Question/Problem 4: How and why did the Vietnam War divide Americans?

Directions: Locate a reading that describes the release of the "Pentagon Papers" in 1971. The passages found on pages 96-97 in _Vietnam: A War on Two Fronts_ (New York: Lodestar Books, 1990) by Sidney Lens are appropriate to use. (Permission to reprint passage not granted.)

Daniel Ellsberg gave an interview with Look magazine in which he explained his action:

[Interviewer]: If you want someone reading this to take a single lesson away from the Pentagon papers, what would you say he should get out of them?

[Ellsberg]: I will say this: Everybody knows the slogan 'Power corrupts.' But have we believed it? For Americans? We've really paid very little attention to the possibility that something like absolute power for the President of the United States could be enormously corrupting.

Do you realize that there's not a hint in any piece of legislation, to my knowledge, that says the President does not have the legal constitutional right tomorrow to send out all the nuclear forces of the United States to explode their weapons in pursuit of our national interests? There is no limitation that he has to consult Congress or the courts or the public or the press before he does that. Nobody else in the history of the world has had that degree of power. It's a very corrupting thought....

[Interviewer]: Do you want these men who were attracted to power, the Bundys, the Rostows, the McNamaras, punished?

[Ellsberg]: The punishment I want for them is that which I have had to suffer. I want them to be compelled to read every page of the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon documents, to see their own decisions laid end to end in the context of all the other decisions made during that period.

Beyond that, I would like them exposed, as I was, to the human physical impact of their decisions on the people of Indochina. I would like them to know what happened as a result of the bombing. I want them to see the footage that never got on television of the wounded children, of the defoliation, of the refugee camps, of the impact of this war on Indochina. And then I want them to decide for themselves what they ought to do.

From The Annals of America, vol 19 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., Chicago), pp. 235-236.