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James DiEugenio on The Pentagon Papers and The Post
'Our Hidden History' Interview

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Transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and flow

OHH: Alright, James Di Eugenio is the publisher and editor of Kennedysandking.com. He just published a review at Consortiumnews.com, that's the late Robert Parry's website, called "The Post and the Pentagon Papers", a review of the new film, "The Post". Before we start, this is was published at Consortium News, do you want to say a couple words about the passing of Robert Parry?

DiEugenio: Yes, I would. It's a real loss for journalism, it's a real loss for people who are interested in alternative sources of information, and I think it's a real loss ... whether we know it or not ... for this country. In my opinion, Robert Parry was the finest journalist in America for about the last 20 years. There are really ... I mean, come on ... there's other people who have bigger names, like Bob Woodward, you know, and Seymour Hersh. You know, there's other people who have wider circulation, like Mike Isikoff, but there was no one in my opinion who could match what Bob Parry did in about the last 20 years. By the way, I should say, before that.

If you take a look at the stories he broke when he was working in the mainstream press, I mean, it's really a very impressive list going all the way back to Reagan's illegal war in Central America to his discovery of drug running by the CIA. He was the first guy to write about that with his partner Brian Barger. He really went after the Iran/Contra scandal. And he was the best journalist, I believe, on the October Surprise. He was the first guy to link Iran Contra with the election of 1980, tracing the arms shipments back to the whole October Surprise thing, showing that although the date went under separate names, they were actually connected.

He worked for three mainstream organizations. He worked for the Associated Press, he worked for Newsweek, he worked for Bloomberg News. And that all told was over a period of 10 or 12 years. He did amazing work. Then he just decided that American journalism had become so polarized, had been so much in thrall to the neo-con movement that had taken over both Washington and the media, that you just couldn't do honest work anymore. So, that's when he decided to go out on his own and started first a paper magazine called Consortium News, and then he turned that into an online magazine. He started this, he cashed in his retirement fund. I think he started in '95, and at the time of his death, which was just a few days ago, he was still going strong. He published it for about 22-23 years. He did not take advertising, none at all. He survived on his fund drives from the people who appreciated his kind of journalism, and there were quite a few people.

I owe a lot to Bob because he published my first movie review back in 2011, when I did a review of Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar. That had been turned down by Salon, so Lisa Pease said, "Why don't you try Bob Parry?" So, I sent him the article, and before I knew it, it was up, it was up on his site. Since then, I did several articles ... well, not several, more like 20 or 30 ... most of them film reviews, but also book reviews. My latest one, I guess that's the best way to segue into, my review called "The Post and The Pentagon Papers."

DiEugenio: By the way, I have to say the last time I talked to Bob was I think the day after Christmas, not knowing that he had the first of a series of strokes on Christmas Eve. It ended up that he died of pancreatic cancer, even though he had regular checkups, I guess they couldn't detect it. Now, I really, really hope ... I think his son and his assistant Chelsea are going to try and make it a go. They're going to try and keep it going. So, I really hope everybody who's listening to this, please go over there and if you like it, and I don't see how anybody who is listening to this couldn't like it, go ahead and contribute whatever you can. Alright? And become part of that group, because there isn't anything like it, in my opinion.

The great promise of online journalism was pretty much stillborn, I believe. There was a big flurry of this stuff, you know, with things like the Huffington Post, and Talking Points Memo would be another one, Daily Kos and things like that. In my opinion, none of them ever fulfilled what we hoped they would. None of them, which of course, I've said in other forums, the paradigm, the high point of American journalism since World War II, I believe, at least mass journalism, was Ramparts Magazine and the LA Free Press, and none of those things that I mentioned ever came close to them. Bob was the only person who came close to it. For him, there was no taboo. There was nothing sacred. He's one of the very, very few sites that let writers like myself and Ray McGovern, talk about the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy without assuming the Warren Commission was correct. I can't think of any other site except maybe Op Ed News, that's about it. But Op Ed News is really more of a blog. It doesn't do magazine stories.

DiEugenio: By the way, Bob let me write some very hard hitting and long articles. The only time he ever cut me was when I went on too long. He thought ... you know, most people online, editors say that readers don't like reading really, really, really long essays. So, he cut me once for length. That was it. Bob let you do that. It's a really great loss. Myself, Len Osanic over at Black Op Radio, I think of me and Lisa Pease talking of Bob's death, and then Oliver Stone on his Facebook page ... I'm very surprised that his death was noted by The New York Times and The Washington Post. But it's a very severe loss to the United States. I just hope the Consortium News survives, I really do.

Concerning how good he was, what a great person he was, he let me write this 10 page review of this newest Stephen Spielberg/Tom Hanks production called The Post which is supposed to be based on the Pentagon Papers case, but it's really not. When I heard it was coming down the pike, I called up Daniel Ellsberg, and I asked him ... I said, "Is this going to be based upon you?" He said, "No, Jim, it's not based upon me." I said, "What's it based upon?" He said, "It's based upon Katharine Graham."I said, "What?" He goes, "Yeah." I said, "Are you a consultant?" He said, "Not really." I said, "You mean they didn't put you under contract?" He said, "No." "Did they talk to you at all?" He said, "One guy called me once."

I'm sorry to laugh, but if you know anything about the Pentagon Papers case, and you're making a movie about it, and you talk to Daniel Ellsberg once, and you don't even put him under contract to consult on the film, I mean, how serious of a film are you making? Because the whole point is that the Pentagon Papers, that case went on for almost three years. From late 1970 to the summer of 1973, it went on. When you talk about the Pentagon Papers, it's such a wide expanse of material, of locations, of personages, that there's really three things you're talking about. Most people don't know this because most people haven't read ... there's about 12 or 13 good books on the subject. I read most of them for that review.

DiEugenio: But first of all there's the Pentagon Papers themselves. This was a secret study commissioned by Bob McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, in the summer of 1967. He, by this time, was having severe doubts about Johnson's conduct of the war, President Johnson's conduct of the war. If you recall, Johnson's policies had completely overthrown what Kennedy's policies were. Because Johnson had done something that Kennedy was never going do, which was commit large amounts of combat troops into theater in South Vietnam. I think by this time there were probably at least 450,000 combat troops there.

It was going to peak out in the spring of 1968 at 540,000 combat troops. Now, there's a lot of reports about Johnson's ... the conflict that was beginning between Johnson and McNamara at this time. When McNamara commissioned the Pentagon Papers, one of the reasons he labeled them top secret was that he didn't want Johnson to find out about them. He knew that they would get terminated. So, the chain of command on the Pentagon Papers was from his deputy, John McNaughton, to McNaughton's assistant, Morton Halperin. Then Morton Halperin assigned Leslie Gelb, a research analyst, to conduct the day to day operations of putting together this encyclopedic study.

It came out that it's really a total of 49 volumes. Most people, including myself, thought it was 47, but there's actually two more volumes that were found. It's really about 7,000 in it's entirety ... it's about 7,500 pages. It's a combination, the way it's constructed is that it's a combination of narrative telling the story of American involvement going back to 1945, studded with documents throughout proving the facts of the narrative. I think a good estimate would be that it's about 4,200 pages of narrative with about 3,300 pages of documents proving the story itself. Now, this went on for 18 months, and I think one number I saw is that Gelb eventually employed 91 researchers to write the Pentagon Papers. One of them was Ellsberg. So, that's one of the ways that Ellsberg knew about it.

If you've ever read the Pentagon Papers, and I strongly recommend you read at least a summary of them ... there's a good summary that just came out, which is The New York Times, what they printed, which was I think five days of stories, three days before they were sued, two days after they were sued. But it still comes to about 700 pages. Because the Times, their articles were very long as opposed to The Washington Post articles, which were about one third the length of The New York Times articles. That's a good summary of them. You can also buy a CD which has all 49 volumes of them. But the point of the Pentagon Papers ... and what was so shocking about them ... is that through these top secret documents they proved what many people, especially the leftist intellectuals, suspected: That the American people were being lied to about this war from the beginning.

There's one absolutely sensational document in which John McNaughton in 1966 tries to justify Johnson's escalation of the war. He says, "It's 10% to help Vietnam, it's 20% to avoid Chinese expansionism, it's 70% to avoid a humiliating defeat." In other words, the reason we were unleashing [Operation] Rolling Thunder, the greatest bombing campaign in the history of mankind, was so that Johnson would not lose the war. And by the way, that was Nixon's reason, too, when he took over. He actually said that to Bob Haldeman, "I will not be the first American president to lose a war." So, in other words, all these people ... and you're talking literally millions of people ... had to perish because Johnson and Nixon didn't want to be the first presidents to lose a war.

Well, of course, if the American public would have known that, they probably would have impeached him. But this was one of the secrets. And another one was it was the first time in the Pentagon Papers where the real questionability of the Tonkin Gulf incident was exposed. Of course, I think everybody listening to this will understand. The Tonkin Gulf incident occurred in the late summer of 1964, August. There were ... It took place over three nights. By the third night there were two American destroyers involved, the Turner Joy and the Maddox, and they accompanied these South Vietnamese speedboats that would perform attacks on the North Vietnamese coast.

When the Tonkin Gulf incident first came to light, Johnson said that number one, the American ships were in international waters, number two, they were routine patrols, and number three, they had no association with the South Vietnamese speedboats. In other words, it was all an accident. It later turned out of course, with the help of the Pentagon Papers, that we found out that all three of those were, to be polite, wrong, to be more brutally honest, lies. Because number one, they were not routine patrols. They were going up and down the coast of North Vietnam because those destroyers had special electronic equipment that were trying to find radar stations and targets. They were in conjunction with the patrol boats who would then attack them and find out more information about things like radar. Some of the time they were not in international waters. They went actually in and out. It later turned out that ... and I think this is only in the Pentagon Papers ... both McGeorge Bundy and George Ball admitted that they were provocations.

DiEugenio: Now, Johnson said that there were two attacks on the American destroyers. Well, that was false, too. The second attack did not happen. The first attack consisted of one bullet through one hull. Now, what kind of a president goes to war when not one American life was taken. Not one American casualty happened. When you had one bullet through one hull and it was you provoking the attack. But that was another revelation in the Pentagon Papers that Johnson, although he ran as the peace candidate and he tried to caricature Goldwater as the unrepentant hawk, Johnson was actually planning to enter the war. He was planning to break with Kennedy's policies. That was also first exposed in the Pentagon Papers. So, when you talk about the Pentagon Papers, there is that, there is this encyclopedia, this massive, almost invaluable for its time ... multi volume exposure through top secret documents that were never supposed to see the day, and that Ellsberg got possession of.

Alright now, so that's one thing. The second thing when you refer to the Pentagon Papers is the Supreme Court case. This was caused by Ellsberg and his friend Tony Russo, who decided that they had to copy the Pentagon Papers and get them to the public. When the study was completed, which I think was at the end of 1968 or the beginning of '69, two copies ... there were 15 copies ... two copies went to Rand Corporation, where Ellsberg and Russo worked.

Ellsberg, of course, knew about them. He got permission from, I think, Morton Halperin. I think John McNaughton had passed away at this time in a car accident. He got permission from Morton Halperin, who when he worked at the Pentagon, which Ellsberg did, he worked under Halperin. So, Halperin allowed him to read them. He'd never allowed him to copy them, but he knew where they were. So, he smuggled them out and he and his friend Russo, Anthony Russo ...

Russo had a girlfriend at that time named Linda Sinay, who owned an advertising business in LA, and they had a copying machine. They didn't want to go to a public copying place, of course, for obvious reasons. So they, night after night, week after week, month after month, they copied this set of the ... I think they ended up copying 45 of the 49 volumes. They copied those because ...

What's so interesting about Ellsberg is that he began as a hawk. He was a hawk on the Vietnam War. He had served in the Marines for, I think, three years, graduated from Harvard, I think he ended up getting a PhD in economics, and was working at Rand Corporation. As time went on and he began to see these conflicting reports about Vietnam, he volunteered to go over there, he spent two years in Vietnam. It was that two year experience which showed him that the war was hopeless, that it was a complete fraud, that the government of Saigon that we were propping up could never win the war. You know, lives were being snuffed out mostly on the Vietnamese civilian side in a cause that was simply never going to have any kind of fruition.

His book, I can't recommend enough. His 2002 book Secrets is a very good book. There's about, like I said, 13 books on the Pentagon Papers case. His is one of the very best. If you want to learn just about the Supreme Court side of it, James Goodale's book is the best, Fighting for the Press. So, once he got the volumes and copied them, he brought them to Washington, and he went to four politicians hoping that they would read them into the congressional record, because he thought that would protect him because the free speech and debate clause in the Constitution: you cannot be questioned if you're a senator or a congressman about where you got information that you spoke about on the floor. Well, for one reason or another, and you can read his book to find out, Fulbright ... Senators Fulbright, Mathias, and McGovern all turned him down, as did Congressman McCloskey.

So, then he decided, "Well, I don't want to do this. I thought I wasn't going to have to." So, he went to his friend Neil Sheehan, who he knew from Vietnam, who was a reporter for The New York Times. He invited Sheehan to come up to his place in Cambridge. By now he had quit his job at the Rand Corporation, and he had gone east to work at MIT on a teaching fellowship. So, he calls his old friend Neil Sheehan, who interestingly was also turning on the war. He had been a hawk, and he had now gone through a metamorphosis in '70 and '71, like David Halberstam had done also. They now were seeing what they wanted to happen, which was more American involvement which Kennedy did not want to do, and they had both criticized Kennedy for not committing combat troops and more ordinance to the theater. Well, they got their wish in spades with Johnson, and they saw that it was a terrible mistake. So now they're both trying to atone for what they had done.

DiEugenio: So by '71, Sheehan had now become a dove, and he was working at The New York Times. Ellsberg invites him to go up to Cambridge, looks at the papers ... he does this for more than one weekend ... and then Ellsberg was leaving for a vacation one weekend. He made a mistake, gave Sheehan the key, and of course, David, any curious journalist, what do you think he did?

OHH: Right.

DiEugenio: He copied the papers. Alright? When he wasn't there. By the way, he didn't tell Ellsberg he had done it.

OHH: Oh.

DiEugenio: And he wouldn't return his calls when Ellsberg tried to call him. He kept it all secret. In fact, Ellsberg found out that the Times had the Pentagon Papers from a different reporter. And he didn't find out that they were going to print them until about two days before they published. Nice guy that Neil Sheehan. So, what happens is that once they're in the possession of The New York Times ... this is when James Goodale, the general counsel for the Times enters the picture. He had heard in March that the Times had come into possession to a veritable pile of classified material. We're talking now '71. Nixon is president. He suspects that even though the Pentagon Papers don't mention Nixon, since they stopped in '68, that Nixon would do something about this because Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had declared an informal war on the media. It was pretty bad what these guys did. If you recall, Spiro Agnew and his calling the press "nattering nabobs" and attacking these media empires of The New York Times and The Washington Post and trying to challenge licenses for The Washington Post/Newsweek organization in Jacksonville, et cetera.

Goodale had a good idea that the Nixon White House was not going to accept this, even though it really didn't concern them. So, he started mapping out a defense in case they were sued. So, what happens now is that there's a great debate inside The New York Times between the reporting side and the management and lawyers side. The reporting side led by Managing Editor Abe Rosenthal wants to publish. Most of the executives and their legal counsel say no. Abe Rosenthal threatened to resign and he said, "Several of these reporters are going to resign also if you don't print this stuff." So, Punch Sulzberger, the owner of the Times at that time then decided to go ahead and publish.

Now, leading up to that ... I think June 13th, '71, was the first story ... there was top secret security at The New York Times because they thought the FBI was going to raid the building. They had actually placed a reporting team in two different hotels because they were that worried that the FBI was going to swoop down and take the classified documents away. In those secret hotel rooms there were security guards all along the hallway. That's actually in the film, The Post. They actually did a nice job on that showing the top secret security that The New York Times had.

So, the first day, June 13th, 1971, The New York Times devotes a four-column headline on this secret archive of how America got into the Vietnam War. And on the first day, Nixon really doesn't do much. Charles Colson tells him, "Look, this is all about Johnson, so let them tear each other apart. Don't get involved." So, he doesn't. Well, on the second day, Henry Kissinger enters the equation. Kissinger, after my studying the whole Nixon administration for too long, Kissinger knew just what buttons to press with Nixon to get him going. It was like really ... after listening to these secret tapes in the White House between Nixon and Kissinger ... it was like psychologists call a ‘folie a deux’, It's when two personalities get together they create a monster. That's what happens with Kissinger and Nixon.

Kissinger says things like, "They're subverting the government. They're making you look like a weakling", et cetera. These, of course, are the buttons that you can press with Nixon. So, the second guy who caused the Pentagon Papers to go to the Supreme Court was John Mitchell, the Attorney General. Nixon then calls Mitchell, and he says, "Can we stop them from publishing?" Remember, Nixon had been a lawyer in Mitchell's law firm. John Mitchell was a bond lawyer. He was in no way a First Amendment attorney. Well, he tells Nixon, "Yes, there's a precedent for it. All we have to do is call them in advance and warn them", which was utterly and completely wrong.

James Goodale, the general counsel for the Times had done some research on this, and he realized that the Times had a very good case because of the prior restraint doctrine. In England, which has an official secrets law, you can employ what they call "prior restraint", that is, you can stop someone from publishing in advance. In the United States we don't have that. So, when Mitchell called the Times ... oh, no, I think he sent them a telegram ... requested they stop publishing, Goodale told them to ignore the request.

So, when they did, Mitchell then went to court and he got a temporary restraining order. This was the beginning of the ultimate Supreme Court case, which I think would be decided about two weeks later. So, when The New York Times was restrained from publishing any more, this is when Ellsberg decides to go to The Washington Post, except the film The Post very much distorts this. First of all, Ben Bradlee did not have a spy go up to The New York Times building, illegally enter, and see a four column spread ... in no book I read did that happen. And two of them--one of them was by Bradlee, the other one was a biography of Bradlee --so I'm sure if Bradlee had done that, he would have wanted everyone in the public to know. It didn't happen.

The guy who influenced Daniel Ellsberg to go to the Post was a guy named Dun Gifford. Dun Gifford had worked for the Kennedys, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, lived up in Cambridge and was a friend of Sheehan's. He said, "Why didn't you go to the Post? Why don't you go to the Post now that they've stopped the Times?" In his book Secrets Ellsberg says something like: On my own I would never have thought of going to the Post. In my review at Consortium News, I try and explain this, a point which I'll get into later, why he probably felt that way.

Anyway, that is how he decided to call Ben Bagdikian, who he knew from Rand Corporation, who was now a reporter for the Post. Bagdikian drives up to Cambridge ... no, actually, I think he flew up to Cambridge ... and meets him in a motel room. Ellsberg gives him a much shorter version of the Pentagon Papers. I think The Washington Post version was 4,100 pages. So, they put these in a couple of boxes. Bagdikian puts them on a plane, he had to buy a second seat on the plane, flies back, and The Washington Post now has the Pentagon Papers. So, they publish for two days. Then, of course, the White House calls up Bradlee, asks him to stop publishing. Bradlee refuses, and now they get enjoined. So now there's a flurry of hearings, which the film doesn't really do a lot of justice to. I think there were, if I remember correctly, there were two hearings in Washington for the Post, there were two hearings in New York for the Times. Finally, there was an appeal to the Supreme Court, and both cases were joined.

DiEugenio: Now, another deception in the film is this, that once The Washington Post was stopped from publishing, there's a scene in the movie where Bagdikian has a grocery bag, which we don't see what's inside, he brings it over to Bradlee's desk, and says words to the effect, "I always wanted to be part of a rebellion." Well, Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks, takes it over to Graham's office and he starts taking out all these other papers, who now have stories from the Pentagon Papers on their front pages. I think there were eventually 19 newspapers that got the Pentagon Papers. Bradlee in the film says something like, Look what you caused ? This was really kind of sick when I saw this. The idea that somehow the Pentagon Papers got out through Katharine Graham is ridiculous. Once the court enjoined them, they couldn't do anything with the Pentagon Papers. It was Ellsberg and his group of young students, some young professors, up in Cambridge who now, with Dun Gifford, got together and they started sending out the Pentagon Papers again to all these other newspapers.

Another thing the film leaves out is that there were two other newspapers that were enjoined by the Justice Department and were in court. I think they were the St. Louis Post Dispatch and The Boston Globe. So, there were a total of four newspapers who were sued. But they couldn't stop it because Ellsberg and his volunteer group--who has chosen to remain secret all these years, but one guy volunteered ... historian Gar Alperovitz recently volunteered, and he admitted he was part of that group--that got them all out to these other publications where it became kind of hopeless to stop it. Then of course, he finally did find a senator, Mike Gravel from Alaska, who agreed to read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record. That's a story in itself because Gravel was not a senior senator at all. He was on this lowly committee, I think the Buildings and Grounds committee. He got the Pentagon Papers realizing that almost nobody was there from his committee that night, I think he started like at 7:00pm and knowing there would be no objections, he started reading them into the record.

The word got out, he had his staff start copying things, gave them to the press, he almost collapsed by about 11:00 at night, and he made a motion to commit the rest of the Pentagon Papers to the congressional record, since there was nobody there to object, it of course passed. That is how the Pentagon Papers actually got into the congressional record. It was Mike Gravel. By the way, that was the night before the Supreme Court decision.

So, really in essence, what Mike Gravel did was, he kind of made the Supreme Court decision a little bit superfluous. Because once the Pentagon Papers were transcribed, Gravel tried to find a publisher, which he finally did, up in Massachusetts, Beacon Press. They published what has come to be known as the Gravel version of the Pentagon Papers. But the Supreme Court ended up ruling for publication. The New York Times lawyers were two superb First Amendment attorneys. The late Alexander Bickel, a Yale law professor, and a guy named Floyd Abrams, who's still alive by the way, of the giant law firm in New York, Cahill Gordon, who I interviewed in advance of that review. They did just a wonderful job. The Washington Post didn't like their firm, and they fired them within the next year. But Bickel and Abrams did a very nice job defending the right to publish without being prior restrained in America. And that case has held up very well, I would think. When I talked to Abrams, he said, "Yeah, I think it's held up pretty well myself." So, that was the other angle. That was the Supreme Court case and the Mike Gravel case. That's another part of the Pentagon Papers.

The third part of the Pentagon Papers is the criminal case which Nixon and Mitchell tried to prosecute in two locations. One was in Boston, and one was in Los Angeles. In Boston, because that's where Beacon Press was, and in Los Angeles, because that's where Rand Corporation was, the one in Boston ... the criminal action in Boston failed. Nixon and Mitchell tried to prove a conspiracy between Beacon Press, Gravel, the circle that was around Ellsberg, and Neil Sheehan. It didn't work because Gravel was protected by the Constitution’s free speech and debate clause. Plus a number of witnesses refused to testify. Mitchell threw one guy in jail. He still wouldn't talk. And so that one collapsed. The one in LA indicted Ellsberg and Russo. It ended up that they indicted Ellsberg on 11 counts of theft and conversion and three counts for Russo, a combination of 115 and 35 years, respectively. If it would have been the maximum, they would have been in jail for 150 years.

DiEugenio: A guy named Stanley Sheinbaum, a very famous liberal philanthropist in LA, raised the money for their defense, which cost $900,000. Today that would be about seven million. There was no way Russo and Ellsberg could have paid for their defense. That trial, which ... it's incredible to me how that trial was ignored ... but at that trial, and hardly anybody knows this, John Kenneth Galbraith testified. McGeorge Bundy testified. Arthur Schlesinger testified. Arthur Schlesinger, in something that was just terribly overlooked, testified that if Kennedy had lived, there would have been no Tonkin Gulf, there would have been no insertion of combat troops, there would have been no Rolling Thunder over Vietnam. That should have been on the front pages of every newspaper in America at that time, but it wasn't. The only place I could find it is in a book by Peter Shrag called Test of Loyalty. It's the only book I could find on the Ellsberg trial. I thought that was incredible because that was ... the trial was, I think, late '73, and [the Oliver Stone film] JFK didn't come out until 1991. But Schlesinger was talking about that back in 1973. So I thought that was pretty important stuff.

DiEugenio: Well, what happened was Nixon ... and to really understand how bad of a president Nixon was and how terrible of a lawyer Mitchell was ... this case really shows you, because Nixon conducted five secret meetings on the prosecution of the Pentagon Papers. That's how bad he wanted to nail Russo and Ellsberg. Because he said that they were comporting with the enemy. It’s just so ridiculous. Like, the North Vietnamese did not know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was bogus? They did not know that Johnson was going to escalate the war? General Giap, before he died, was interviewed by a friend of mine, Mani Kang, through his son, and he said: Yes, we knew Kennedy was withdrawing at the time of his assassination. We understood that. And we also understood that once the Gulf of Tonkin happened, that Johnson was going to escalate the war. So, the idea ... that is so ridiculous, you know, that you were aiding the enemy. What you were doing was telling the truth to the American people for once on a war that should never have happened. But thanks to Nixon and the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower, it did.

So, Nixon conducted five secret meetings on the prosecution of Ellsberg and Russo. What happened was that three things occurred that caused the case to be dismissed. Number one, Ellsberg was illegally wiretapped. Number two, the administration, Nixon and Ehrlichman had a meeting with the trial judge, Matt Byrne, in which while the trial was in process and they offered him the FBI directorship. The third thing... oh, how could I forget…they burglarized Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. You know, Hunt and the Cubans and Gordon Liddy and those guys? Because Nixon wanted to get dirt on Ellsberg. So, once those three things were exposed, the case was dismissed.

Now, another important thing that nobody talks about: Russo did not want to dismiss the charges. He wanted to go through to a verdict, because he thought they were doing pretty well. It turned out that when they interviewed the jurors, they would have been acquitted. The tally was seven to acquit, five to convict, and two undecided. So, they would have won the case anyway. So, that's the third aspect of the Pentagon Papers, the criminal trial.

Now, see, what I've described to you is a very long, complex series of events in which ... and by the way, in that description I've left out probably two thirds of the story, but what Spielberg and Hanks do is they take just one aspect of it, The Washington Post aspect, which lasted two weeks. Like I said, the Pentagon Papers case went on for almost three years. So, they try and condense this into the two week interval that the Times passed off ... well, not passed off, but the responsibility for publishing went from the Times to the Post ... they never really explained how and why it happened.

Now let me tell you something even more shocking. James Goodale, the counselor for The New York Times, when he heard the film was being produced, asked to see a copy of the original shooting script. He was stunned when he saw it because in that original shooting script there is no opening 15 minutes, which features Ellsberg and The New York Times in it. In other words, in the original script there was no New York Times, and there was only one scene with Ellsberg. That's when Bagdikian goes up to Cambridge to gets the copies for the Post, the copy of the Pentagon Papers for the Post. Goodale went spastic. He said: How the hell can you film a project on the Pentagon Papers and never mention The New York Times and make Daniel Ellsberg into a bit character?

DiEugenio: So, then they changed it, and they added this prologue, which I think is 12 to 15 minutes, which pictures Ellsberg in Vietnam meeting McNamara and Bob Komer of the Defense Department on the way back ... going ahead and copying the Pentagon Papers. That opening sequence takes about 12 ... and by the way, it's the best part of the movie if you ask me. Guess what? It would never have been there without James Goodale. That's the kind of film it was going be.

My other objections, which I brought out in my review ... and by the way, my book is coming out in a few weeks, called JFK: The Evidence Today. I wrote an entirely new ending chapter in which I discuss this whole Pentagon Papers and The Post thing in a much longer way. My review is about 10 pages. In the book it's the concluding chapter, and it's at least twice as long. One of the things that they do in the film, which I think is just ... so objectionable ... is that they manufacture a scene which comes near the end, in which Kay Graham goes to visit McNamara. There's two things going on in the scene, which ends up being a shouting match. Graham is depicted as being surprised and stunned at what McNamara did in Vietnam. That's one part of it. The Secretary of Defense McNamara ends the scene by trying to talk her out of publishing the papers because he is fearful of what Nixon will do.

That is one of the most objectionable scenes in the whole film. Why? In my view you can use dramatic license if the actions the characters take in the film are consistent with what the real characters did in life. But it's a violation of dramatic license when what they do in the film is completely opposed to what they did in life. First of all, there's no evidence this scene ever happened. Obviously, that would have been in Kay Graham's book Personal History. It's not there. She devotes all of 12 pages to the Pentagon Papers in her book, which is as, Floyd Abrams told me: that shows you how important she thought it was to her. Well, also there's no evidence at all that Bob McNamara ever tried to prevent anybody from publishing the Pentagon Papers. In fact, like I've tried to say on more than one occasion, it was Bob McNamara who created the Pentagon Papers. If it wasn't for him they would never have been created. It was him who did that. It was he who kept them from Johnson. And according to everybody involved in the project Bob McNamara never exercised any editorship over the Pentagon Papers.

In fact, Gelb said that when he started the project, McNamara took him to his house, opened a big closet door, and gave him reams and reams and reams of documents. He said words to the effect, let the chips fall where they may. He told them: I'm afraid that once this story gets out that there's going be a lot of people saying we never had these documents. So, we're going to get the jump on them. So, that's just an utterly false characterization in that scene in the film.

DiEugenio: The other thing is the idea that Graham was surprised at what McNamara did in Vietnam. To show you how bad that is, you have to go back to 1964 when Lyndon Johnson took the presidency after JFK was assassinated. He knew two things. Number one, he was going to break with Kennedy's policy because, as you know and any informed individual knows today, Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his assassination in the NSAM 263, which was slowly over time in the space of about three months it was completely neutralized because Johnson decided that Kennedy really didn't know what he was doing. But he did, and so he was going to go ahead and escalate the war. But he knew that he would have to have The Washington Post, the local newspaper, on his side. At that time The Washington Post was the number one circulation newspaper in the capital, and it was read by just about everybody on Capital Hill. He had Katharine Graham and the executive staff of the paper over to his house ... I think it was April of 1964 ... he revealed to them his plans to escalate the war in Vietnam.

During the presidential campaign that year, if you recall, Johnson completely disguised what he was going do, and he tried to paint Goldwater as the hawk. He said things like, "I will not send American boys to Asia to do what Asian boys should do. We seek no wider war." Well, this is a bunch of baloney. And Graham had to know that. But then when he started escalating the war in '65, he sent her to Vietnam to visit General Westmoreland, who he had made the Commander in Chief of all forces in Indochina. So, she got the whole tour. She came back exhilarated. At a meeting of her editorial board, she said, "Does anybody think we should bring up the idea of withdrawal?" One guy raised his hand. She said, "You're so stupid."

I can go on and on with this because there was also the fact that The Washington Post, when Johnson got through the Tonkin Gulf resolution, The Washington Post not only backed the resolution, they criticized the only two senators who voted against it. The Post even attacked Martin Luther King when he came out against the war in 1967. They said he had forfeited his moral authority on the Civil Rights movement by going against the president.

Then Ben Bradlee did something extraordinary right before the Tet Offensive, he took his lead reporter, a guy named Ward Just, out of South Vietnam, brought in a guy named Peter Braestrup and Braestrup ended up endorsing Johnson's view of the Tet Offensive, which that it was a terrible failure for Hanoi and a great victory for the United States, which is pretty crazy, I think by anybody's estimate.

So, that's how much The Washington Post was in Johnson's pocket through those crazy escalations from 1965 all the way up to 1968. The idea that Graham was, "Oh, I'm" ... sort of like that scene in Casablanca where Claude Rains comes in and says, "I'm shocked, I'm shocked that there's gambling in this hotel." I'm sorry, that's just a piece of fiction that they made up. Like I said, for the reason that it's the opposite of what each character would have done or said, it's not at all justified.

DiEugenio: I was very disappointed in the film. Let me say this. It is well done. Spielberg has usually been a good visual director. Kay Graham played by Meryl Streep, she's a very capable actress. But that does not make up for what I believe is a falsification of history in very many ways. The heroes and the heroines of the Pentagon Papers case were not Ben Bradlee, they were not Kay Graham. That was an accident, something totally unforeseen. The heroes of the case were of course Ellsberg and Russo, Linda Sinay for letting them copy the documents, and also Mike Gravel, the senator who read them into the congressional record. Also Judge Gerhard Gesell, who in the lower court decision sided with The Washington Post twice, not once but twice. It was those people. Those people are the heroes of the Pentagon Papers case.

In my opinion, the only way to tell the story if you are really a serious historian, which Spielberg and Hanks think they are but they're really not, the only way to tell this story I would think is through a four night miniseries, like two hours a night for an expansive eight hours. If you were really serious about telling the truth, it's a great, great subject. To give you just one example, in I think 1969 when Ellsberg was turning from hawk to dove, maybe '68, he went to a talk that Kissinger did at, I think, Rutgers University. He was in the audience. When Kissinger was done ... imagine this scene if you could just let your visual dramatic imagination let go for a while. Here is this National Security Advisor who everybody thinks is so smart and such a great maestro of foreign policy, and here comes Ellsberg, his former student, who raises his hand, stands up, and asks this guy, "How many civilians do you and Nixon plan on killing in Indochina this year?" Can you imagine that scene?

DiEugenio: What I would have done if I was directing that scene, I would show Kissinger, then I would do a transition flashback as he's fidgeting at his podium, which Ellsberg said he was, and to the White House. I would show Nixon on one side, Kissinger on the other side of the Oval Office, and Nixon saying ... by the way, this is absolutely true, it happened ... he said, "That's the difference between me and you, Henry. I don't care how many civilians we kill." Kissinger said something like, "Mr President, I don't like you looking like a butcher." I would flash back to that scene, because that's the kind of guy President Nixon was, you know, the full story about just how a horrible president he was has not come out yet because there's still some of those tapes that are missing. But this is the reason he fought so hard. It was scenes like that, that he fought so hard during his lifetime to keep those tapes bottled up. So, then I would come back to the present and have a camera on Ellsberg waiting for his reply. Finally, the moderator bailed out Kissinger.

DiEugenio: But that's the kind of movie you could have if you really stayed true to the people involved and also the record. You know, as I said at the conclusion of that review, in my opinion that's too hard edged of a film for Hanks and Spielberg. It cuts too much of the quick about modern American history. When Spielberg did Amistad, that took place in the early 1800s. This is relatively recent history.

By the way, one last thing I want to point out: the film implies at the end that it was the Pentagon Papers case that went ahead and caused Watergate. That's what a lot of people thought. They thought that the Plumbers Unit with Hunt and Liddy and McCord was created to stop the leaks of the Pentagon Papers case and to go ahead and do the raid on Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. It turns out that through the work of Bob Parry and Ken Hughes, that's not the case.

The Plumber's Unit was created because Nixon was so worried about what he did to rig the 1968 election. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Right? With Anna Chennault and Bui Diem who was the South Vietnamese Ambassador. And how Johnson was trying to get peace talks going throughout the summer and fall of 1968. Nixon knew about this, and he obstructed, got in contact with President Thieu in Saigon, told him not to agree to any meetings, to deprive Johnson of making that announcement during the campaign in order to hurt Humphrey, who Nixon was running against.

Then, I think, three days before the election, President Thieu made a speech in Saigon that was carried by all three networks: NBC, CBS, and ABC. You're probably old enough to understand back then that was it. You didn't have this proliferation of all these cable networks and FOX News, et cetera. If you got those three networks, you got almost everybody who's watching television at the time. He made a speech in which he said he would not participate in any peace talks. He tried to say that somehow that Johnson was sandbagging him and his cause. That really decided the election. Humphrey was gaining on Nixon and that put the kibosh on it. Well, Johnson suspected that's what Nixon had done, so he put the FBI and the CIA on the trail, and they came up with proof that that was the case.

FBI Director Hoover told Nixon about that when Nixon was in his transition period, and Nixon was very worried that that file would be exposed. He actually put a young staff aide, Thomas Charles Huston, on the trail of finding that file. He thought it was at the Brookings Institute, which it was not. But that's when on a tape Nixon says: Then we have to firebomb the Brookings Institute, create some kind of diversion, break in there. That's how the Plumbers Unit began. Again, it would probably be too hard-edged, you know, because it says that Nixon not only violated the law, the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from interfering in diplomacy but also stole the election. That's another thing that I think is false about the film.

OHH: It sounds like a very ... you called it a combination Washington-Hollywood fairytale. I've heard you talk about a chapter in one of your books where you talk about the CIA's interaction in Hollywood. Do you think that this film was produced just to make a good story? Or do you think there's something more about trying to raise the profile of the media? Why was Tom Hanks involved, knowing the way he looks at things like the JFK assassination, do you think?

DiEugenio: I guess we should explain to the listenership, I have written in the past about 20 pages on the CIA in Hollywood. It's a very important subject. I talked about Charlie Wilson's War in that regard, which was another bad movie by Tom Hanks. It completely distorted the whole United States/Afghanistan/Taliban struggle. In that instance, he did have a CIA consultant on that film. Now, on this one I haven't been able to find any evidence of that.

Hanks and Spielberg, they're so politically naïve that somehow they say they did this movie because they wanted to try and revive the concept of a free press against Trump's war on the fake news thing, as if the two situations are somehow anywhere comparable or parallel. I don't see how things like Stormy Daniels and Russiagate, I don't see how any of that parallels going into a Third World country, using a false event as a declaration of war, and then going ahead and laying waste to that country for a period of around 10 years and taking the lives of at least four million people and in Cambodia another million or two. I don't understand how that equates to each other. It doesn't at all to me.

In the reissue of my book, I'm also going to point this out, that, if that was the case then where was Spielberg and Hanks when Barack Obama was doing more to violate the freedom of press than any other president in history? Goodale told me that. He's been watching this. He said Obama was the worst president, worse that George W. Bush on this issue. So, you know, I just don't see ... that's another way to me of showing how politically naïve they are. They have a very bad understanding of modern history. It's really kind of sad what these guys are up to and their record in that. I'm very disappointed. I told Goodale, "Who do these people get to do their research for them?" Remember in the first draft of the script, if it wasn't for Goodale, there would never even be that15 minute opening about Ellsberg in Vietnam or The New York Times at all.

That's what you're up against with these guys. They think they're doing a good thing. I don't agree with that at all. Tom Hanks, just take a look, first there was Parkland, then there was Charlie Wilson's War, now there's this movie. What kind of a record is that?

OHH: Yeah. Charlie Wilson's War was one of the worst movies and just one of the strangest movies I've ever seen. I don't see how Tom Hanks has become such a cultural icon, but you know I think of all the valuable things you do on your website and in your writing, taking these reviews of books and movies ... and especially movies like this that are just kind of meant to paint a completely false picture of our recent history. Your reviews of them are one of the most valuable things you do of all the valuable things you do on your site. I think this was really interesting and sets the story straight. I think this is a good thing to do.

DiEugenio: Thank you so much, David.

OHH: Yeah, no, thank you. I look forward to talking to you again.

Written by OurHiddenHistory on Thursday February 15, 2018

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