Daniel Ellsberg: Master of War, Champion of Peace
by John Kendall Hawkins
The Speeches
Daniel Ellsberg reckoned that he almost got us all killed back in '62, twice shooting his mouth off through firebrand speeches that he wrote and gave to political orators to proxy vent his bravado. His research and analyses at the RAND Corporation in the years after WW2 had shown him that the US sported a 10-1 nuke advantage over the Soviets, and that we knew where their dinky little nukes were located (Plesetsk), and yet in the mounting tension in a post-war Berlin, the Soviets were blustering about superiority, scaring the bejeezus out of the Europeans, who wanted some gimme reassurance from the Yanks. DeGaulle's Force de Frappe set up to deter the Soviets, the French not believing the Yanks's promise to protect Europe. Ellsberg's speeches changed that calculus.
Each speech served to humiliate Soviet First Secretary Nikita (his name translates to "unconquered" or "victor") Khrushchev. The first speech, delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick at a Business Council gathering in Virginia on October 21, 1961, seemed, to the Soviets, to be calling their bluff on nuclear superiority and may have helped inflame the tensions over the newly constructed Berlin Wall, culminating in the famous stand-off at Checkpoint Charlie on October 22. Ellsberg, recalling his speech 50 years later in The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a War Planner, realized he may have sent a rorschachable message:
What else was I saying in my draft passages for the Gilpatric speech but that if the Soviets blocked our enlarged patrols along the Berlin corridors with some of their armored divisions in the neighborhood, they would have been taking an unacceptable risk of U.S. first use of nuclear weapons against those forces
Ellsberg expressed surprise at the Soviet response to this speech. Although it occurred to him that Khrushchev needed to save face. The day after Gilpatric's speech, Khrushchev's Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky told the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow:
A realistic assessment of the picture would lead one to believe that what the imperialists are planning is a surprise nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. and the socialist countries.
The response was scary in its implications. The speech introduced the idea of a first strike, first use concept into the fraught conversation between the superpowers.
Ellsberg's second speech, at the 1962 University of Michigan at Ann Arbor commencement, was delivered by Secretary of State Robert McNamara. The Secretary urged a policy of deterrence whereby the US and Soviets agreed to nuke only military targets and to spare the cities and their populations. This seemed to favor the Americans. Khrushchev raged that "it was deceptive to the American people because bases in the United States were in or near large cities." As far as the First Secretary was concerned, the speech was saying to him,"that McNamara was somehow trying to make nuclear war seem less bloody and therefore more acceptable," and said Khrushchev, "To get the population used to the idea that nuclear war will take place."
It's interesting that, according to Ellsberg, both speeches were exactly the kind of language that JFK was intent on avoiding. Kennedy aide Carl Kaysen had warned him about language he'd prepared in a previous speech written for Kennedy that was meant to call Khrushchev's bluff; its propositions included language that went against "Kennedy's more conciliatory style." JFK didn't use Ellsberg's speech. As for Gilpatrick's speech, historian Michael Bechloss, said "The speech violated the President's own rule against backing an enemy into a dangerous corner." Ellsberg "confessed" in Doomsday that "in October 1961 I had done my part in greasing the skids toward the Cuban missile crisis." The second speech, at Ann Arbor, had merely put out the growing fiery rhetoric between the Soviets and the Americans with gasoline, Ellsberg wrote:
By the time of the Ann Arbor speech in July, the Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles that were meant, among other aims, to counter American assertions of strategic superiority and warnings of possible U.S. first use or first strike over Berlin were already on their way to the Caribbean.
Nothing in the speech encouraged Khrushchev to turn the nuke-laden ships around. As Ellsberg points out in Doomsday, it wasn't only the speeches but also the US pointing out in their bluff-calling the number of ICBMs the Russians had (4), where they were located (Plesetsk), and how "vulnerable" the missiles were to attack, while the US moved nukes into Italy and Turkey well within range of Moscow. Clearly, even with such an advantage, nobody thought to consider that Khrushchev might sneak some intermediate range missiles within range of Washington, DC.
Ellsberg seems to have started out as the real deal Master of War that Bob Dylan sneered at in his famous song, hiding behind walls, hiding behind desks, playing with the world as if it were a toy. Though he declares in Doomsday that he in no way wanted to see a nuclear war break out, Ellsberg "confesses" that it took half a century for him to realize that his earlier language could easily have been taken as an existential threat to the Soviets. He misread their read. He believed the Soviets were bluffing about the threat; the missiles sent to Cuba suggested otherwise.
But Ellsberg's story about what happened in the lead-up, and during the missile crisis, in Cuba, was more harrowing than anything most Americans have heard about. The zero sum event was far closer than reported. Consider: The Pentagon wanted to invade Cuba to force the Soviet intermediate missiles out, but, Ellsberg reveals in his book, nobody realized at the time that the Soviets had, "along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included." And what's more, Ellsberg reports in Doomsday, the Pentagon had every intention of nuking China, too, had they bombed the Soviets, even without Chinese provocation.
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