|
The timing couldn’t have been better. Daniel Ellsberg, the dean of Vietnam War protesters, spoke at Rutgers to an audience of several hundred students, faculty, and alumni, on Wednesday, November 8, 2006. It was the day the nation learned the results of an election that had become a referendum on another unpopular war, the day that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned. The event took me back. Thirty-five years ago, as I was returning from a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Kenya, Ellsberg took the protests against the Vietnam War to a new level by releasing what came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers,” some 7,000 pages of classified documents that gave the lie to two administrations’ propaganda on the war. To me, Ellsberg was a hero, but not to everyone. At a “welcome home” party in the Washington suburbs, I listened as two high government officials ripped into Ellsberg for being a publicity-seeking turncoat and traitor. Not a word, from these Washington insiders, about the terrible costs of the war and the substance of Ellsberg’s charges. For them, the only issue was his disloyalty to the administrations he had served in the Departments of Defense and State.
As it turns out, Ellsberg himself was troubled by the issue of loyalty. For years, he believed that the oaths of secrecy he had taken as a government employee compelled him to keep silence about the truth of the war. Finally, however, he decided that, by keeping the government’s secrets from the American people, he was violating a second and higher oath: the oath he had taken, as a government employee, to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It was then that he copied the documents and released them first to members of Congress and then to the press.
In his talk at Rutgers, “Averting the Next War: A Call for Civic Courage,” Ellsberg revisited these historical events to draw parallels with the present. He is very much afraid that in spite of the groundswell of opposition to the Iraq War, the war itself will not end. By 1968, he reminded his audience, a majority of Americans opposed the war in Vietnam. But the war did not stop. Instead, it dragged on into the mid-1970s, through two administrations, killing over 20,000 more Americans, and countless Vietnamese, as politicians spoke of exit strategies and escalated the violence. And, echoing a recent series of New Yorker articles by Seymour Hersh, he also fears that the Bush administration is planning to launch a massive air attack on Iran, possibly with the use of nuclear weapons. To prevent this, Ellsberg argued, individuals inside the government will have to have more foresight, and more courage, than he did. They will have to put the Constitution first and release the secret war planning documents to Congress and the people before attacks actually begin. Then and only then can Americans approach the hard choices between war and peace as the framers of the Constitution intended them to do, through debate rather than executive fiat.
A wiry, silver haired man in his 70s, Daniel Ellsberg could still pass, in his tailored blue suit and tie, for a State department officer. But he exudes a quieter, more reflective energy. His Rutgers address combined argument with personal anecdote. Story begat story, and the effect was to conjure up a vivid sense of the vast and intricate world of Washington. As he guided his audience through that world, Ellsberg seemed at times to slip back into those corridors of power, and to be wandering there, like Diogenes in the ancient Greek agora, in search of an honest man. He received a standing ovation from the audience.
|
