AMY GOODMAN: And you are listening to Democracy Now!, as we move on to this 30th anniversary of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: My father had a favorite line from the Bible, which I used to hear a great deal when I was a kid: “The truth shall make you free.” And I hope that the truth, that’s out now — it’s out in the press; it’s out in homes, where it should be, where voters can discuss it; it’s out of the safes, and there is no way — no way — to get it back into the safes — I hope that truth will free us of this war. I hope that we will put this war behind us and we will learn from it in such a way that the history of the next 20 years will read nothing like the history of the last 20 years. I’ve enjoyed reading the papers the last week. I’ve been reading the truth about the war in the public press, and it’s like breathing clean air.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg in June of 1971. In 1967, the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, commissioned a top-secret history of the Vietnam War. The 7,000-page study traced the U.S. effort, dating back to the '40s, to destroy the Vietnamese Revolution. In 1971, a Defense Department official and former RAND Corporation analyst named Daniel Ellsberg secretly photocopied the Pentagon Papers and made them available to The New York Times. The New York Times, after deliberating for three months, began publishing excerpts of the papers 30 years ago today. That afternoon, an outraged President Nixon spoke on the phone to his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. He said, “It's treasonable.” “There is no question,” Kissinger told his boss, who was then overseeing the illegal bombing of both Laos and Cambodia.

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times, we bring you Daniel Ellsberg’s voice again, this time here on Democracy Now!

Dan Ellsberg, who were you talking to in that recording 30 years ago?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was being interviewed by Walter Cronkite, who was then thought of as the most trusted man in America, or American television, anchorman at CBS at that point. I was underground. The FBI was searching for me. It was subject to what was described in the papers as the biggest FBI manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. And Walter Cronkite was putting me on nearly half an hour of television at that time, which is to say that a network anchorman was in a state of something like rebellion against the establishment, which is a very unusual situation.

I hadn’t broken any law, but I was expecting to go to jail for the rest of my life at that point. And they were about to put me on trial and indict me for a possible 115-year sentence. So, those were the rather unusual circumstances I found myself in. That wasn’t the way my career had been headed up ’til that time. I had been in the Marine Corps. I had been at the RAND Corporation for many years. I had been in the Defense Department and the State Department, in Vietnam. And I was one of the — one of the drafters, the authors, of this Pentagon Papers, which were a history of the war from 1945 to 1968.

I heard myself saying in that quote just now that I hoped the history of the next 20 years would be nothing like the history of the previous 20. Well, I lost that wish for at least the next, oh, four years. The war had four more years to run, that were very like the previous 10 or so. And indeed, we haven’t changed all that much.

In 1969, though, two years before that interview, I had come to realize that a new president, President Nixon, was about to replay the history of the previous four years or so, or more, and that just like Lyndon Johnson in 1964, he had lied in the election of 1968, or misled the public — misled the public, rather, as to what his real aims were in Vietnam. He said that he intended to end the war, but he didn’t share with them the private information that he intended to end it by winning it, and that he was going to win it much the same way that Johnson had set out to do in ’64, which was by making secret threats of escalation in the air of bombing, in the hopes that the authorities in Hanoi would draw back, would call off the nationalist struggle and this revolutionary struggle in Vietnam, and would leave our chosen representatives in charge of administration in Saigon, in South Vietnam.

We were about, then, to replay that history, I thought. The war was not going to end. I thought that Nixon’s hopes were as foolish, as unfounded as the hopes of Johnson and Walt Rostow five years earlier, and that the result would be that the threats would not work. I thought he would carry them out, just as Johnson had. And the result would be a larger war, that would go on for years. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people more would die, to no real different end, that in the end, they would not — the result would not be an American suppression of nationalism in Vietnam, would not be an American-run government in Vietnam, but it would be much the situation that has arisen today, at the cost of, as I say, many, many scores and hundreds of thousands or more lives.

So I thought that I shouldn’t behave as I had five years earlier, which was to keep my mouth shut about what I knew was the divergence between what the public was being told and what was really being planned in the Pentagon and in the White House, that I shouldn’t be silent about the fact that Congress was being lied to, and that threats, secret threats, were being made that were sure to lead to escalation, and that that was the future the president was holding. So I thought that I ought to tell the truth this time to Congress and to the public, even if that sent me to jail, which I expected that it would.

For a couple of years before that, I had, having come back from Vietnam, understanding that we weren’t going to win, and we weren’t going to achieve any legitimate purpose. We weren’t going to achieve anything, even illegitimate purpose, in Vietnam, and therefore that the war should end. But for two years, I had limited myself, like a lot of other establishment people and officials and former officials, to actions that I thought would be effective, but had another aspect to them that I wasn’t so conscious of at the time, that wouldn’t risk my own career or put me outside the establishment circles or deprive me of access to men in power.

AMY GOODMAN: What finally convinced you to risk almost everything?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The triggering thing that led to the change in my behavior in 1968 and '69 was that I met, and particularly in late ’69, young Americans who were on their way to jail to do everything they could to put a spoke in the wheel, to put sand in the machinery, to warn their fellow Americans that this war had to be stopped, that it was wrong, and it was urgent to stop it and necessary to stop it. And their example, of these young men who would realize that the best thing they could do with their lives was to go to jail in order to send this message, made me ask myself: What could I do to help end this war, if I were ready to go to jail? And I then thought of things that I simply hadn't thought of before, including giving Congress, and eventually giving the newspapers, these thousands of pages of top-secret documents about how they’d been lied to.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan, one of the things we do on Democracy Now! is bring the voices of activists to the airwaves. And something that always strikes me is the different worlds that people at the grassroots level and people in the establishment, like you before the Pentagon Papers were released, the different worlds that you occupy. In fact, isn’t it true that you were very removed and isolated until you started going to some antiwar conferences?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I may have been the only person at the RAND Corporation, that I know of one, only one I ever heard of, the only one from the Pentagon or in the Pentagon who had ever met someone who was actually on his way to prison, or later I visited people who were in prison, for draft resistance and for opposing the war.

It’s not so surprising circles were entirely different, except for the fact that a lot of these people were exposed to their own children. And that did have a considerable effect on them. But I’m not aware of any of those children who went to the point — and it would have meant breaking with their parents very dramatically — of a kind of resistance that put them in jail, that or actually leaving the country. That might have led to some different behavior by some of those officials.

I think it was critical for me that I did meet those people face to face and come to realize that they weren’t the way the media represented them. They weren’t aliens. They weren’t Martians. They weren’t entirely a different breed of person. They were people very — with backgrounds, in some cases, very much like myself. That was, those are the ones that made the biggest impression on me, and I think that was natural.

It’s for that reason, by the way, that I always tell people that I always wear a coat and tie when I get arrested. And I urge them to do the same, if they have a coat and tie, because it conveys to other people that having a coat and tie, and even a short haircut, in some cases, doesn’t exempt you from the responsibilities of citizenship. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for you to take risks in opposing a policy and to pay a price in opposing a policy, and that people like themselves can go this far. It was critic — it was essential for me to realize that people who had gone to Harvard, like myself, and had had a career otherwise, like myself, realized — had come to realize that going to jail, in the tradition of Martin Luther King or, before him, Gandhi and Rosa Parks, that that was a reasonable thing to think of doing. And that freed me to think of some effective things to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, speaking today. We are going to a break and then come back to this conversation, the man who released the Pentagon Papers 30 years ago. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, Free Speech Radio. I’m Amy Goodman. It’s the 30th anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers. And Dan Ellsberg, a man who worked for the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon, was the man who released those papers to The New York Times, published 30 years ago today. Dan Ellsberg, what was it like? I wonder if it was harder to go up against the president of the United States, President Nixon. Was it harder to do that or to go against the people that you worked with on a day-to-day basis, your colleagues at the RAND Corporation and at the Pentagon?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, the cost was great. You know, you mention you think — people do think of them as evil places. One thing I learned from reading Martin Luther King and his understanding of Gandhi, and reading Gandhi directly, and books like Barbara Deming’s Revolution and Equilibrium, which I — which affected me very much, which I read and reread, and Joan Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence, is the notion that to avoid — to eschew the notion of judging people, regarding people as evil people, while at the same time being very clear that much of what ordinary people do, what humans do, people very much like ourselves, is evil. The action is evil, the action, which means you cannot cooperate with it, you can’t keep silent about it, you have to oppose it. But you should do that in a spirit not that the people doing it are an entirely different breed, as I said earlier, or are somehow, in a peculiar way, evil people who can’t change and who are doomed to do the same thing, but that very ordinary people can be led to do terrible things, which is how evil actually gets done.

My break with my colleagues at RAND was not a matter of politics. I would say most of them agreed with me in terms of the war, or I agreed with them. We had the same view. And as McNamara has now revealed, he had much the same view when he was secretary of defense, much of the time. In fact, I think he had it earlier than he’s yet admitted. The question is: What do you do about that?

And certainly, what I did caused great fear among many of my colleagues, and great sense of wrongdoing, in that they felt I — I don’t think many of them really felt that I’d betrayed the country, but they felt I had betrayed them, that their jobs were in jeopardy, that Congress might remove the budget of the RAND Corporation, which was a possibility — there were actually bills to do that because of some actions that I took — and that I was jeopardizing their job and their livelihood, and it was wrong to do that, that I was turning on my friends. The effect of that — also, they all had clearances. They couldn’t afford to allow even the possibility of a suspicion that they agreed with what I’d done, because that would immediately cause suspicion about their own clearance. And that, in turn, would lose them not only their job, but their whole career, their whole — they couldn’t go to a similar place or work in the government at all.

So, the effect was that I lost every friend I had in the world, essentially, all the male ones, certainly, who had clearances. They were mostly men at that time. And their families couldn’t communicate with me, either. They didn’t talk to me any after that for 20 years or so, 'til the Cold War ended, at least, even to denounce me. They didn't want a letter from themselves to be found in my garbage by the FBI, which did go through my garbage. And they didn’t want to have to explain why they were in any touch with me or why they cared what I thought or whatever. So, I simply — it was as if I had emigrated or I had been banned in South Africa. And nobody could communicate with me at all. That was a heavy price to pay. But then I had already faced the decision that I was ready to go to jail forever, so I was ready to face this price. But like most whistleblowers, I hadn’t fully foreseen just how permanent it would be in terms of losing all my old associates, people I did respect. And, of course, I found many new friends who were in the movement, and people whose values I totally agreed with at this point or actions I agreed with. So, it was a new life. But still, it’s quite a price to lose, like emigrating, all your associates who’ve known you over the years.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just reading this new book by David Rudenstine called The Day the Presses Stopped: The History of the Pentagon Papers Case. And he says that Henry Kissinger considered you brilliant. You had spent a lot of time in Vietnam, done a great deal of analysis for the Pentagon and RAND. He also describes the encounter you had with Kissinger, which clearly signaled to the secretary of state that you’d crossed the line, that you’d gone to the other side. Can you describe that forum at MIT and what you asked him?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The question that I asked Kissinger was simply this: What is your best estimate of the number of humans — of the number, actually, I said first, of Vietnamese that will die in Vietnam if our policies continue over the next 12 months? Now, I asked that, knowing from past experience that almost certainly he had no such an estimate. And as a matter of fact, I called up one of his aides just before this confrontation just to check that. I had suggested to Kissinger earlier, when I was a consultant to the White House, that they do a study along these lines, and he had not done it. And I asked: Had they ever gotten around to making such an estimate? And as I suspected, no, there was no such estimate, because that wasn’t something they wanted to know. It might leak, and it would not encourage the public to support their policies.

So, his first answer was, “Well, you’re accusing us of being racist,” because I talked about Vietnamese. And I said, “No, no. Let’s just say: How many humans will die? Let’s not put this on the basis of race here. Americans, Vietnamese, every kind.” And I won’t go through the whole confrontation. He obviously did not have an answer, finally. And, in fact, the moderator of the thing, seeing his embarrassment, broke off the whole program at that time and let him go back.

He had said, by the way, he had come there to tell us — he said, “You know, you’re accusing us of wanting to widen the war, but we are not widening the war. We are winding down the war,” he said. That night, he said. The next day — he then went back to Washington on a late plane. The next day, actually, there was an embargo on news out of Vietnam. And Osborn Elliott was at this conference. He was the editor of Newsweek. That was the level of people who were at this thing. And I had been saying that I expected the war to widen. That was — the Pentagon Papers hadn’t come out yet. But that’s why I had given them, in effect, because I saw the war widening. And he said, “You know, there may be something to what you’ve been saying. We’ve just been told there’s a total embargo on information out of Vietnam.” This was the next morning.

Well, it turned out that while he was talking to us, the preinvasion bombing of Laos had begun. While he was telling us that he’d come to Washington to tell these noblemen and their sons that the war was winding down, inexorably, and he said, “And it will continue to wind down,” the bombing of another country had begun. We were about to invade another country, Laos, which was another debacle, in early ’71. The chutzpah of this or the length to which they would go to deceive these people — for what? An extra 24 hours? They were bound to know very shortly that the war was getting a bit wider, as it did the next day — is almost incomprehensible. But that was the story of the war.

And what the Pentagon Papers showed when they came out a few months later was that that had been the pattern for 23 years, up until '68, and was still the pattern three years beyond that. There's no reason at all to believe that this pattern that the Pentagon Papers showed for 23 years, under four presidents, two different parties, and which Nixon continued in another — again, the Republicans — for another four years and more — there’s no reason to believe that pattern has changed at all. And what is that pattern, up 'til today? In fact, we've seen many other examples of a similar behavior — the Iran-Contra affair, Iraqgate, tolerating and the expediting of the arming of Iraq even before the Gulf War, all the decision-making around our various invasions of Panama and the Gulf War. What the pattern is, is the willingness of the men we elect — and I’m talking of every president we’ve elected since World War II, not to go back before that — to undertake policies, secret foreign policies, that are entirely at odds with the policies they describe to the public.

Even those officials who foresaw the likelihood of disaster, like Clark Clifford, let’s say, in 1965, and Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey, and a surprising number of insiders, those very same people will not only keep their mouths shut to the public about these lies, but they will loyally support the lies, they’ll reproduce them themselves, they will serve the president in these policies, as if their only loyalty was to the commander-in-chief, the president of the United States — a kind of Führer principle.

When McNamara brought out his book a year ago revealing that he had believed, at least as early as 1965, late 1965, that our course was unworkable, that it wouldn’t succeed, that it would only lead to a lot of deaths and a high-level stalemate, and at some point he realized, he tells us, that we really should get out, that that was the logic of his beliefs, nevertheless, he was challenged last year as to why he hadn’t said anything earlier, why he hadn’t resigned, why he hadn’t fought, effectively, against the war. And his answer to that is — could have appeared in any one of these World War II movies, except he wouldn’t have been wearing an American uniform as he said these words. You know, “My leader” — it would have been with a different accent, you know, more of a Henry Kissinger accent, shall we say? “I was only obeying orders. My loyalty was to the president. He appointed me.”

I thought it was healthy that McNamara was challenged on this so much and that the questions were raised, that should he not have done, if I can say this, what I did 25 years earlier. But it’s clear that he hasn’t gotten that message. And I don’t think that many people in the executive branch really have yet. It’s up to us to teach them, I think, a different way to behave.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan, do you think Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, if he was alive, should be tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I wish they should be forced to read the record of the Pentagon Papers. Just read it. Read the memos they wrote, and their colleagues wrote at the time, and what they said to the public and what they did. Read the whole history of it, and the preceding and the succeeding administrations. And then they should decide what to do with the rest of their lives.

Now, just the other day, this week, in fact, I heard McNamara on a C-SPAN broadcast asked if he had read the Pentagon Papers and — as I had hoped he would. He commissioned them, after all, and they, as he said, are in his garage now, having been in his safe at the Royal Bank. And he said he had never read them. Well, that’s pitiful. It’s kind of disgusting, really, that he didn’t have the guts to confront his own words in print to that extent, and what his own subordinates, his own officials working in the Pentagon, thought of the decision-making and their analyses in the course of that thing.

But I still think that it’s not too late for him and for others to go through that learning experience. And if they won’t do it, I think there should be kind of truth commissions of the kind that they have in Argentina and Chile and Brazil — at least these are discussed in all these places — as ways of bringing out the truth of what we’ve done. I’d like to see that done not just for Vietnam, but for Central America, in particular, for Indonesia and East Timor, and for Iran, and have a kind of glasnost, say, “The Cold War is over. Let’s be willing to entertain a decisive change in policy. And let’s start by really having the courage to face the truth about what we have done” — we officials — and what our officials have done in our name in these parts of the world over these years. Lay it out. Open the safes. And I think that would be a very strong move toward changing the policy, because I think their instinct was right to keep these things secret from the American public all these years, that the public couldn’t have swallowed these policies of death squads and torture and crews and covert actions all this time, and the human victims that have resulted from those, and they would have changed the policy. And I think that truth telling of this sort would be the way to get that policy change right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite the fact that Robert McNamara has admitted in his book that he had grave misgivings about the Vietnam War when he was secretary of defense more than 25 years ago, is it true that he still refuses to talk to you or debate you?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: A number of people have urged him to do it under various circumstances, and he hasn’t been willing. He certainly regards, from the point of view I’ve just described, what I did as disloyal to him, to the president, to the team, and as making me a bad person, that I did something very wrong. I think that that — I think he’s very sincere in believing that. I think that should be debated.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and then to The Washington Post and other papers. But that’s not quite how The New York Times identifies you.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know how they’re doing it lately. For many years, they identified me as the man who says that he gave the Pentagon Papers to the newspapers. And their rationale for it, which caused eyebrows to raise and people say, “What are they saying? You know, what is their relation to you?” — well, their relation was and is very much arm’s length. And something to tie this into what we’ve been talking about all along here is, I know pretty well that The New York Times, and I think all the other papers in the country, that I know of, have not really faced the question of their relation — of the legitimacy of the secrecy system altogether, and what it means for democracy, and how seriously they should take it. They do, in fact, even the Times still, defer to that and give that far more kind of idolatry than it deserves or that we can afford as a democracy.

The upshot of that was that they didn’t really have very warm feelings toward me. I don’t know what their feelings toward sources in general are. But I know that many people in the press regarded me as a traitor or as a bad guy. They were willing to run the Pentagon Papers, but they hadn’t really faced up to that question I raised earlier: What should I have done? What should McNamara have done? Was he right, then and now, in saying that he had no challenge to put this information out? Or was I right? We can’t both be right.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers 30 years ago today.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: The answer to the third question is that it is true that —

AMY GOODMAN: This is President Nixon.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: — as far as the capacity to govern is concerned, that to be under a constant barrage, 12 to 15 minutes a night on each of the three major networks for four months, tends to raise some questions in the people’s mind with regard to the president. And it may raise some questions…

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams and Brad Simpson. Our engineer is Anthony Sloan. Our technical director is Errol Maitland. If you’d like to reach us, you can send us email and mail@democracynow.org. That’s mail@democracynow.org. And you can write to us at Democracy Now!, 120 Wall Street, New York, New York 10005. That’s Democracy Now!, 120 Wall Street, New York, New York 10005. From the embattled studios of WBAI, from the studios of the banned and the fired, from the studios of you, our listeners, I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.