My research permitted amazing conversations with some of McNamara’s former colleagues and their children, including Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg informed the direction of my research and shared my excitement about the sources I was looking for, especially the secret diaries of his former (and beloved) boss, John McNaughton. He is both a window into and a foil to McNamara. On substance, they were in basic agreement on most issues (from Vietnam to nuclear issues), but they chose very different paths to address their moral qualms. I think the questions they asked–including on the moral responsibility of public officials–are as urgent today as they were in the 1960s.
I wrote
'I Made Mistakes': Robert McNamara's Vietnam War Policy, 1960-1968
A memoir that charts Ellsberg’s journey from committed Cold Warrior to icon of the peace movement. What is so captivating about this account is Ellsberg’s willingness to sacrifice a booming career and his place within the inner sanctum of Washington, DC power, in the service of truth through the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
The story of his moral awakening is moving and compels readers to consider how anyone with even limited power can use their position to act in immoral situations, with the corollary that inaction and silence are often complicity.
The true story of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the event which inspired Steven Spielberg's feature film The Post
In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers - a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came…
This book is not McNamara’s most famous nor original–it essentially weaves together his speeches to provide reflections about war and nuclear weapons–but is arguably his most compelling.
The shadow of Ellsberg and his colleagues who wrote many of these speeches is present and shows a distinct subculture that existed around McNamara, who was far more refined than the warmonger stereotype suggests and also dedicated to educating the American people about national security. It shows a man sitting atop the world’s most powerful defense establishment, grappling with important moral dilemmas, including its enormous capacity for human destruction and institutional pressures toward war.
Published shortly after leaving the Pentagon, the author discusses various aspects of his tenure and position on basic national security issues; including policy statements from the author's public addresses and reports to Congress during his tenure as Secretary of Defense.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
A book that combines the intellectual firepower of possibly the best nuclear historian (Martin Sherwin) and biographer (Kai Bird) of their generation to produce something that is much more than the story of the “father of the nuclear bomb.”
As amazing as the film is, the book is a real thing of beauty. Juxtaposed with Ellsberg’s writings, what the book shows is just how much the architects of the nuclear era struggled with the moral implications of this reality.
Physicist and polymath, 'father of the atom bomb' J. Robert Oppenheimer was the most famous scientist of his generation. Already a notable young physicist before WWII, during the race to split the atom, 'Oppie' galvanized an extraordinary team of international scientists while keeping the FBI at bay. As the man who more than any other inaugurated the atomic age, he became one of the iconic figures of the last century, the embodiment of his own observation that 'physicists have known sin'.
Years later, haunted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer became a staunch opponent of plans to develop the hydrogen bomb.…
Ellsberg’s last book focused more clearly on his work on nuclear planning within the Department of Defense, where Secrets had mostly concerned itself with Vietnam.
The book provides a chilling account of how tenuous and fragile a system based on nuclear deterrence remains. Much more than that, the book is a clarion call for all of its readers to be alive to the morality of the very existence of nuclear weapons.
Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction
From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, the first insider expose of the awful dangers of America's hidden, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that is chillingly still extant
At the same time former presidential advisor Daniel Ellsberg famously took the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he also took with him a chilling cache of top-secret documents related to America's nuclear program in the 1960s. Here for the first time he reveals the contents of those now-declassified documents and makes clear their shocking relevance for today.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
A collection of essays that show that Ellsberg’s decision to reveal the Pentagon Papers was not an emotional impulse but a rational culminating point.
He went to Vietnam on several occasions, including as an advisor on pacification programs, and devoured official documents: he was the first–possibly only–person to read the full set of the Pentagon Papers at least once. It was on the basis of this new evidence that he revised his thinking, concluding that the war was “first… a problem; then… a stalemate; then… a crime.” Also, he trained as an economist, and there’s a kind of game theory logic that plays out in these essays. As his reading of the war incrementally changes, he understands that “optimal” outcomes require a different response from him.
In his second public contribution to ending the American intervention in Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg brings together and revises his papers that best explain US policy and strategies during the war.
Drawing upon his virtually unique range of experience as a participant, field observer, analyst, and critic, Papers on the War shares a selection of Daniel Ellsberg's writings as he critiques the presence of US policies in Vietnam.
With the major contribution of a greatly expanded and redefined version of his crucial study "The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine," Ellsberg reveals consistent patterns of decision-making with respect to Indo-china that…
The book provides a fresh look at Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a man largely remembered as the “architect” of the Vietnam War. Using new sources, most notably his personal papers and John T. McNaughton's diaries, the book shows that McNamara resisted the war more than most from the very start. His mistakes were not that he was a misguided warmonger but instead that he suppressed his misgivings because of his conception of his role as Secretary of Defense and his sense of loyalty to the President.
