( Niko Tavernise / 20th Century Fox )
Leslie Gelb, the man who supervised the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers, wasn't a character in the new Hollywood drama, "The Post." He is rarely called for comment in documentaries and films about the Pentagon Papers leak. Back in 1971, Gelb was troubled by the publication of the Papers by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, but he came to see that they demonstrated the major flaws of the Vietnam War effort. Brooke talks to Gelb about what the Pentagon Papers were trying to achieve in the first place, how they're understood by the public, and what "The Post" missed in its interpretation.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. And this is a clip from the new Spielberg film released nationally this weekend called The Post, as in the Washington Post.
[CLIP]:
POST REPORTER: Ben, how are we supposed to comb through 4,000 pages of this thing?
POST REPORTER: They’re not even loosely organized.
POST REPORTER: The Times had three months. There’s no way we can possibly get this done.
POST REPORTER: Yeah, he’s right. We got less than eight hours.
BEN BRADLEE: Hey, hey, The last six years we’ve been playing catch-up and now thanks to the president of the United States who, by the way, has taken a [BLEEP] all over the First Amendment, we have the goods. We don’t have any competition. There’s dozens of stories in here. The Times has barely scratched the surface.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the summer of ’71, The New York Times was hit with an injunction barring it from printing any more scoops from the Pentagon Papers, the top secret history of the Vietnam War leaked by analyst Daniel Ellsberg. But now the Post had a copy. The Pentagon Papers, the momentous, monumental chronicle of government secrets and lies was described last year in the sweeping 18-hour film series, The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
[CLIP]:
NARRATOR: Seven-thousand pages of highly classified documents and historical narrative, compiled secretly at the orders of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He had hoped a study of the decision-making process that had led the United States to become so deeply involved in Vietnam would help future policymakers avoid similar errors.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yet, Les Gelb, isn’t so sure the press got the right message from the Pentagon Papers, and he led the team that created them 50 years ago. What's more, he rarely gets the chance to set the record straight because researchers, they don't pick up the phone.
LES GELB: The people behind the movie, The Post, didn’t call.
[BROOKE CHUCKLES]
And the only who came by, really, was Ken Burns.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What did he ask you?
LES GELB: He asked me about the origins of the Pentagon Papers and I told him what they were, namely, that we got a list from McNamara of a hundred questions.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Things like, what's happening in the field, how many of the enemy died?
LES GELB: That’s right, what’s the body kill? Eight of the hundred questions were historical. I was given six people to work on these questions and we were given two months to get ‘em done. I collected the people. By the way, we were told not to tell anybody about this. We stared at the questions and we all started laughing. They said, well, why are we doing this? This is the kind of stuff we send up to the press secretary when we’re preparing him to answer questions, and we’re not going to be able to add anything to what we’re doing on a daily basis.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But some of the questions were bigger than that, Les. The questions included, are we lying about the number killed in action?
LES GELB: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Can we win this war? So how did the government feel about the war?
LES GELB: I would say almost everybody in the government felt that the war was not going well but a number felt there were ways to fight it better. There were very, very few people in the Pentagon or the State Department or the White House who were flat out against the war.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. They believed in the domino theory.
LES GELB: Essentially, that was it, that somehow if we’d lost a strategic place such as Berlin, we would lose Europe. And, in fact, in one of the memos you'll see in the Pentagon Papers, the State Department referred to Indochina as the “Asian Berlin.” That's how central they thought it was to the future security and safety of the United States. Hard to believe but that's what we thought.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why did McNamara ask you these questions, if you were already giving the best answers you could to the press secretary every day? Why?
LES GELB: To this day, I don't know. McNamara initially just said, answer those questions. Then after this group of six that I had assembled schmoozed about it for several days, we decided, well, you know, it might be interesting if we could look back into the files and maybe give more in-depth answers to the questions we had been answering more or less from our daily experience. And, inevitably, you had to dip back into the history. We wrote up a list of about 20 some-odd monographs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Short papers.
LES GELB: That’s really with the Pentagon Papers is, a bunch of short papers. I sent the memo to McNamara and he wrote on that memo, okay, let it be encyclopedic and let the chips fall where they may. But we were still enjoined from telling people about it. The only ones who really knew were CIA, Mc -- because McNamara called the head of the CIA, Richard Helms, and Helms shipped over to me an enormous quantity [LAUGHS] of these documents from the CIA. But he never called Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, he never called Walt Rostow, the national security advisor or told Lyndon Johnson. The notion that this was a definitive history is just plain wrong, Brooke, [LAUGHS] because we didn't have that kind of access. And we never were allowed to do any interviews.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm! And you were a 30-year-old -- punk, pretty much, right?
LES GELB: I was 30 years old. I was director of policy planning in the Pentagon.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It was your team who came up with the idea of writing these short papers, which became the Pentagon Papers. Ken Burns suggested, it's also suggested in the new film, The Post, that McNamara commissioned this study as a cautionary tale for those who might follow in his footsteps. And so, what do you think of that narrative?
LES GELB: I think it's an explanation that Bob McNamara came up with after the fact. And he told some people that he was doing this to save future leaders from making the same mistakes and he told others, who didn't like it, for example, he told Dean Rusk that he never asked for these studies, he just wanted a collection of documents.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How long did it take?
LES GELB: It started in June of ’67, finished in February ’69. And when it was all done, you know, we had these 36 volumes, which very few people who have written about the Pentagon Papers, I assure you, have read.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
And then I took the papers over to McNamara's office at the World Bank. He was head of the World Bank in February ’69. I brought them into his office and we’re sitting around this coffee table having a little chat and then finally I said to him, would you like to see the papers? I opened up one of the boxes, handed him one of the monographs. He flipped through it like you flip through a deck of cards, with his thumb, and he threw it back into the box and he said, and I quote, “Take them back to the Pentagon.”
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think he ever read them?
LES GELB: I have no idea. I spoke to him many times over the years and I never asked him and he never said. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He was replaced by Clark Clifford as secretary of defense, a very sort of blueblood lawyer who had virtually no foreign policy experience.
LES GELB: And, by the way, we thought Clifford was sent to the Pentagon by Johnson to sit on people like us who had begun to ask questions about the war that the White House didn't like. Clark Clifford sensed this right away and laughed and said, you don’t realize, I’ve been against this war since 1965. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What did he think of the domino theory?
LES GELB: That was the reason why he became a dove in ’65, long before the rest of us foreign policy expert,s caught in the trap of our thinking. Johnson had sent him to talk to the Asian leaders about sending more troops to fight the war, and none of them would give any troops. And so, Clifford said, I thought to myself, well, if the dominoes don't think they have to fight to save themselves, what the devil are we doing?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: By the time you were assembling what became the Pentagon Papers, it was already known to the secretary of defense and to the president, and possibly to you, if you were sending that information daily to the press secretary, that the war was not going to be won.
LES GELB: Yeah, well, there were some people who thought it could be won. You had --
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But not the president and not the secretary of defense.
LES GELB: That's correct.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, they felt they had to continue to send battalion after battalion into the field to die.
LES GELB: No question about it but I think Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk continued to believe that we still could pull this out. But, you know, I think most people by sometime in ’68 came more to believe that we couldn't afford to lose.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They continued to send soldiers into it.
LES GELB: Not to lose.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: To maintain a, a strange balance of power in the world, the domino theory, a bankrupt notion, as it later came to be believed.
LES GELB: But at the time, most people in government believed it. The story has been put out that the Pentagon Papers showed they were all lying. But, while the Papers show some lies, the main message is that our leaders, from Truman onwards, didn't know hardly anything about Vietnam and Indochina. They were ignorant. And it also shows that the foreign policy community believed that if we lost Vietnam the rest of Asia would fall. And that was kind of a given.
Here we’re talking about all this stuff and you know far more than the average informed person about the Pentagon Papers, and you’re surprised by my answers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's precisely why we called you, Les, because there are popular legends about the Pentagon Papers and you think that they convey a false narrative. Now, you concede, there was an enormous amount of lying about numbers, constant statements of optimism. There was the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
LES GELB: You know, I didn’t even know that, Brooke, by the way, on the Tonkin Gulf, until I saw the actual negatives of the pictures taken during the shooting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Contrast the story we were told and what you saw.
LES GELB: What the American people were told in 1964 was that North Vietnamese boats attacked American ships in the Tonkin Gulf area and that our ships fired back. But what I found out, when I actually saw the negatives of the pictures taken during that night, that showed our ships firing huge guns [LAUGHS] and no small ships firing guns at us. I was astonished.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Confusion in the Gulf of Tonkin initially and later outright deception enabled President Johnson to effect a huge escalation in that war.
LES GELB: That's right. It provided the public justification.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I would argue that you may underestimate the significance of the continuous lying throughout the conduct of that war.
LES GELB: I don’t think I underestimate the, the lying. I know what it was and I know who was doing it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you think the media narrative about it is outsized.
LES GELB: It’s outsized based on the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg created the myth that what the Papers show is that it all was a bunch of lies. But the truth, [LAUGHS] truth is people actually believed in the war and were ignorant about what could and could not actually be done to do well in that war. That's what you see when you actually read the Papers, as opposed to talk about the Papers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So, essentially, a set of beliefs forced the government to continue to sacrifice thousands of men in order to get the enemy to the table, maybe.
LES GELB: And Nixon negotiated for another four years or so before he concluded the deal.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how many people died in that period?
LES GELB: As many as died in all the years before. You know, the total, I think, is something like 58,000 deaths, and God knows how many lives ruined.
And look, I wish I had turned against the war much sooner and I regret it, you have no idea, no idea. But eventually I did and then I spent several years of my life fighting against the Nixon policy and for the early end of the war. But it was too late.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how did you feel back in 1971, when you discovered that The New York Times was about to publish the Pentagon Papers?
LES GELB: That’s a very good question because, to be perfectly frank, as I think [LAUGHS] I’ve been throughout this, this interview --
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]
LES GELB: -- my first instinct was that if they just hit the papers, people would think this was the definitive history of the war, which they were not, and that people would, would think it was all about lying, rather than beliefs. And look, because we’d never learned that darn lesson about believing our way into these wars, we went into Afghanistan and we went into Iraq.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And do you think that's why it's important to clarify what the real lesson of the Pentagon Papers is?
LES GELB: Absolutely. You know, we get involved in these wars and we don't know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, people on top and even down below. And, my heavens, these are not wars like World War II and World War I, where you have battalions fighting battalions. These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, with the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Les, thank you very much.
LES GELB: You’re, you’re very welcome. Yeah, it’s so hard for people to swallow all this because of all these years of hearing the other story. You know, again, I don't deny the lies. [LAUGHS] I just want them to understand what the main points really were.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Les Gelb led the team that wrote the Pentagon Papers. He’s also a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and former head of the Council on Foreign Relations.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, exclusive coverage of the red carpet at the president's famous Fake News Awards.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media.
[PROMOS]