice had to be kept secret, as did all advice “urging extrication” from Vietnam. In fact, that there was such advice did not make an appearance in the Pentagon Papers. Why? Because “That revelation would burden the president with personal responsibility for all that followed from is decision to reject [such an] alternative.” [83] Such revelations would make clear “that a president strongly inclined to escalate had had a real choice…, an extrication option … actually recommended by advisers of great authority.” [83] That is, it would be clear that LBJ chose US war-making in Vietnam, a choice that wasn’t demanded by the situation, by the actions of the North Vietnamese or other communist nations.

 

                  In other words, it would be revealed that LBJ did not want peace; he did not want to avoid war in Vietnam. He wanted war, he sought war, even against the advice of “advisers of great authority. That revelation would be too burdensome for LBJ and for the US regime, a regime that had to disguise its embrace and endorsement of war, a disguise that legitimated Johnson’s presidency as well as the regime he presided over.

 

                  The most basic problem confronting the US then was not Vietnam. It was, in fact, the US regime, a regime that was war-like to very dangerous degrees. It might even be said that the problem then was not Vietnam or even communism; it was US imperialism.