February 18, 2010

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'Dangerous Man' Daniel Ellsberg Reflects (2010)
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CONAN: There's a fascinating part - we're going to play a little clip from the movie - you're talking about telling Henry Kissinger, who's just about to receive security clearances to read all that top secret information, and you walk in through three mental stages of what that knowledge is going to do to him. And let's hear this.

(Soundbite of movie, "The Most Dangerous Man")

Mr. ELLSBERG: First, a great exhilaration, for getting all these amazing information that you didn't know even existed. And the next phase is you'll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this. But that won't last long. Very soon, you'll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening too.

CONAN: And that's a pretty apt description of the corrosive effect of top security clearance.

Mr. ELLSBERG: You know, it's - I should correct one thing there. Henry had -Kissinger - had had top secret clearance for many years, as I had in RAND. What I was really telling him was what I have - I'd had a dozen clearances higher than top secret, what are called compartmented information, when I was in the Pentagon. And I knew - as far as I knew, he did not have those earlier. He was about to get them. We were in the hotel Pierre and he hadn't gone to Washington yet. It was after the election.

And so I was really telling him the effect, the specific effect of having these much higher clearances which involve sort of listening in on the world's party line in communications, just listening to everybody, or reconnaissance, that sort of thing. He was about to get information that he didn't know existed. Now, it isn't that all that information is true. Imagine listening in on a party line in your community. You get a lot of false rumors and disinformation and mistakes. It wouldn't give you a real picture. But you would have a different sense of reality than you'd get just at a local grocery store from talking to people. So, it gives you the feeling that you're in a different world. And these other people, who don't have the clearances, don't have anything to tell you that's worth hearing.

Actually, later, in a much later conversation, the next year, I was with Kissinger in San Clemente and I was urging him to read the Pentagon Papers, which ended in 1968, he had a copy. And he said: But do we really have anything to learn from these documents? I said: Well, yes. I think you do. And my heart was sinking at this point. And he says: But we make policy very differently now. And I said: Well, Cambodia - the fiasco debacle that had just happened in the spring - I said that didn't look so different. He said: Well, that was done for very complicated reasons. I said: Henry, every rotten decision in the last 20 years in Vietnam has been done for very complicated reasons and pretty much the same ones; political considerations, legislation in Congress, fear of being called weak, or you know, not giving the whole.

And actually, I even referred to him some of his colleagues from Harvard, led by Tom Schelling - who's in the film, by the way - who had come to him to tell him they were breaking off all relations with the government, all consulting - they were all consultants - because of Cambodia. And - so I - this came up. And he actually said to me: But they didn't have clearances. And I thought, oh God.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ELLSBERG: He has really drunk deep of what I thought of as Circe's potion that he gave to Ulysses' troops that turned men into swine so they could no longer communicate and could no longer make their way out of the enchanted isles.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009)
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Kevin Drum: Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge (2010)
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Daniel Ellsberg: Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2003)
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