The Public Penitent

...Ellsberg's appearance on the Dick Cavett show, for instance, was most impressive...

...One book was published during this period under the Human Events imprint, a collection of official communist documents with an introduction by William Henry Chamberlin called "Blueprint for World Conquest...

...Sincerely yours, From an actress: Dear Senator: It was with revelation and the great hope for our country to listen to a man like you speak...

...And in fact, Lyndon Johnson believes that they were commissioned by Robert McNamara and were intended to be used by Robert Kennedy in his drive against Johnson for the Democratic Presidential nomination...

...If the body was tense and driven," says Halberstam, "the mind was mathematical, analytically bringing reason from chaos, always reason...

...To its credit, the Administration has not yet attempted to make political hay over the information in the Pentagon Papers...

...The life of the Ellsbergs is a heady one, for the models they create and the games they play can be large indeed, involving all of society and its citizens...

...But they inevitably overlooked one important factor -- the human...

...And the man of pure intellect suddenly discovers the whole welter of emotions that defines human beings...

...Out it came, all quantified, with per cents and indices...

...Or one is tempted to rehash the whole Tonkin incident...

...But still the attempt will be made to somehow discredit Mr...

...After reading the Pentagon Papers Americans are supposed to feel that they have been had - - then they are to cry out against the war...

...Ellsberg The Public Penitent John R. Coyne, J r . The McNamara-Pentagon papers were put together in the sixties by a group of Defense Department functionaries, most of them liberal, most of them anti-war...

...And John Roche dismisses the collection as "third-echelon chitchat...

...Toward the end of his reign McNamara, I believe, came to realize this, and his realization led to a particularly poignant understanding, finally of how dismally he had failed...

...1971, he firmly believes, will see a replay of 1964...

...Yet just beneath the surface, something else lurked, something obviously not lunacy but something nevertheless which drove the man...

...Agnew, who doesn't find this kind of tendency healthy at all, means by , "a national spirit of masochism...

...And so, because of what was known of the man, the oddness of his public personality, the lawlessness of his action and his grandiose notion of his place in the cosmos, many of us were prepared to dismiss him as a loon...

...Not because people have read and digested them - - only the complete bureaucrats possess the necessary immunity to boredom for that -but because of the way in which the media interpreters have chosen to use them...

...And when he appeared on a CBS special with Walter Cronkite on 23 June, this impression was in no way modified...

...His decision, he tells us, was taken after a long struggle during which he carefully considered the conflicting concepts of moral judgments and legality, private morality and the public good...

...The problem with the study," says one government official, "is that it is a prosecution brief masquerading as a dispassionate study...

...Thus the peculiar intensity of EUsberg's character as it transmits itself through the media...

...Like all the young technocrats who planned and carried out the Vietnam war, Ellsberg was a "defense intellectual...

...Most politicians do, after all, with the exception of a few like Barry Goldwater...

...Ellsberg himself seems always to have been a rather odd duck, variously described as an "intense, almost 'tompulsive talker...

...I have become militant and increasingly alienated from the country of my birth ~ to the point of shame, pure shame, at being an American citizen...

...Such men in a very real sense play God, and in the fifties and early sixties they came to be a whole new class in American society, and a most powerful one...

...and, finally, had incorporated the formerly independent states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia into the Soviet Union...

...Especially guilty of misinterpretation says Walt W. Rostow, former special assistant for national security affairs to President Johnson, have been the writers for the New York Times, whose treatment of the papers Rostow calls "the shoddiest piece of journalism I've seen since I entered public life in 1941...

...The reason: McNamara simply didn't understand the human dimension or, more accurately perhaps, simply didn't believe in it anymore than, say the Marxist believes in such a thing as human nature...

...Ellsberg wasn't mad...

...Like so many of his counterparts in the world of the univer-sities, the foundations and the media, Ellsberg represents a relatively new type, the mid-twentieth century Liberal intellectual technocrat...

...This isn't so alarming, of course, for most men at one time or another go through much the same sort of struggle...

...When the Henry Regnery Company was organized in 1947, therefore, it was not with the idea of publishing conservative books, but books which didn't necessarily fit the liberal ideology which so dominated publishing as to constitute a particularly effective form of censorship...

...And when Colonel Hacksworth, our most decorated officer, recently resigned his commission in disgust with the way we have operated in Vietnam, his harshest criticisms were reserved for those remotecontrol planners who thought of everything except that one intangible element that invariably determines how well troops perform in the field - - pride...

...This is of course understandable, when the national media tells you flatly that two Presidents have lied through their teeth about the reasons for involvement and the nature of our response...

...Cavett perhaps came closest to bringing it above ground when he referred to a Life photograph taken in Vietnam which showed Ellsberg happily clutching a chopper, staring off toward what presumably were enemy positions, apparently waiting eagerly to let off a spray of bullets...

...Sincerely, From California: Honorable Sir: Since 1961, I have been active in the peace movement...

...Daniel Ellsberg, the fanatic who pimped the stolen papers, hints broadly that there are secrets not yet unearthed that will implicate the Nixon Administration...

...The purpose, obviously, is to rouse among Americans sufficient moral revulsion for a popular outcry against the war...

...Now the character of this "public penitent" is worth examining, for it seems to me that he represents a rather stunning epitomization of all the illnesses of twentieth century Liberal man and his institutions and attitudes...

...By the time he was sworn in he had already identified the hundred problems of the Defense Department...

...Many times I have wanted to leave, to seek an easier life in a land of peace, but I have found such a course of action untenable...

...It isn't that they consciously overlooked it, of course...

...encyclopedic lists of alternative approaches to particular problems, routine exercises in the necessary dissimulations of government...

...I came into book publishing, however, by degrees, and as a result of my association with Felix Morley and Frank Hanighen in the publication of a Washington newsletter, Human Events...

...The papers~ says William F. Buckley, " a r e nothing more than memoranda expressing attitudes, contingency plans...

...In 1959 it seemed plausible to believe that every American citizen would one day be represented by an IBM card, and it was during the late fifties and into the midsixties that these people began to assume an increasingly important governmental function...

...by its actions had made it clear that it considered Poland an exclusive Russian preserve: had blasted Pius XII as a pro-fascist...

...And this is precisely what Mr...

...And it is tempting to make that clear once more...

...house generals like Maxwell Taylor representing the military in the planning...

...Halberstam relates a story that the newsmen like to tell...

...McNamara was not really taking it in...

...field commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff increasingly discovered that their decisions were being made for them in such places as the Rand Corporation...

...During the sixties, like so many others of his type, he was irresistably drawn to Washington by the character of Robert McNamara, the think-tank technocrat's beau ideal...

...It's hard to remember now just how powerful they were...

...Part of the problem is one of insulation the peculiar way in which the Twentieth Century has unfolded has led to the rise of groups and classes cut off from the daily life of the society and the majority of its inhabitants, and a consequent overdevelopment of one faculty, the intellectual, at the expense of others, such as the emotional...

...During those years have felt a sense of hopelessness and frustration that has at times led to terrible despair...

...But then one day it dawns...

...In some cases, such as that of Robert McNamara, the route lies through the giant corporation, although it should be remembered that McNamara modeled his Ford operation on the think-tank pattern, and by so doing inevitably made enemies among the corporation's men of affairs...

...McNamara was fascinated...

...Most of us who followed the news day by day already suspected that the Kennedys and Johnsons often spoke with forked tongues...

...Ellsberg, reacting to that picture of himself holding a machine gun, tells us just how puny one of the central tragedies of our time has become - - the contingency planner suddenly realizing that his contingency plans, developed like games in a think-tank, can actually be applied in the real world...

...And so I have remained, dedicated to the struggle, yet growing angrier as time goes on...

...Never once did I think, not even in my wildest hopes that I could or would ever want to reach across that gulf to shake the hand of a very brave and righteous man and to say thank you, thank you very much, Senator Gravel for what you have done...

...I equate you with Patrick Henry and while I hod thought Congress dead, I begin to wonder...

...Yet here he seemed calm, collected, sincere, almost completely rational - - almost...

...McNamara simply wasn't capable of understanding or appreciating people who were not like himself...

...Nixon through the papers...

...One expected him, especially after the Cronkite show, to display psychotic tendencies...

...The Henry Regnery Company began operations that year, but was not incorporated until 1948, taking over the pamphlet series and the remaining stock of "Blueprint for World Conquest...

...John R. Coyne, Jr...

...It was a mind that could continue to call on its mathematical kind of sanity long after the others, the good liberal social scientists who had never gotten beyond their original logarithms, had trailed off...

...There is nothing in the Pentagon Papers which could possibly harm Nixon and although Liberals searched avidly for dark Republican secrets as the administration attempted to restrain publication, there were none, nor could they understand that Nixon acted because he sincerely felt that it was wrong to publish secret information no matter who the information implicated and that he sincerely felt that the information disclosed, even though it had nothing to do with his own administration, might affect the credibility of the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world...

...12 The A l t e r n a t i v e October, 1971 From California: Dear Senator: I wish to thank you for giving me the first feeling of pride in being an American that I hove experienced in some time...

...as an American this is my war and my war to stop...

...The Colonel was very bright and read him immediately, like a man breaking the code...

...It could be argued, of course, that it is, in fact, rather unhealthy to have men stumbling through the streets flaying themselves with knotted thongs, but this is what the Liberal types would most like to see-- Mr.- Nixon dragging his cross up Capitol Hill, trailed by a weeping nation...

...But even without the papers to prove it, he assures us that he can sense a repeat of the 1964 escalation, How...

...They were cool and lucid, men of mathematical precision who had grown up in the atmosphere of the Cold War, students of nuclear power and parity,and deployment whose very professions seemed sometimes to the humanist uncivilized...

...His academic record at Harvard and Cambridge was brilliant...

...Under the regime of Robert McNarnara, especially, they took over larger and larger amounts of the work once reserved for men in the field...

...He had groups and committees studying them...

...The result is not unlike the sort of thing that happens when a fifty-year-old Jesuit suddenly discovers girls...

...And when, in some period of stress, such as the present period, the McNamara or the Ellsberg realizes this, the result can be an extreme renunciation of the old way of behaving and the fervent espousal of a new behavior...

...It was becoming increasingly difficult in any case to conduct'a publishing operation divided between Washington and Chicago, so in 1947 I decided to go it alone...

...show...

...I was participating in a criminal conspiracy to wage aggressive war," he told another...

...But their value as historical documents is highly questionable, because the papers themselves were selective...

...But McNamara wasn't interested in the Vietcongs...

...The criticism perhaps most often 14 The Alternative October, 1971 levelled at Robert McNamara was that he was inevitably correct intellectually but invariably incorrect in predicting the outcome of the strategies he set in motion...

...His answer., were lucid, thoughtful, despite an intelligent hour ana a half grilling...

...In a Harper's magazine article, "The Programming of Robert McNamara," David Halberstam says "He had come in at a dead run...

...He had his people, the bright young men plucked off the campuses or the shadow government of the Rand Corporation and other think-tanks...

...To many of those who knew him, Ellsberg seemed - - well - - squirrelly...

...One thinks, for instance, of the shabby treatment accorded Barry Goldwater in 1964, when people like Herblock depicted him as a beady-eyed bomb-thrower, opposed by Lyndon Johnson, the man of peace who, as he preached restraint during the campaign, had already made up his mind - - at least according to media interpretation - - that Curtis LeMay's advice to bomb them back to the Stone Age was best...

...Nixon and Kissinger have secretly revived the notion of "escalation" and at any moment we can expect resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam...

...I do wish you well...

...He wanted to talk about the Colonel: "That Colonel is one of the finest officers I ever met," he said...

...Brandt's answer was published by Human Events as a pamphlet, bearing the same title as the Morgenthau book, and became the first of a series of monthly pamphlets...

...Finally he interrupted: 'Now, let me see if I have it right, this is your situation: and then it came out from him -- all numbers and statistics, this many friendlies on this many operations, this many troops to attack 48 percent of them after dark...

...Sincerely yours, From Oregon: Senator Gravel: We love you...

...Garry Wills, in one of his feebler columns, casts around for something good to say about Ellsberg and finally is forced to celebrate "the healthy return of a half-forgotten figure out of our history, the public penitent...

...The temptation to make political hay is great...

...What we now think of as the "Conservative Movement" received its name and identity with the publication in 1954 of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind There had, of course, long been opposition to the dominant liberal ideology, in some cases on a high intellectual level - - Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, for example, and Hayek's Road to Serfdom had both preceded Kirk's book, but it was The Conservative Mind that brought the opposition together, gave it a name, and began the development of a coherent alternative...

...Through another set of papers from the same files, Kennedy and Johnson could probably have been made to look like the thwarted men of peace they both claimed to be...

...In the fifties, as Joseph Kraf~ points out, Like so many of his The Alternative October, 1971 13 type, he went to work for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, one of those think-tank operations that depends for its financial well being on the Department of Defense...

...The man of pure emotion must by nature appear masochistic, for emotionalism in its purest form feeds on self-suffering...

...Victor Gollancz was an extremely successful and astute publisher of Jewish background, a member of the Fabian society, and the founder, in the thirties, of the Left Rook Club...

...They move from school to good university to graduate school to brief service stints in the officer corps to some sort of publically or semipublically supported organization such as the Ford Foundation or the Rand Corporation or to the media or to the universities, where they work with concepts, attempting to apply abstractions to the operation of systems...

...If there were more people like you, we wouldn't be in the trouble we are now...

...Think-tank game-playing replaced military strategy and tactics, and...

...Later that day, the newsman went up to McNnmara and commented on how tough the situation was up there...

...And suddenly, if you were watching and listening closely, you saw it, and the references to women and children and the deep sense of shame and guilt which suggested mental illness all seemed to fit...

...Human Events, as the war ended, was one of the few publications to point out the dangers of the policy of unconditional surrender, and to remind its readers that a settlement based on hatred and revenge could neither bring peace nor would be in accordance with the traditions and ideals professed by this country...

...All of this, however, didn't prevent him from taking an extremely critical view of post-war allied...

...Shortly after the first of the documents appeared in the Times, the United States Senate, by a solid vote of 57 to 42, adopted a resolution urging the President to pull out of Vietnam by the end of 1971...

...On balance, it was an impressive performance...

...s an Assoc~mte and regular contributor to The Alteimative./-//s first book, The Kumquat Statem6nt,was published in November by Cowles and he is presently writing a study of Greek J mythology featuring the Vice President Agnew...

...Others tell of how Ellsberg seemed compelled to denounce his participation in DOD activities: "I come before you as a war criminal," he told one student audience...

...He had simply discovered emotions...

...Morley and Hanighen had founded Human Events in 1944, as World War II was approaching its end...

...Now the Colonel's performance was so blatant it was like a satire and one of the reporters began to laugh and had to leave the tent...

...The second issue of Human Events, for example, dated 9 February 1944, consisted of an article by Felix Morley called "The Trend Since Tehran," the Tehran Declaration having been signed some three months before by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin...

...That this process was dangerous is nowhere better illustrated than in the mismanagement of the Vietnam War...

...his hands were folded and he was frowning a little...

...What is alarming is that Ellsberg seems absolutely certain that in his struggle he was representing the nation as a whole and that it is for him to decide just what would be most beneficial for us, a role usually reserved for madmen and the New York Times...

...There was that strange secret smile, those funny anticipatory noddings, the constant wiping of the nose and chin, and above all, those eyes -- extremely bright, the stare intense, constantly blinking - - and just behind them a wary look, the look of a frightened deer as he watches the hunters through a thicket...

...And according to polls, even Southern hawks are now demanding an immediate withdrawal...

...McNamara was in Vietnam on an inspoction tour and on one specific occasion, "A Marine Colonel had a sand tablie showing the terrain and was patiently giving the briefing...

...The Vietnam War was conceived and mismanaged by Liberal Democrat civilians, with only a couple of tame Kennedy...

...But it could justifiably do so if it so desired, and it should do so if the President's genuine attempt to wind down the war and to cut American involvement continues to be treated as a Republican con game...

...One writer who knows him tells of his fear that he was constantly being followed and describes a party at which Ellsberg, for no apparent reason, appeared disguised as an Arab...

...And when he does, especially if he decides that his overdeveloped intellect has been misdirected, the renunciation is extreme, the act of expiation dramatic, and the man of pure ifltellect becomes the man of pure emotion...

...Rostow continued, "The Times headline writers, lead writers, editorial writers and columnists all went beyond the Pentagon papers in conveying around the world the charges of deceit by the President, charges which are not substantiated by the papers themselves...

...I should begin by saying that when I first became interested in publishing, we didn't describe ourselves as Conservative...

...The flagellant has become "the public penitent...

...But even without referring to the Pentagon Papers it can be reemphasized that the old truism of American politics - - Democrats get us into wars, Republicans get us out - - applies once again...

...When, therefore, Professor Karl Brandt of Stanford University sought a publisher to bring out an answer to Henry Morgenthau's Germany Is Our ProbLem, which had just appeared and proposed to convert Germany into a "goat pasture," it was quite natural that he should go to the publishers of Human Events--no one else, at that time, being even willing to discuss the publication of such a book...

...But this impression just doesn't hold up...

...Only occasionally did something else peep through - - a tendency to use terms such as "criminal" and "murderous" when referring to our actions in Vietnam, a strange allusion to a "sexist war," a statement that American "women and children" had always opposed the war...

...At this writing the operation has been successful...

...Though finally, when the mathematical version of sanity did not work out, when it turned out that the computer had not fed back the right answers and had underestimated those funny little far-off men in their raggedy pajamas, he would be striken with a profound sense of failure, he would at least briefly be a shattered man....And so in the end the Great Statistician became himself a statistic, one more casualty of the war...

...Our first list consisted of three books: a study of the phenomenon of Hitlerism by the Swiss philosopher, Max Picard, and two books on allied occupation policy in Germany by the English publisher, Victor Gollancz...

...There is not o "liberal" bone left in my body - - I am a radical through and through, and I hove found the gulf that separates me from the American system and its representatives to be a dark, gaping chasm, impossible to broach...

...A Conservative Publisher in a Liberal World Henry Regnery The editor of The Alternative suggested that I write something about my experiences as a publisher of conservative books...

...I have lived through insults, alienation from my family, red baiting, etc., because of my political beliefs...

...The series continued for some three years, and included among its authors Felix Morley, John U. Nef, Joseph M. Lalley, Arthur E. Morgan, Clare Booth Luce, William A. Orion, Robert M. Hutchins, Douglas Steere and Frank Chodorov...

...Their effect has been profound...

...But to express public indignation and then to capitalize on the information disclosed in the papers would not only be fruitless but insincere as well...

...those who could "see things as they were," to which small but distinguished group Morley and Hanighen belonged, were not at all convinced that the victorious conclusion of the war and the policy enunciated by the administration would introduce the era of peace and good will among the nations proclaimed by the official propaganda line...

...Nevertheless, although they are biased and although they never quite touch the heart of the whole matter - - the process of Presidential decision-making--it would be disingenuous to dismiss the Pentagon Papers as inconsequential...

...Unlike the majority of ordinary citizens, an Ellsberg has little experience of the whole range of experiences - - mundane and tragic, embarrassing and hilarious, noble and profane - - that form the development of man's character in society...

...While the New York Times had greeted the Tehran Decaration with the assertion that it "laid the foundations for a new and better order in the world," Morley pointed out that in the eleven weeks that had followed the pious declarations of the big three about "working together in peace," and welcoming all "freedom loving peoples" into a "World Family of Democratic Nations," Communist Russia had, without consulting its Western Allies done the following: signed an exclusive "mutual assistance pact" with the Czechoslovak government in exile...

...The papers have been used, quite simply, to discredit everyone connected with Vietnam...

...Cavett asked whether he had realized that those bulletts would kill someone, and Ellsberg, for one of the few time's in the interview, was evasive...

...I would find it a great honor to meet with you one day...

...Not too different, really, from some demented Hollywood madman act on the late...

...The Saintliness of Dr...

...Which then consisted primarily of a four-page essay on some aspect of foreign policy...

...The man of pure intellect must by nature appear at times sadistir, for he understands little of what pains others...

...Well, he can't quite say, but such types are big on devining moods through some sort of mystical process - - the same sort of process by which it is determined that we are all collectively guilty and should do collective penance...

...a man driven" with a "bent for dramatization and self dramatization...

...messianic crusader" with "a martyr complex...

...And then there are the strange delusions...

...Without breaking stride he went on with the briefing simply switching its terms...

...If it is not stopped, and by the power of this people, there will soon be no land of peace anywhere - - p~rhaps no world at all...

...It was the first such resolution ever to win in the Senate...

...Such comments, coupled with the theft and delivery of the documents, led one writer to conclude that Ellsberg's role in the fencing operation derived from "his feeling of personal guilt and the need for expiation through action...

...At that time, 1946, when Stalin was referred to as "Good Old Uncle Joe," and any realistic appraisal of Soviet Russia regarded as a particularly obnoxious form of heresy, the publication of the aims and methods of the Communist International created something of a sensation, and, I must say, whetted my appetite to publish more books...

...Military men did not set policy under Kennedy and Johnson...

...It's just that you can't run something like pride through a computer, and there's no way of programming it into any strategic game you're playing...

...The games players and the contingency planners often saw the large picture brilliantly...

...Such men inevitably have followed similar patterns...

...The Ellsbergs are curiously insulated, protected from reality, and they develop hugely in one direction, but usually at the expense of others...

...And perhaps now that the military is under such withering fire, it is worthwhile to remind Americans that the military involvement was only operational...