Man with the Monkey Wrench

If I could find the proper forum, I would be willing to risk 20 years in jail. I must expose the duplicity of the Government.

DANIEL ELLSBERG, 40, one of the authors of the documents he has made public, is a nervous, intense and brilliant man. He is seen by his associates as possessing the mind of a Niels Bohr and the soul of a tortured Dostoevsky hero. As a former Pentagon colleague put it: "Dan would have been an excellent Jesuit in another time. He has a perfect logical mind and an unbending sense of morality." Ellsberg was for a time one of those faceless bureaucrats who sit at the fulcrum of decision making and are privy to the most guarded information. Yet he has a marked capacity for excess. One friend says that his reversal from a pro-war to an unequivocal antiwar position is completely in character. "That's the kind of guy Dan is. He's sensitive and passionate, as well as being immensely intelligent. When he was a hawk, he wanted to be up along the DMZ fighting. When he became a dove, he became an active dove."

Born in Chicago, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1952. During his junior year, he was editor of the Advocate, the school's literary magazine, a rare post for an economics major. As a senior, he served on the Crimson, stayed on at Harvard to win his master's and eventually a Ph.D. His thesis on the nature of the decision-making process, titled Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, was so complicated and so incisive that he became an overnight star in the rapidly developing field of systems analysis. Ellsberg joined the Rand Corp., where he became the protege of Henry Rowen, currently the corporation's president.

The critical step in Ellsberg's career came in 1964, when he went to the Pentagon as a special assistant to lohn McNaughton, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He landed the job because of McNaughton's role in nuclear issues, such as the test-ban treaty. As a former professor put it: "Ellsberg just got drawn into Viet Nam, the same way McNaughton did, the same way all of us did." He became so drawn in that he seriously wanted to re-enter the Marine Corps, in which he had done a stint as an officer. He once gloomily said: "If I went back into the corps, they'd never give me a company anyway. Once they learned that I wrote speeches for McNaughton and Robert McNamara, they'd have me writing speeches for some general." He consoled himself by inserting such stridently militant phrases into McNaughton's and McNamara's speeches as "The only way to think of the Viet Cong is to think of the Mafia."

Ellsberg did finally get to Viet Nam --as a member of Major General Edward Lansdale's senior liaison office of elite intelligence agents. Later he was put in charge of evaluating the new pacification program for the U.S. embassy. In this sensitive post, Ellsberg traveled all over Viet Nam, had access to the highest civilian officials and saw the ugliest face of the war: the corruption, manipulation and terrorism on both sides. He must have also seen more than his share of civilian casualties, for it was the Vietnamese victims that eventually came to plague his conscience. Still, while he was serving his tour with Lansdale and the U.S. embassy, his only reservations about the war revolved around its conduct. Otherwise, as he wrote in the class notes for his 15th Harvard reunion, his role as a combat observer compensated for "a somewhat unfulfilled career as a Marine platoon leader and company commander during peacetime."

When he wrote that, Ellsberg was laid up in Bangkok with a severe case of hepatitis. He felt that "the alternatives before me are to stay on with the Government in Viet Nam or to return home to research and consult: a choice between the engine room and the belly of the whale." The hepatitis helped him to make up his mind, and Ellsberg returned to the Rand Corp. in 1967, working basically out of the Santa Monica, Calif., office. He kept all of his top-level security clearances and remained active as a Government consultant. Ellsberg worked with Henry Kissinger--his former teacher--to smooth the transition from the Johnson to the Nixon Administration, and has said that he drew up the options for a Nixon Viet Nam policy. According to Ellsberg, Kissinger adopted all of his proposals almost verbatim except one: a fixed withdrawal date.

Soon Ellsberg, who seemed set for a brilliant Government career, was beginning to feel the lash of collective guilt. Even before the Tet offensive in 1968, he began to voice his doubts about the war; his initial attack came during a gathering of intellectuals in Bermuda under the sponsorship of the Carnegie Endowment. As the war dragged on, his sense of personal guilt heightened and his torment deepened. His conflict had developed to the point that even Kissinger was reluctant to include Ellsberg in the Nixon planning group.

Ellsberg disconcerted Rand officials by organizing a group of five associates to write a sulfurous letter to the New York Times and the Washington Post denouncing the war. He also wrote a scathing piece for the New York Review of Books on Nixon and the Laos incursion. He began to see not only himself but everyone who did not demonstrate actively against the war as a "war criminal." He seemed obsessed, and his friends found it impossible to get him to talk of other topics; many were put off when he called them "good Germans" for not protesting against the war.

By the spring of 1970, he realized that his views were becoming an embarrassment to Rand, so he resigned and accepted a fellowship at M.I.T., aiming to write a book on Viet Nam. He remarried (he has two teen-age children by a previous marriage) and settled down in Cambridge, Mass. But Ellsberg could not keep his singular mind off the war. He had the support of his wife Patricia, a Radcliffe graduate and daughter of Toy Manufacturer Louis Marx, a Nixon supporter.

By week's end, Ellsberg had not emerged from underground. He disappeared Wednesday afternoon from his house near Harvard Square. When he does come back into public view, no one is quite sure just what will happen to him. As one friend notes: "If the Government decides to prosecute him, it's going to be one helluva trial because he's really a very impressive figure. I think he'd like a platform like that."

In a sense, Ellsberg symbolizes the national torment that the brutal, seemingly interminable war has created. He grew to believe that the war would not end in the foreseeable future unless a massive monkey wrench was thrown into what, in his view, was a perpetual-motion machine. The documents were the wrench. Ellsberg had earlier offered them to Senator George McGovern, who decided not to make them public.

In a broad sense, Ellsberg is but the latest in a series of Government elitists --McNaughton, McNamara, Clark Clifford--who have turned away from the war they once so fervently supported. He himself is particularly scornful of the war's apologists, such as Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin. Ellsberg has put it this way: "My role in the war was as a participant, along with a lot of other people, in a conspiracy to commit a number of war crimes, including, I believe, aggressive war." He especially takes issue with Schlesinger's view that Viet Nam resulted from a series of small decisions and that it is unfair to seek out guilty men. "The only trouble with that account of our decision making," he said, "is that it's totally wrong for every Viet Nam decision of the last 20 years."

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