Whistleblower of Them All: Daniel

¶ … whistleblower of them all: Daniel Ellsberg The Vietnam War was waged at the height of the Cold War. During the 1950s and 1960s, most Americans accepted that there was a certain level of necessary secrecy in the conduct of foreign affairs and intelligence. There was also a high level of trust in the institution of the presidency in the hearts of the American public: it was believed that the government knew best how to protect American interests abroad.

Yet a great deal of how and why the Vietnam War was waged was hidden from the public, beginning with the behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to the U.S. Congress' Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A supposed attack by the North Vietnamese upon U.S. Naval destroyers was used to give the Johnson Administration sweeping powers to escalate the war in Vietnam. In actual fact, the reports of a North Vietnamese attack in the Tonkin Gulf were mistaken. "Furthermore, the U.S.

ships were on a secret intelligence mission within North Vietnamese territorial waters. This is just a sample of the many lies to the public and Congress," lies that were revealed only because of the courage of one man (Martin 2003).

This high level of accepted secrecy regarding the conduct of the war continued through the Nixon Administration, until Daniel Ellsberg, a member of the McNamara Study Group became so disgusted with the mendacity of the Pentagon he gave a copy of the real intelligence and prognosis of the war to the New York Times.

Defying the militaristic culture in which he had been reared as a marine, and overcoming his qualms about institutional loyalty and the sacrosanct value of 'national security,' Ellsberg Xeroxed and leaked 7,000 pages of documents, giving "the world an alternate history of five administrations' policies in Southeast Asia, and spurred a breached White House into paranoiac espionage ending in presidential resignation" (Pinkerton 2009). Never would the American public trust a presidential administration to tell the truth with such blind faith after reading the Pentagon Papers.

"The Pentagon Papers were political dynamite because they told what had really been going on in Vietnam. That was in contrast with the official line, regularly presented by top government and military officials, who blatantly lied to the public about the Vietnam War. For example, the official line was that the war was going well, when actually there was plenty of inside information that it wasn't," for many years (Martin 2003). The Nixon Administration tried to suppress the release of the Pentagon Papers through an injunction, but the U.S.

Supreme Court overruled the president. Ellsberg's actions not only helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, and perhaps saved lives of American servicemen, but also established that the authority of the executive branch of government was not above the law, and could not use national security as a defense to cover up whatever unpleasant information it chose. Ellsberg is a powerful example of the need for whistleblowers.

Only someone with access to Pentagon intelligence and the ability to understand how the information contradicted the official image of the Vietnam War presented to the public could have the ability to shine the.