Milestone of U.S. history passed all but unnoticed

Forty years ago last week, the salient details of a secret government study, officially and with chilling bureaucratic banality titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” hit the front page of the New York Times.

What those details disclosed was the breathtaking depth and breadth of a years-long deception our leaders had perpetrated on the American people in one of the longest and costliest misadventures in U.S. foreign policy -- the Vietnam War.

The stunning revelations soon were known by a far less formal and far more historically laden name: The Pentagon Papers.

Two weeks ago Monday, on the 40th anniversary of the secret study’s leak to the press and thus to the American public, the government officially declassified the more than 7,000 pages of the full report. Though the occasion was dutifully and for the most part thoroughly reported by print, broadcast and Internet media organizations, the overall response was a collective yawn.

Maybe that should have been expected. The important stuff, after all, has been public knowledge for 40 years.

But with Americans still fighting and dying in two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and American money and military might being expended in what might or might not (depending on which branch of government you ask) be a war in Libya, it doesn’t seem altogether inappropriate to remind ourselves of the cost of official lies paid for with human lives.

Then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned the report in 1967. American support for the war had already begun to wane as the human toll mounted, and by 1971 public sentiment against the war was strong even before the stunning disclosures.

Only 15 copies of the top secret report were distributed to the highest-ranking officials. But Daniel Ellsberg, an aide to Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, managed to painstakingly copy major portions of it a page at a time and thus blow the whistle on high-level lies and liars -- and act for which some to this day consider him a traitor.

Among things the Pentagon Papers revealed, as the Times wrote in a 25th anniversary piece in 1996, was “that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”

LBJ was hardly alone. At least four successive presidents lied about the intent and scope of American involvement in Vietnam: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Richard Nixon, who probably deserves most of the credit for extricating the U.S. from the Vietnam quagmire, didn’t do it without the typical seediness that ultimately brought down his administration: In a grotesquely fitting detail, his notorious “plumbers” were revealed to have broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in a search for damaging personal information.

Among the things we learned from the Pentagon Papers were that body counts were falsified; that the government carried on unreported and illegal bombings in Laos and Cambodia; that the staggering cost of the war was even higher than had been reported. (A black marble wall near the Lincoln Memorial puts that cost in far more powerful perspective.)

Worst of all, we learned that the men prosecuting the war had themselves turned against it. McNamara would years later write what can only be interpreted as an attempt at historical atonement, a book in which he admitted how many years and lives were sacrificed after he and other officials had determined the war was unwinnable. To call his mea culpa “too little, too late” is grossly inadequate to describe the gross inadequacy of it.

That it has taken this long to officially declassify the report is said to be due more to the stubborn persistence of bureaucracy than to any major yet-undisclosed revelations, but that doesn’t make the four-decade delay any less shameful. It has cheated Americans of the full history and of the lessons we need to learn from it. (I’ll spare you the Santayana quote; it’s a clumsily overused allusion, and almost always by the wrong people on the wrong side of an argument.)

The Pentagon Papers should stand as monument to a reality from which Americans have never been exempt: Power mongers who held themselves beyond public accountability have been writing history in human blood since centuries before the Caesars.

This story was originally published June 26, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Milestone of U.S. history passed all but unnoticed."