In eulogies Daniel Ellsberg is defined as a “whistleblower,” but he didn’t really break the news about “our” role in Vietnam to US Americans who had attended a teach-in or read about the war in Ramparts, or the Nation, or the underground press, or listened to Pacifica radio, or been deployed there and seen the reality with their own eyes. By photocopying and releasing a massive, detailed report ordered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on US involvement in Vietnam, Ellsberg and Anthony Russo risked life imprisonment to document and supplement what millions of us already knew and were saying: that the government had been lying all along, that the US was upholding a corrupt regime, that the insurgents would prevail.
Dubbed “the Pentagon Papers” when published in April ‘71 by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the documents we read thanks to Ellsberg are heartbreaking and infuriating. At the end of World War Two, Ho Chi Minh had written eight letters to the White House pledging friendship and asking that the US not support France’s effort to reimpose colonial rule. If only Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived for a year beyond the end of World War Two, maybe the White House would have responded wisely. But under Harry Truman, Ho’s letters were ignored. “We” backed the French, who were decisively defeated by the Viet-Minh in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, where the victors came marching in sandals and the vanquished retreated in tanks.
If you were woke back then, you might have heard the whistle being blown by an Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett whose reports from Vietnam were picked up by the National Guardian, IF Stone’s Weekly, and other leftist publications. In March, 1962 Kathie Amatniek wrote in the Harvard Crimson: “By this time there could be little doubt of Diem’s lack of popular support or the sincerity of his allegiance to any kind of democratic ideal... The US has stuck rigidly to a line of Cold War opportunism... Naturally our support of the French in the name of anti-communism antagonized nationalists of every political hue. Somehow we assumed that the Bao Dai regime, instituted by the French in 1949 to divide and weaken the independence movement, had popular support.” (The Crimson was one of four newspapers read in the White House in the JFK years... In the ‘70s Kathie changed her last name to Sarachild.)
What follows is a chronology from Aboveground, a leaflet/newspaper produced in the fall of 1969 by Vietnam vets stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. The boldfacing is theirs:
DECEMBER 19, 1946—Viet Minh forces throughout Indochina attack French troops. The French-Indochina war begins. Understand that France held Indochina as a colony for years (just as the British held America) and just 26 days prior to the outbreak of the conflict, on November 23, French troops opened fire on the civilian” population of Hai Phong killing 6,000.
DECEMBER 23. 1950 United States signs Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with France, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for indirect US military aid to VN, Cambodia and Laos.
OCTOBER 12, 1952 The 200th US ship carrying military aid arrives in Saigon.
MAY 8, 1954 Despite years of French assurances of impending victory, Dien Bien Phu falls.
MAY8-JULY 21 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina. Agreements are signed on July 20 and 21 and the main provisions concerning Vietnam are that (1) Vietnam is to be partitioned along the 17th parallel into North and South Vietnam, (2) regulations are imposed on foreign military bases and personnel and on increased armaments, (3), countrywide elections, leading to the reunification of North and South Vietnam, or to be held on July 20, 1965, and four on an international control commission parenthesis ICC) is to be established to supervise the implementation of the agreements. The United States and Vietnam are not signatories to the agreements. The United States issues unilateral declaration stating that it “will refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb” the Geneva agreements, “would view any renewal of the aggression in violation of the aforesaid agreements with grave concern and they’re seriously threatening international peace and security,” and (3) “shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections, supervised by the UN to ensure that they are conducted fairly.”
OCTOBER 1, 1954 Eisenhower letter to Diem promising “economic assistance.”
FEBRUARY 12, 1955 The US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) takes over the training of the South Vietnamese Army
FEBRUARY 19, 1955 Talks were scheduled to begin (according to Geneva Agreement) for the preparation of all-Vietnam, elections to be held on July 20, 1956, to reunite the country. The government of South Vietnam rejects the North Vietnamese government’s invitation to discuss the elections, on the grounds that in North Vietnam the people would not be able to express their will freely and that falsified votes in North Vietnam could overrule the votes in South Vietnam.
DECEMBER 12, 1955 US Consulate in Hanoi is closed.
JULY 20, 1956—All-Vietnamese election, as provided in 1965 Geneva declaration, fails to take place.
Senator Wayne Morse in a speech at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas, May 14, 1965, said of the scheduled elec- tions “Undoubtedly, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh would have won such a free election. President Eisenhower declares in his Mandate for Change that all the experts he talked to in that period believed Ho would get at least 80 percent of the vote... Ho was the nationalist patriot of Vietnam who had our favor and our help in WW II when he organized local resistance to the Japanese occupation. Thereafter, he led the resistance to the effort of France to resume its prewar colonial dominion in Indochina.”
The Aboveground chronology quotes a teach-in speech excerpted in The Viet Nam Reader (edited by Mark Raskin and Bernard Fall): “America’s failure, of course, to build up an effective government under Diem is now well known, but this was not immediately apparent, for after Geneva his regime enjoyed several years of grace during which Ho Chi Minh’s followers left it pretty much alone. Essentially this was due to the fact that the Geneva Agreements had promised nationwide elections for 1956 and it was primarily because of this provision and because the agreements also stipulated that France would be responsible for carrying out the accords south of the 17th Parallel —and that France would remain there until the elections were held—it was primarly because of those reasons that the Viet-Minh withdrew its armies from the South and for a considerable period suspended revolutionary activity there.
“But with American encouragement Diem refused to permit the elections in 1956 and France washed her hands of the responsibilities which she had assumed at Geneva. Regardless of what sophistry has been employed to demonstrate otherwise, by enouraging Diem to defy this central provision of the Geneva agreements, the United States reneged on the position it had taken there in its own unilateral declaration.
“Civil war in Vietnam became inevitable, for when a military struggle for power ends on the agreed condition that the competition will be transferred to the political level, can the side which violates the agreed conditions legitimately expect that the military struggle will not be resumed?”
“As the editors of The Vietnam Reader state, ‘The Second Indochina War Started on July 2 1 , 1956. On that day, the dead- line passed which had been set two years earlier at Geneva for reunification elections to be held between the two zones of Vietnam.’“‘
In 1964 a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, Clark Kissinger, commissioned a peacenik named Lee Baxandall (who wasn’t in SDS) to produce an antiwar poster to run in the New York subways. Lee, a close friend, roped me in. I wasn’t in SDS either, but I was working at Scientific American and he knew I could get it done. With help from the art director, Jerome Snyder, and the Cambodian mission to the United Nations (in those days you could just walk into the building, there were no metal detectors), I got the poster made. I don’t remember who came up with the wording, but it’s obvious that, with respect to Vietnam, we considered the violation of the Geneva Accords to be our government’s original sin.
Never forget it was “patriotism” that always motivated Dan Ellsberg.
Never forget Dan Ellsberg started out in life serving as a young platoon leader and company commander in the 2nd Marine Division.
Never forget Dan Ellsberg was a leading nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation. He successfully challenged the then-existing plans of the United States National Security Council and the Strategic Air Command for winning a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Never forget Dan Ellsberg worked in the Pentagon from August 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton. He then went to South Vietnam for the next two years, working for General Edward Lansdale as a member of the State Department.
It was always patriotism and a desire to serve his country that motivated Dan Ellsberg.
Always.