It’s not often I have dinner with a real American patriot. But April 5, I had the good fortune to find myself passing a basket of rolls to Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was in town to speak at the annual get-together of the Indiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
For those whose memories are dim, or who just don’t know, Daniel Ellsberg probably did more than any one person to end the war in Vietnam. You could call him our country’s ultimate whistle-blower. In 1971, he took the Pentagon Papers, a top secret archive documenting the true story of America’s involvement in Vietnam, to the New York Times. The Pentagon Papers were loaded with dirty secrets going back to the Truman Administration. They revealed that the U.S. had been planning on making war in Southeast Asia for years.
Ellsberg was a researcher working for the Defense Department. Compiling the papers was his job. As he worked on this project, he found himself growing increasingly upset by the ever-widening gap between what was actually happening in Vietnam and what the government said was happening. Thanks to reading the documents, he knew the war was being fought under false pretenses; that the American people were being lied to.
Ellsberg took an oath when he went to work for the government. It was the same oath he took when he served with the Marines. He pledged to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution — not his boss, even if that happened to be the president of the United States.
Over 50,000 American soldiers and untold numbers of Vietnamese people were killed after Congress voted to give Lyndon Johnson the authority to escalate the Vietnam War in 1964. Ellsberg believed he had no real choice but to go public with what he knew, even if that meant going to jail. June 28, 1971, he turned himself in to the F.B.I.
Increasing numbers of Americans were already unhappy with the way the war was going. The release of the Pentagon Papers finally tore whatever faith they had that the war was just or worthwhile. Support for the war all but evaporated.
By now Nixon was president. He was furious at what Ellsberg did. As far as Nixon was concerned, this “leak” was treasonous. He determined to strike at Ellsberg in any way he could. Not only was Ellsberg indicted on 12 counts, including violation of the Espionage Act, Nixon authorized burglars to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and steal Ellsberg’s medical records in an effort to discredit him.
That break-in, along with other gross violations of Ellsberg’s civil rights, proved to be part of Nixon’s undoing. The judge hearing the government’s case against Ellsberg declared a mistrial. Nixon would resign from the presidency in disgrace.
Recently, when Ellsberg spoke in Indianapolis, the country was embroiled in another unpopular war — a war also started under false pretenses. And, once again, Ellsberg is calling on Americans to understand patriotism as the act of defending the Constitution from self-serving politicians who would wreck it.
He brought an urgent question to us: “What are we going to do?” The Bush Administration has committed a fistful of impeachable offenses. Not only has it used false information to go to war, it has used that war as a pretext to spy on American citizens without obtaining warrants. As Ellsberg pointed out: If government agents were to break in to his psychiatrist’s office today, they would likely go unpunished.
But, as Nancy Pelosi has said, impeaching this president is “off the table.”
This, according to Ellsberg, may seem like practical politics, but it’s a tragedy for our constitutional form of government. If the Bush Administration’s shredding of the Constitution is allowed to stand, there is no reason to believe that the next president, regardless of his or her party, will roll back the executive powers Bush has commandeered. While members of the Democratic-controlled Congress have harrumphed about Bush’s transgressions in the capitol’s hearing rooms and hallways, they have done virtually nothing to hold the president accountable or restore our checks and balances.
Ellsberg said he didn’t know what the answer to his question should be — only that time was running out. That’s why, at the reception before dinner, he described himself as asking every lawyer in a room full of them: “What are we going to do?”n