Daniel Ellsberg and the American Government Today: Play It As It Lies.
By the mid-1960s, it was clear to the U.S. military and government that the Vietnam War was very likely not winnable.
But three presidents — John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon — felt it was politically and strategically important to keep fighting anyway, even if hundreds of thousands of people would die.
To maintain the necessary support of the American public and their elected representatives for this march into the Big Muddy, the government adopted a simple, effective strategy.
It lied.
It reported encouraging progress when it saw little or none. It issued wildly inflated body counts for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers. It hailed the South Vietnamese ARVN as a powerful, ever-improving fighting force, which it was not.
For years these fabrications worked, because Americans support their soldiers and because during the Cold War, stopping communism was a widely shared goal.
Trouble is, it didn’t work forever. By the early 1970s even people who still resented the “peace creeps” reluctantly began to accept what the government had feared for years: that we were pouring American lives and American money into an enterprise not likely to have a good outcome.
Still, the government insisted one more offensive or one more bombing campaign could turn it all around.
Then in mid-June of 1971 the New York Times began summarizing the Pentagon Papers, a massive and forbidding academic document ordered by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on how the military and the government really had been assessing the whole situation since the Viet Minh insurgents began throwing off their French colonial rulers in the wake of World War II.
The inescapable conclusion: It had always been hard to see a path to victory.
The Pentagon Papers didn’t contain a whole lot that anti-war activists and even some neutral observers hadn’t warned about all along.
The fact it was compiled by the government itself just made the argument harder to refute.
Daniel Ellsberg, who made a copy of the classified report available to Times reporter Neil Sheehan, died last week at the age of 93. While he took considerable and expected criticism for leaking the report, he never regretted it, saying the higher betrayal here was by government agencies and branches that lied to the people they were elected and appointed to represent.
There was some agreement on that point, even by people who still supported the war. The Pentagon Papers were startling.
Fast-forward a half century, to the end of Daniel Ellsberg’s life. Today, the widespread reaction to any report that revealed the deliberate spread of misinformation by a government entity would more likely be, “What else is new?”
Pew Research, which has been aggregating poll data since 1958 on how much Americans trust their government “to do the right thing most of the time,” found that in the last years of the Eisenhower administration, through the Kennedy Administration and into the first year of the Johnson Administration, between 75% and 77% of Americans said they had that trust.
Around 1965, the number began plunging. By the end of the Nixon Administration in 1974, about a decade later, it was 30%. It rose a bit under Ronald Reagan and again from the end of the Clinton administration into the George W. Bush administration, though even then it only got back to 50% once, in a brief spike after 9/11. Since 2007, it has not topped 25%. The most recent figure is 21%.
Daniel Ellsberg didn’t awaken America to the option of distrusting government. Those good old Founding Fathers were guiding a country that had just kicked a government out, and there was considerable sentiment to replace it with as little government as possible. They envisioned government populated not by a ruling class, but by citizen farmers who would periodically sacrifice a couple of years to come to Washington and help promote the common good before returning to the plow.
In any case, Ellsberg and Sheehan were hardly the only reason Americans were trusting government less every day. That transformation took a village. But it happened, and it’s no mystery why Donald Trump today draws roars of approval when he tells supporters not to trust the FBI, the Justice Department, the election system and pretty much anything else. Nor, on the other side of the ideological coin, do progressives have any trouble convincing supporters that the current Supreme Court is not to be trusted.
Americans have a cranky side. We like to complain. It’s an outlet, it’s a bond, it makes for good conversation.
But that’s different from almost 80% of us saying 60 years ago that we basically trusted our government and almost 80% of us today saying we don’t.
Among other things, that shift probably says we are simply overwhelmed by the whole concept of government, which has become a massive beast incorporating millions of people from the President on down to everyone from scientific medical analysts, forest rangers, Social Security agents, motor vehicle inspectors, police detectives and immigration caseworkers to local school board members.
That is to say, we have no shortage of targets for anyone who wants to complain about almost anything, and given the sheer volume of government, it’s much easier to blame the institution en masse than sort out the parts we do or don’t like.
That’s too bad, because it’s likely that most government employees, like most workers at any job, want to do that job as well as possible. In the case of government, that means pursuing the outcome that is most satisfactory both to the community and to any individual person or persons involved.
There are, of course, those who try to use government as a vehicle to superserve themselves and/or their friends, at the expense of the greater community. Lies are part of the currency for that minority, as George Santos demonstrates.
Whatever the causes of our well-embedded distrust of government, it is troubling. It makes us more suspicious. It makes us less inclined to embrace possibilities, something America has often done well. It makes us waste too much of our time and energy on being angry.
Sifting through all the causes and nuances of our disenchantment is a free-fall down a rabbit hole the size of Siberia. The steep decline in the 1960s, for instance, dovetails with the ultra-divisiveness of issues like the war and civil rights, and very likely marks another point at which disagreement with policy became distrust of the institutions promoting that policy. Today, the explosion of partisan news outlets and social media has created a megawatt bullhorn amplifying the most strident voices of distrust.
But the problem goes well beyond those who adopt what they heard on TV. Its multiple roots tunnel down to things as basic as the fact we no longer teach civics in school. Boring as civics classes were, they gave kids a basic understanding of how American government works, which many of today’s dissatisfied Americans very likely could not explain.
And then there’s the inconvenient fact that government sometimes does lie, or mislead by omission. Some of the lies serve pure self-interest. Some are strategic, preserving a path to a perceived greater good the way a military commander does not want the other side to know where he or she will strike next. It’s deception in the same way that government sometimes overrides the will of the people in pursuit of what it considers more just goals. If the white South had had its way in the 1960s, there very likely would still be “colored” water fountains today.
One of the fondest myths of 21st century America is that there was once a golden age, usually placed around the 1950s, when everything worked and everyone was nice to everyone else. There were certainly good things about those years, things it would be worth reviving. There was also oppression, corrosive and often vicious, of minorities, women and others. The water and the air were dirtier. The poverty rate in the late 1950s was 22%, close to double what it is now. It wasn’t all good old days.
That’s worth noting because equal opportunity, poverty prevention and environmental cleanup are largely the result of government actions, some of which don’t make a lot of mericans happy. Too many regulations, they say. Too much government. They quote Ronald Reagan’s famous line that government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
It’s safe to say most Americans probably think government is okay when it implements a policy they approve, when its actions work to their benefit and when it was exercised by the political team for which they cheer.
It’s also safe to say that to restore government’s 75% approval rating, tens of thousands of government entities would have to convince hundreds of millions of people they have only the collective good in mind. The people, in turn, would have to accept that the resultant policies were the product of an honest and fair discussion with no dangerous agenda.
It sounds so simple. So did the idea of America stopping a bunch of ragtag communists in a tiny country in Southeast Asia.
