Wohlstetter and veteran hawk Paul Nitze formed the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy and set out to defeat the ABM treaty. They recruited Richard Perle, Edward Luttwak, Peter Wilson, and Paul Wolfowitz. One committee enthusiast, Dean Acheson, anointed them “our four musketeers.”96 Wilson and Wolfowitz had studied with Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago, where he taught political science. Perle had become a disciple while still in high school.
Following the unsuccessful effort to stop the ABM treaty, Perle took a job with Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Operating from what was known as “the Bunker,” Jackson’s foreign policy team would eventually include a gaggle of leading neoconservatives. Jackson and his acolytes bristled at the fact that the SALT treaty allowed the Soviets a temporary advantage in the number of missiles and in missile throw weight. They ignored the fact that the United States had significant advantages in terms of both numbers of nuclear warheads and technology. The United States also had a three-to-one advantage in bombers. Jackson charged U.S. negotiators with having “caved in” to their Soviet counterparts. He attached an amendment to the SALT treaty stipulating that no future treaty could permit the United States anything less than numerical parity in any category of weapons. Jackson pressured the White House into firing a quarter of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) staff, including a dozen people involved in SALT negotiations. The new, more conservative head of the ACDA, Fred Ikle, recruited Wolfowitz to fill one of the vacancies. In 1974, Jackson’s allies passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied trade benefits to any Communist nation that restricted citizens’ rights to emigrate freely. Kissinger was furious, claiming that the amendment had “blighted U.S.-Soviet relations ever after,” which was just what Jackson, Perle, and company wanted.97
In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War, showing that the government had systematically lied to the public about Vietnam for years. RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg was one of the few people to have had access to the study in the summer of 1969. The more he read of the history of the French and then U.S. invasions, the more he understood the moral indefensibility of U.S. policy. By September 1969, he had drawn several key conclusions: The war had been “an American war almost from the beginning.” It was a “struggle of Vietnamese… against American policy and American financing, proxies, technicians, firepower, and finally, troops and pilots.” It was only U.S. money, weapons, and manpower that had kept the political violence at the scale of a “war” since 1954. And, most significantly, he understood that
It was no more a “civil war” after 1955 or 1960 than it had been during the U.S.-supported French attempt at colonial reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power—which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest—was not a civil war. To say that we had “interfered” in what is “really a civil war,” as most American academic writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier official one of “aggression from the North.” In terms of the UN Charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.
Ellsberg recalled his former Pentagon boss John McNaughton telling RAND researchers that “if what you say is true, we’re fighting on the wrong side.” Ellsberg realized that stating it that way had “missed the reality since 1954. We were the wrong side.” Therefore, in his mind, the war was a “crime,” an “evil,” “mass murder.” And he knew that Nixon was lying about ending it. In fact, through his bombing policy, Nixon was showing the North that there were no limits to what he was willing to do to achieve “victory.”98
Inspired by the example of young activists who chose to go to prison to protest the war and increasingly desperate to end the bloodshed, Ellsberg photocopied the forty-seven-volume McNamara study. He then tried to convince several senators to enter the study into the public record. When that failed, he went to Neil Sheehan of the New York Times. On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers. On June 15, the Justice Department filed for an injunction in Federal District Court in New York. The judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Times. Such an action was unprecedented. An injunction had never before been used to stop the presses in the United States.
To circumvent the injunction, Ellsberg then gave the documents to the Washington Post, which took up where the Times left off until it too was blocked. But, anticipating that, Ellsberg had gotten copies to seventeen other newspapers. After the Post was enjoined, excerpts appeared in the Boston Globe and then the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In all, nineteen newspapers printed sections of the papers. Meanwhile, the FBI conducted a thirteen-day manhunt to try to find Ellsberg, who had gone into hiding. The Detroit News interviewed Ellsberg’s father, a Republican who had twice voted for Nixon. The elder Ellsberg proudly defended his son’s actions: “Daniel gave up everything to devote himself to ending that foolish slaughter…. If he did give them that report, and if the government accuses him of some crime… well, he might be saving some boys they’d have sent there otherwise.”99
On June 28, Ellsberg surrendered to the authorities. As he walked toward the federal building, a reporter asked, “How do you feel about going to prison?” Ellsberg replied, “Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end the war?”100 On June 29, Alaska Democratic Senator Mike Gravel tried unsuccessfully to read the papers on the floor of Congress, but he later managed to read them into the record in a hastily called evening subcommittee session. He also distributed a large number of unpublished top secret documents to reporters. The following day, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, releasing the Times and Post to resume publication. Ellsberg, however, was indicted on criminal felony charges and faced 115 years in prison.
Nixon actually welcomed the leaks showing years of lies about Vietnam by Democratic administrations. He salivated at the thought of leaking more documents exposing Kennedy’s involvement in the Diem assassination. Kissinger called it a “gold mine,” but when he hesitated to undertake the leaking himself, Nixon instructed Charles Colson to do so.
Nixon and Kissinger decided to destroy Ellsberg. Kissinger told Nixon, “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America today. He must be stopped at all costs.” In late July, Kissinger railed against Ellsberg to Nixon: “that son of a bitch—First of all, I would expect—I know him well…. I am sure he has some more information…. I would bet that he has more information that he’s saving for the trial. Examples of U.S. war crimes that triggered him into it.”101