Word: ellsbergs
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Samuel L. Popkin, assistant professor of Government and an expert in Vietnamese affairs, was called before a Boston grand jury empanelled to investigate crime surrounding the Pentagon Papers case. Prier to coming to Harvard, Popkin had worked with Daniel Ellsberg '52, the self-acknowledged distributor of the Papers...
...Government, says Ellsberg, there is "a need not to know." Unpleasant realities are often ignored; critical data often go ungathered. He notes that in 1968, at Henry Kissinger's request, he drew up a list of all the conceivable options open to the U.S. in Viet Nam. They began with using nuclear weapons and ended with an immediate and complete pullout. But, says Ellsberg, by the time Nixon got the list, the last option had been deleted as inconceivable...
Throughout most of the book, Ellsberg is less concerned with laying blame than with attempting to analyze the process of Government decision making. Ultimately, it defies analysis because, as Ellsberg himself observes, bureaucrats seldom leave a clear trail. In many ways Ellsberg defies analysis too. He is the academic owl who became a Viet Nam hawk and eventually the dove who nested in the purloined Pentagon papers. His experiences as an armed researcher in Viet Nam now lead him to declare that "to call a conflict in which one army is financed and equipped by foreigners a 'civil...
Complex Scenario. Ellsberg even contemplates the possibility that he is a war criminal similar to Albert Speer, the intelligent, cultivated humanist who was Hitler's architect. He recalls attending a seminar on war crimes and thinking "that I was the only person present who was a potential defendant." It is difficult to take this possibility seriously. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers for what he feels is the good of the country; he may also have been trying to rid himself of what he sees as a damned spot. But his view is too schematic and bears the cold stamp...
...Ellsberg, the antiwar activist, must be taken seriously. The issues he has raised about Viet Nam dwarf him as an intellectual celebrity. To view him as a potential martyr, or simply as a burglar, offers a too convenient way of avoiding the moral questions implicit in all wars. To avoid such questions goes beyond "the need not to know" to the need not to feel...