Daniel Ellsberg's Downfall: A Trifecta of Shilling, Conspiracy Theories, and Lies - People's View

[ucrdem]

162. Yes, that's an excellent review and a commendable summary.

I couldn't have chosen a better one. I highly recommend both review and book. Quoting for the journal:

JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass
Reviewed by James DiEugenio | http://www.ctka.net/2008/jfk_unspeakable.html

Since DiEugenio has nicely captured Douglass' thesis -- basically that JFK was eliminated by the CIA and Joint Chiefs for what they perceived as his traitorous reluctance to engage in military operations, particularly against Castro and Khrushchev -- and also his account of JFK's role in the Ngo brothers' assassinations, I won't rehearse either here. I'll simply add that Douglass supports his account with meticulous documentation that sets his book apart from even the best JFK bios including my other two favorites, Brothers by David Talbot and Profile of Power by Richard Reeves. I strongly recommend all three.

As to your question about Douglass' connection to Snowden's tale of NSA spying: since the thread is about Ellsberg let me start with him, simplifying a bit to save space. Douglass makes extensive use of the Pentagon Papers and Ellsberg's later work including Secrets, a 2002 memoir, as sources, and does not to my knowledge openly question Ellsberg's bona fides. However he does mention some interesting information, including that as a Pentagon analyst working on the PP in 1967, Ellsberg was greatly perplexed by JFK's steadfast refusal to commit troops to Vietnam when urgently requested by the Joint Chiefs, so much so that he sought out Bobby Kennedy for an interview and confronted him with this question:

Why, Ellsberg asked him, had President Kennedy rejected both ground troops and a formal commitment to victory in Vietnam, thereby "rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials"? Robert Kennedy answered that his brother was absolutely determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam, because if he did, the U. S. would be in the same spot as the French -- whites against Asians, in a war against nationalism and self-determination. (Douglass p. 108, quotation from Ellsberg's Secrets)

That was in 1967. Nixon won in 1968, covertly bombed Cambodia after secretly subverting Paris peace talks, and the Vietnam war roared on. Then in 1971, it as time for reelection, and along came RAND-Pentagon alumnus Ellsberg peddling his Pentagon Papers, parts of which he himself had written, exposing and humiliating not Nixon but LBJ and to a lesser extent Kennedy. Nixon won reelection 1972, and the war rolled on until Nixon tried to end it, at which point Watergate, also featuring Ellsberg in a symbolic but non-speaking role, took care of Nixon.

So the long and the short of my analysis is that Ellsberg is a very dubious character who may or may not be the peacenik he claims to be. He wasn't in 1967, by his own account -- the RFK interview goes on in that vein, with Ellsberg determined to find out what had made JFK tick -- and his glorious deed in 1971 seems to have helped assure Nixon's reelection. Cut to Oct. 2012, and as I've already posted in this thread, Ellsberg was very vocally telling potential Obama voters that he himself did not support Obama, had no intention of voting for him, and furthermore that Obama has earned impeachment:

It's not merely understandable, it's entirely appropriate to be enraged at Barack Obama. As I am.

He has often acted outrageously, not merely timidly or "disappointingly."

If impeachment were politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he's earned it (like George W. Bush, and many of his predecessors!)

It is entirely human to want to punish him, not to "reward" him with another term or a vote that might be taken to express trust, hope or approval.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-ellsberg/obama-swing-states_b_1979321.html

Since Obama is in my view the most reluctant dispatcher of US military forces since JFK -- or better put, the most successful pursuer of what JFK had called the strategy of peace -- I have to say that in this most recent instance, again, Ellsberg's weirdly wire-crossed pronouncements do not strike me as sincerely motivated.