Kissinger’s Shadow (13 page)

“Kissinger,” Ellsberg remembered, “liked the sound of that.” So the new director of national security asked Ellsberg, in early 1969, to compile the questions. According to Marvin and Bernard Kalb, the very first thing Kissinger did when he “arrived at his office in the White House basement on January 20, 1969, was to fire [Ellsberg's] list of fifty questions at a bureaucracy struggling to make the transition from Johnson to Nixon.” Kissinger set “impossible deadlines,” demanding “detailed answers from the State and Defense departments, the CIA, Commerce and Treasury, and the Bureau of the Budget to such questions as: What is the state of American relations with China? With the Soviet Union? With India, both Vietnams, and Indonesia?” The list went “on and on.” The questions, as Ellsberg predicted, prompted a backlash. “Who the hell does he think he is anyhow?” And soon a counterproposal for reorganizing the NSC around the State Department began to float around, which allowed Kissinger to identify potential rivals. The proposal was quashed and its authors were sidelined.

That first stage of the exercise worked well for Kissinger. The next, not so much. Kissinger had asked Ellsberg to collate, analyze, and average the responses to the questions related to the Vietnam War, over five hundred pages in total. The gloom revealed by the survey was astounding. Even those hawks “optimistic” about the pacification of Vietnam thought that it would take, on average, 8.3 years to achieve success. All respondents agreed that the “enemy's manpower pool and infiltration capabilities can outlast allied attrition efforts indefinitely” and that nothing short of perpetual troops and bombing could save South Vietnam.

When the findings were presented to Kissinger, he must have immediately recognized the trap he had fallen into. For all his warnings about how the “accumulation of facts” by technocrats like Ellsberg has the effect of sapping political will, Kissinger had foolishly given him free rein to, in effect, data mine the bureaucracy, providing him with hard evidence that the majority of the foreign service thought the war either was unwinnable or could be won only with actions that were politically impossible: permanent occupation or total obliteration.

The negativity of Ellsberg's survey added to the state of siege that quickly fell over the Nixon White House, compelling the use, over and over again, of the word
savage
to describe the violence he hoped to visit on North Vietnam. Maybe, in the face of ongoing confirmation that he wouldn't be able to bend Hanoi to his will, Kissinger thought by repeating the word like an incantation he could keep Ellsberg's gods of evidence and fact at bay.

Ellsberg proposed a follow-up survey. “We've had enough questions for now,” Kissinger said.
*

*   *   *

Kissinger was the statesman, Ellsberg the expert. And according to Kissinger's worldview, Ellsberg shouldn't have existed, or at least he shouldn't have done what he did. Midlevel experts and analysts were supposed to be risk-avoiding functionaries, little better than insurance actuaries. Ellsberg was what Kissinger in his undergraduate thesis called a “fact-man.” His faith in data, his belief that he could capture the vagaries of human behavior in mathematical codes and then use those codes to make decisions, should have led him to a state of, if not paralysis, then predictability. As Kissinger would later write, “most great statesmen” are “locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices, for the scope of the statesman's conception challenges the inclination of the expert toward minimum risk.”
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But it was Ellsberg who was speaking out against the war and then leaking top-secret documents, taking a tremendous risk, including the possibility of imprisonment. And with this one audacious act, he changed the course of history.

The difference between Ellsberg and Kissinger is illustrated by the Pentagon Papers themselves. The “major lesson” offered by the massive study, Ellsberg thought, “was that each person repeated the same patterns in decision making and pretty much the same policy as his predecessor without even knowing it,” thinking that “history had started with his administration, and had nothing to learn from earlier ones.” Ellsberg, the economist, believed that breaking down history into discrete pieces and studying the decision making process, including the consequences of those decisions, provided a chance to break the destructive pattern.

But when Ellsberg tried, in their last meeting before leaking the documents, to get Kissinger to read the papers, Kissinger brushed him off. Kissinger, when he became national security adviser, was given a copy of the study, so he knew what it was: exactly the kind of history writing he had long warned about, designed to entrap executives into thinking that what was has to be, an endless chain of causes and effects resulting in doubt, guilt, and defeat. That the study was compiled by an amorphous committee of experts, analysts, and functionaries only underscored the danger.
*
“Research,” Kissinger wrote in 1966, “often becomes a means to buy time and to assuage consciences. Studying a problem can turn into an escape from coming to grips with it.”
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“Do we really have anything to learn from this study?” he asked Ellsberg, wearily. “My heart sank,” recalls Ellsberg.
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*   *   *

On Monday, June 14, 1971, the day after the
New York Times
published its first story on the papers, Kissinger, at a senior staff meeting that included Nixon, exploded. He waved his arms, stomped his feet, and pounded his hands on a Chippendale table, shouting: “This will totally destroy American credibility forever.… It will destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy in confidence.… No foreign government will ever trust us again.” “Henry was jumping up and down,” was how Nixon remembered the scene, which according to one biographer shocked even those used to Kissinger's outbursts. By this point, Kissinger had become known for his “temper tantrums, jealous rages, and depressions.”
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“That poor fellow is an emotional fellow,” Nixon remarked in late 1971 to John Ehrlichman. “We just have to get him some psychotherapy,” Ehrlichman responded.
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The following days brought more phone calls and meetings, as Nixon consulted with his inner circle—Kissinger, Haldeman, Mitchell, and Ehrlichman, and others—on how best to respond. The Pentagon Papers were a bureaucratic history of America's involvement in Southeast Asia up until Johnson's presidency. There was nothing specifically damaging to Nixon. But it was Kissinger's “fury” that convinced Nixon to take the matter seriously. “Without Henry's stimulus,” John Ehrlichman said, “the president and the rest of us might have concluded that the Papers were Lyndon Johnson's problem, not ours.” Kissinger “fanned Richard Nixon's flame white hot.”
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Why? The leak was bad for Kissinger in a number of ways. He was just then negotiating with China to reestablish relations and was afraid the scandal might sabotage those talks. He feared that Ellsberg, working with other dissenters on the NSC staff, might have breached the closed informational circuit that he had worked hard to establish, perhaps even acquiring classified memos on Cambodia.
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But Kissinger's rage was also as much about the leaker as about the leak, obvious in the way he swung between awe and agitation when describing Ellsberg to his coconspirators, as almost Promethean in his intellect and appetites. “Curse that son of a bitch, I know him well,” he began one Oval Office meeting:

He's a genius.… He was a hardliner. He went—he volunteered for service in Vietnam. He was so nuts that he'd drive around all over Vietnam with a carbine when it was guerilla-infested, and he'd shoot at—he has My Lai cases on his—he'd shoot at peasants in the fields on the theory everyone in black—.… The man is a genius. He's one of the most brilliant men I've ever met.

In other conversations, Kissinger said that Ellsberg had hunted Vietnamese peasants from helicopters and was a drug-crazed sex maniac. “A despicable bastard,” Kissinger said. “Passionate in his denunciation of Daniel Ellsberg,” was how Ehrlichman remembered Kissinger.
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Kissinger keyed his performance to stir up Nixon's varied resentments, depicting Ellsberg as some kind of liberal and hedonistic superman—smart, subversive, promiscuous, perverse, and privileged. “He's now married a very rich girl,” Kissinger told Nixon. “Nixon was fascinated,” Ehrlichman said.

“Henry got Nixon cranked up,” Haldeman remembered, “and then they started cranking each other up until they both were in a frenzy.” “Kissinger,” he said, “was absolutely infuriated and, in his inimitable fashion, managed to beat the president into an equal froth of fury.” Haig said that Kissinger “did drive the president's concern” about the leak.

“It shows you're a weakling, Mr. President,” Kissinger warned Nixon, if he were to let Ellsberg off.

It was in the meeting where Kissinger gave his most detailed description of Ellsberg (the one where he admitted that he passed on classified information to Nixon's campaign in the fall of 1968) that Nixon ordered a series of illegal covert operations. “Blow the safe,” he said, hoping to get that bombing-halt file so he could “blackmail” Johnson into speaking out against Ellsberg. “I want it implemented on a thievery basis,” the president directed. It was also in this meeting that Nixon ordered the “plumbers” to be established, a clandestine unit headed by Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy that conducted a number of buggings and burglaries, including the one at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

The plumbers were also responsible for breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in California, an operation that directly stemmed from Kissinger's portrayal of Ellsberg as unhinged. According to Haldeman, “the reason for trying to get Ellsberg's psychiatrist's files is explained by the desire to find evidence to support Kissinger's vivid statement about Ellsberg's weird habits.” The information was to be used to “discredit his character.”
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“He's nuts, isn't he?” Haldeman asked Kissinger in one of their meetings.

“He's nuts,” Kissinger answered.

*   *   *

Earlier, in the meeting where he suggested that Kissinger survey the bureaucracy as a way of establishing his dominance over it, Ellsberg, who won the highest of security clearances at a very young age, had warned Kissinger of the danger of too much knowledge. It's a lengthy speech, worth quoting in full:

Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

I've had a number of these myself, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even
existed
. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all—so much! incredible!—suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't … and that all those
other
people are fools.

Over a longer period of time—not too long, but a matter of two or three years—you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the
New York Times
can. But that takes a while to learn.

In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to
learn
from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And
that
mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues … and with myself.

You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
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