June 29, 2001

Misreading the Pentagon Papers

By LESLIE H. GELB

Over the past 30 years, the news articles on the Pentagon Papers have been based more on mythology and folklore than fact — everything from how the project originated to what it proved.

The project did not start as a history. It started in 1967 after Robert McNamara, then Defense Secretary, asked for classified answers to about 100 of what I would call "dirty questions." These questions had little to do with history. They were the kind of questions that would be asked at a heated press conference: Are our data on pacification accurate? Are we lying about the number killed in action? Can we win this war? Are the services lying to the civilian leaders? Are the civilian leaders lying to the American people?

There were about eight or so questions that were directly historical: Could Ho Chi Minh have been an Asian Tito? Did the United States violate the Geneva Accords of 1955?

I had a staff of six, drawn from the Pentagon: three military officers, three civilians. We set about to answer these questions by drawing on documents from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the White House. We all quickly concluded that serious answers to these questions would require looking through these documents and others far more carefully. So, we proposed about 20 individual studies, which we later expanded to 36. Secretary McNamara approved and ordered the study to be "encyclopedic" and said to "let the chips fall where they may."

Four years later when I discovered that The New York Times was about to publish the papers, I was against publication. I felt that unless the studies reached the public in a scholarly way, they would be misrepresented. People would think the studies proved that the Vietnam War was mainly the story of the government lying to the American people. In my opinion, the documents demonstrated a more important point.

They showed our leaders and ourselves struggling, over the course of decades, with the conviction that the United States should not be responsible for losing any country to Communism and that Vietnam was a cockpit of the struggle between Communism and freedom.

The documents were more about those convictions and those beliefs than about lying, at least judging from the documents to which we had access. And they were really more about political leaders and bureaucracies coming to terms with a war that was tearing the government and country apart.

Yes, government officials lied to the public about the war. The documents showed people in government failing to tell the truth and misrepresenting the facts to each other. Officials lied to one another to show what a good job they were doing or because they felt that optimism was what was expected of them. But the Pentagon Papers mostly show that public statements largely reflected classified estimates and judgments. That is, when officials were optimistic, the public statements were optimistic, and vice versa.

I was lucky to have been a 30-year-old kid at that time, looking through the keyholes at the McNamaras and the Bundys who had to make the decisions. But I tell you, I'm cursed with a good memory, and I wish I didn't have it, because I remember that I and almost everybody I knew deeply believed in that war. We supported it primarily because of beliefs about what the world was like at that time.

Almost all of us changed our views gradually. Almost all the "doves" I knew became doves far later than they remember. Even into early 1969, the doves in the government were not arguing for complete withdrawal, rather we argued for a halt to the bombing, serious negotiations and a gradual withdrawal of troops.

Even then, our opposition wasn't really based on moral grounds either. We were all hard-nosed, national security analysts and we began to question the war because it looked like a stalemate that would seriously affect our position as a great power around the world. That's what we were thinking. But, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. likes to say, all of us in the end are afflicted by the treachery of memory.

For all their shortcomings, the Pentagon Papers present a very complicated picture of governmental decision-making on the Vietnam War. The documents are not a cartoon, but they have often been made into a cartoon.

Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, served as the director of the Pentagon Papers project from 1967 to 1969.

Copyright © 2001 The New York Times Company