The Nation: Man with the Monkey Wrench

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Ellsberg did finally get to Viet Nam —as a member of Major General Edward Lansdale's senior liaison office of elite intelligence agents. Later he was put in charge of evaluating the new pacification program for the U.S. embassy. In this sensitive post, Ellsberg traveled all over Viet Nam, had access to the highest civilian officials and saw the ugliest face of the war: the corruption, manipulation and terrorism on both sides. He must have also seen more than his share of civilian casualties, for it was the Vietnamese victims that eventually came to plague his conscience. Still, while he was serving his tour with Lansdale and the U.S. embassy, his only reservations about the war revolved around its conduct. Otherwise, as he wrote in the class notes for his 15th Harvard reunion, his role as a combat observer compensated for "a somewhat unfulfilled career as a Marine platoon leader and company commander during peacetime."

When he wrote that, Ellsberg was laid up in Bangkok with a severe case of hepatitis. He felt that "the alternatives before me are to stay on with the Government in Viet Nam or to return home to research and consult: a choice between the engine room and the belly of the whale." The hepatitis helped him to make up his mind, and Ellsberg returned to the Rand Corp. in 1967, working basically out of the Santa Monica, Calif., office. He kept all of his top-level security clearances and remained active as a Government consultant. Ellsberg worked with Henry Kissinger—his former teacher—to smooth the transition from the Johnson to the Nixon Administration, and has said that he drew up the options for a Nixon Viet Nam policy. According to Ellsberg, Kissinger adopted all of his proposals almost verbatim except one: a fixed withdrawal date.

Soon Ellsberg, who seemed set for a brilliant Government career, was beginning to feel the lash of collective guilt. Even before the Tet offensive in 1968, he began to voice his doubts about the war; his initial attack came during a gathering of intellectuals in Bermuda under the sponsorship of the Carnegie Endowment. As the war dragged on, his sense of personal guilt heightened and his torment deepened. His conflict had developed to the point that even Kissinger was reluctant to include Ellsberg in the Nixon planning group.

Ellsberg disconcerted Rand officials by organizing a group of five associates to write a sulfurous letter to the New York Times and the Washington Post denouncing the war. He also wrote a scathing piece for the New York Review of Books on Nixon and the Laos incursion. He began to see not only himself but everyone who did not demonstrate actively against the war as a "war criminal." He seemed obsessed, and his friends found it impossible to get him to talk of other topics; many were put off when he called them "good Germans" for not protesting against the war.

By the spring of 1970, he realized that his views were becoming an embarrassment to Rand, so he resigned and accepted a fellowship at M.I.T., aiming to write a book on Viet Nam. He remarried (he has two teen-age children by a previous marriage) and settled down in Cambridge, Mass. But Ellsberg could not keep his singular mind off the war. He had the support of his wife Patricia, a Radcliffe graduate and daughter of Toy Manufacturer Louis Marx, a Nixon supporter.