Secrets

Viking

2002

x, 498 p., [8] p. of plates

Includes bibliographical references (p. 471-475) and index.

0670030309

1. The Tonkin Gulf : August 1964 -- 2. Cold warrior, secret keeper -- 3. The road to escalation -- 4. Planning provocation -- 5. "Off the diving board" : July 1965 -- 6. Joining the Foreign Legion -- 7. Vietnam : the Lansdale team -- 8. Travels with Vann -- 9. Losing hope -- 10. Rach Kien -- 11. Leaving Vietnam -- 12. Jaundice -- 13. The power of truth -- 14. Campaign '68 -- 15. To the Hotel Pierre -- 16. The morality of continuing the war -- 17. War resisters -- 18. Extrication -- 19. Murder and the lying machine -- 20. Copying the papers -- 21. The Rand letter -- 22. Capitol Hill -- 23. Leaving Rand -- 24. Kissinger -- 25. Congress -- 26. To the New York Times -- 27. May Day 1971 -- 28. Approaching June 13 -- 29. Going underground -- 30. The war goes on -- 31. The road to Watergate -- 32. End of a trial.

Daniel Ellsberg began his career as a U.S. Marine company commander, a Pentagon official, and a staunch supporter of America's battle against Communist expansion. But in October 1969, Ellsberg--fully expecting to spend the rest of his life in prison--set out to turn around American foreign policy by smuggling out of his office the seven-thousand-page top-secret study, known as the Pentagon Papers, of U.S. decision making in Vietnam. Ellsberg tells the full story of how and why he became one of the nation's most impassioned and influential antiwar activists--and how his actions helped alter the course of U.S. history. Covering the decade between his entry into the Pentagon and Nixon's resignation, Secrets is Ellsberg's meticulously detailed insider's account of the secrets and lies that shaped American foreign policy during the Vietnam era. Ellsberg provides a vivid eyewitness account of the two years he spent behind the lines in Vietnam as a State Department observer--an experience that convinced him of the hopelessness of Johnson's policies and profoundly altered his own political thinking. As Ellsberg recounts with drama and insight, the release of the Pentagon Papers, first to The New York Times and The Washington Post, set in motion a train of events that ultimately toppled a president and helped to end an unjust war. Infused with the political passion and turmoil of the Vietnam era, Secrets is at once the memoir of a committed, daring man, an insider's expose of Washington, and a meditation on the meaning of patriotism under a government intoxicated by keeping secrets.

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