ipl-logo

Daniel Ellsberg Thesis

856 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Jfk assassination theory essay

Born in Chicago in 1931, military strategist Daniel Ellsberg helped strengthen public opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971 by leaking secret documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. The documents contained evidence that the U.S. government had misled the public regarding U.S. involvement in the war.
On June of 1967, the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, ordered officials in the headquarters of the U.S. military to gather a history of U.S. policy toward Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the officials hired by McNamara, helped compile a 7,000-page, 47-volume document that Ellsberg called "evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder." Daniel Ellsberg began …show more content…

According to John T. Correll who states that in 1964 "Johnson and McNamara said that the central U.S. aim was to secure an 'independent, non-Communist South Vietnam. '" but on March 24, 1965 McNaughton says that the United States main priorities are: "70 percent- to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat, 20 percent- to keep South Vietnam territory from Chinese hands, and 10 percent- to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life." The reason the Pentagon Papers was so shocking to the public was because people began to realize that the government hasn 't been telling the whole truth about the Vietnam War. Also, of the main focuses was on the freedom of press issues. The Pentagon Papers didn 't cause a national security problem other than the fact that the Vietnam War wasn 't over yet. The articles would have given the North Vietnamese people an early understanding of the U.S. 's "objectives, strategies, uncertainties, and degrees of commitment" had the documents not been several years old by the time of …show more content…

Conclusion
The U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War led to the revolutionary change of American society in how they chose to view their country’s government and how they choose to abide by its wishes. The war created an entire new movement of young adults who weren’t afraid to question what they viewed as injustice; they stood for peace and love, and protested for it. Draft evasion showed that the American people didn’t have to fight for a war that they didn’t believe in. The revelation of the Pentagon Papers showed that citizens had a right to know what their country was doing. This left millions of Americans wondering; when does loyalty to one’s state end? Does following a separate set of morals, that of which contradict your government, make

Show More
Related
716 Words | 3 Pages

Larry Berman's, No Peace, No Honor (Touchstone), argues that Richard Nixon wanted to be remembered as a great foreign policy president, however, his plans went array due to the Watergate scandal. Berman believes that with the aid of Henry Kissinger, President Nixon buried the truth about America's “honorable” pulling out of South Vietnam, thus leaving the South to fend off their northern counterparts. It is argued by Kissinger that the administration won the war and that it was Congress that lost it. Kissinger has said that it is evident that congress lost the war when they defunded any continued military activity that could have prevented the communist from taking over South Vietnam. Berman argues that Nixon and Kissinger both knew that with

Read More
204 Words | 1 Pages

In a “Vietnam Veterans against the war”, John Kerry’s comment on President Nixon not wanting to become, “the first President to lose a war,” illustrates just how insistent Nixon was on maintaining a superior Presidential image of power. Ironically, Nixon has one of the more, if not the most, tarnished Presidential image due to the Watergate scandal. Kerry’s speech drove the idea that the Veterans fighting in Vietnam did not believe that they were there to do good and did not feel that they were the “heroes” liberalizing the Vietnamese from the dangers of communism. As he notes, most people there did not understand the difference between communism and democracy. The freedom the Vietnamese sought was liberation from the helicopters, the bombs,

Read More
777 Words | 4 Pages

Nixon wanted to end the war just like every other American. He had many plans for this war and one of them was called Vietnamization. Vietnamization was a policy that would replace U.S. troops with South Vietnamese troops and supply them with supplies and weapons (Rubel 182). It was a way to retreat U.S. troops and end involvement in the war. Even though he ended involvement in the Vietnam War by withdrawing U.S. troops, he decided to bomb enemy forces in Cambodia (Lillegard 71).

Read More
352 Words | 2 Pages

In The Age of Great Dreams written by David Farber, chapter 7 My opinions and views have not changed on if there was a true purpose in Vietnam. As David Farber would state “By 1965 the main goal of the U.S. policy in Vietnam (70%,” reported McNaughton) was “to avoid humiliating US defeat” (142). My belief about the war is the intent was to stop a future threat and not allowing china or Russia to ally with Vietnam. But in the end, it lead to confusion of even the soldiers of the time not knowing their purpose in the war besides avoiding U.S. humiliation in the end. There was too much corruption and agendas with the politics of Vietnam such as how president Johnson and the media handled the war to the point it sound like to me within Farber’s

Read More
56 Words | 1 Pages

A popular reason why the Nixon administration formed the Vietnamization policy was to decrease US casualties and construct an army known as ARVN to gradually take over the American troops roll in the war. Alongside these military goals was the additional political goal of creating a westernized stable government within South Vietnam thus popularizing the country.

Read More
387 Words | 2 Pages

The atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians was a political threat to Nixon’s strategy of Vietnamization. Nixon’s goal was to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese so that he is able to withdraw most of the U.S. troops. The massacre in My Lai would further justify the resistance of the enemy and it was the complete opposite of what Nixon wanted to accomplish.

Read More
509 Words | 3 Pages

To begin with, the Vietnam War, one of the most paramount foreign policy events during Nixon’s time in office. Often times, ending it is added into Nixon’s list of accomplishments. But was it really as simple as that? This is a perfect example of how there is much more to the iceberg than just the tip.

Read More
891 Words | 4 Pages

One of the most controversial wars in history and a turning point in American foreign policy, the emotions and events surrounding the Vietnam War capture the essence of the era. The rise of rebellious youth culture and anti-war and anti-draft movements were key social aspects of American life leading up to and during the fighting. (Doc 2, 3) On the political side, Congress aimed to control the Chief-Executive with legislation such as the War Powers Act of 1973, requiring the president to remove all unreported troops in Vietnam and report any further sent. (Doc 7) To say the country was divided would be a massive understatement.

Read More
1143 Words | 5 Pages

Robert McNamara hope to achieve containment of communism in North Vietnam and have a south Vietnam to be a capitalistic. He believes that the US should keep communism in North Vietnam and prevent communism to spread to North Vietnam neighboring countries. McNamara recommend the following actions he wanted to stabilize US forces in Vietnam which he viewed “…would put us in a position where negations would be more likely to be proactive…”. He also wanted to install a barrier which would run across sea, the neck of south Vietnam and some of the trails in Laos. Stabilize the Rolling Thunder program, Peruse a vigorous pacification program.

Read More
943 Words | 4 Pages

Johnson’s decisions in Vietnam are complex and debated about to this day. Johnson was left with this issue from Kennedy and as a strong proponent of the Domino Theory he believed that going to war with Vietnam was the right decision. The Vietnam war would devolve into disastrous policy and resulted in the loss of life of numerous Americans. However, while his decisions were disastrous he recognized that a continuation of his presidency would only seek to divide the country more.

Read More
337 Words | 2 Pages

Cambodian, Laotians, and Vietnamese fought for their freedom from the French. America sided with the French to manipulate Vietnam. Robert McNamara was a Secretary of Defense, who had the reports about the United States ' plan proceeding on Vietnam. Mainly, they were seriously secret matters : also known as Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg wanted the public to know about his opinion that the federal government 's involvement was a sinister and needless war, so he offered the information of the reports to the New York Times.

Read More
1524 Words | 7 Pages

The war in Vietnam to do this day has gone down as one of the influential and controversial wars in United States history. The war lasted from 1955 to 1975.The nation as a whole began to uproar over the war and the major consequences of the war. There were many reasons why so many Americans were against the war. Public opinion steadily turned against the war following 1967 and by 1970 only a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops to fight in Vietnam (Wikipedia). Not to mention, many young people protested because they were the ones being drafted while others were against the war because the anti-war movement grew increasingly popular among the counterculture and drug culture in American society and

Read More
1124 Words | 5 Pages

“Woodstein” and Watergate, Edward Snowden and the NSA, and Seymour Hersh and My Lai exposed the hidden wrongs of the US government with staggeringly influential power to change both the government and journalism. Here, we will be focusing on the fallout from Hersh’s reports on the 1968 massacres at My Lai (“Pinkville”), Vietnam. With the exposer of US Army immorality by Seymour Hersh of the St. Louis Dispatch in a series of reports the field of war journalism was forever changed into two distinct eras, Pre and post Vietnam and fundamentally changed the journalist, military relationship.

Read More
1139 Words | 5 Pages

January 31, 1968 Dear Diary, I’m writing to you because I just got the word that 19 Vietcong guerillas attacked South Vietnam’s embassy. As the President of the United States, I am very concerned about South Vietnam and all the Americans there at this time. Additionally, I am worried about how this will be portrayed to the Americans on the homefront through the media. I understand that South Vietnam and the Vietcong were in a “cease-fire” or a time where both sides agree to stop the fighting for a little while. I have been told that the Vietcong had hidden weapons throughout Saigon and attacked the second night of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

Read More
765 Words | 4 Pages

Also, newspapers revealed stories and government secrets that proved that the American people were being lied to ( New York Times vs. the United States). The Vietnam war is believed by some to be a war deeply rooted in economics. Many aspects of the United States were affected directly. The Great Society programs were suffering because the money that was put towards the war, could have been used to help poverty programs.

Read More

More about Daniel Ellsberg Thesis

Related Topics

Open Document