4.0
Secrets
ByPublisher Description
The true story of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the event which inspired Steven Spielberg’s feature film The Post
In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers - a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man's exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.
"[Ellsberg's] well-told memoir sticks in the mind and will be a powerful testament for future students of a war that the United States should never have fought." -The Washington Post
"Ellsberg's deft critique of secrecy in government is an invaluable contribution to understanding one of our nation's darkest hours." -Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle
In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers - a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man's exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.
"[Ellsberg's] well-told memoir sticks in the mind and will be a powerful testament for future students of a war that the United States should never have fought." -The Washington Post
"Ellsberg's deft critique of secrecy in government is an invaluable contribution to understanding one of our nation's darkest hours." -Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSecrets Reviews
4.0
“It’s been three years since I read this memoir, and yet the rage I felt then by the blatant corruption and continual deception of the public by four different U.S presidents, has not dwindled the least!
Ellsberg’s “man on the inside” perspective - though subjective and written decades after the events took place - adds another abominable vile layer to the malfeasances of the U.S involvement in the Vietnam War, as revealed by the Pentagon Papers. Namely, that it makes the lying by the elected Presidents feel personal to the (U.S) reader in a way which the records in the papers themselves did not.
Through his vivid account of the purposefully illegal actions taken by individuals at the NSA, like Robert McNamara, and/or POTUS and/or the VPs, and by disclosing previously confidential one-on-one conversations with said individuals, Ellsberg thwart said perpetrators and their enablers from hiding behind the abstract idea of a “corrupt government” where everyone - and thus no one - is responsible. It also prevents the blameworthy from making a single scheming politician like Nixon the scapegoat. (Though, I’d love to shit on Nixon any day. Unfortunately, however, he isn’t the only twat in this history lesson. He’s just the biggest:))
No, indeed, this retelling of events confronts you with the fact that even highly-revered presidents like J.F.K purposefully deceived U.S citizens and allowed for continual massacres of innocent lives on the other side of the world, with eyes fully open.
This book repeatedly slaps you in the face with the horrendous number of lives lost during the war and the ever-denied, but very real campaigns of mass-bombings and mass-destructions of civilian villages. Not to mention the additional destruction of land, the various chemical weapons (!!), outright assassinations of resistance leaders, and repeated U.S efforts of destabilising a frail and newly emerging Vietnamese government. The latter, mostly through coups, involving organised murders of entire families of Vietnamese leaders and/or candidates.
Normally, I refrain from divulging in subjective accounts of history, but the statistics given and the events told in this memoir are identical to the recorded data in the Pentagon Papers (yes, I went and fact-checked), and Ellsberg’s retelling is true to his original narrative post-leak.
A final (but crucial) corollary: Whistleblowers must be protected. Now, more than ever in our current age of fake news, politically-driven propaganda, and half-baked truths.
If not, democracy risk becoming a front.”
“This book radicalized me in high school”
About Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate, ex-Marine, and Rand Corporation analyst, was one of the "whiz kids" recruited to serve in the Pentagon during the Johnson administration. In 1971, Ellsberg made headlines around the world when he released the Pentagon Papers. He is now a prominent speaker, writer, and activist.
Other books by Daniel Ellsberg
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