What a twenty-five-year-old memo by Daniel Ellsberg says about the past failures of Lyndon Johnson and the current horrors of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The conversion of my friend Ellsberg, who died last June of cancer, from avid supporter of and adviser on the Vietnam War to perhaps its most important critic is well known. One of Dan’s major obsessions was with American leadership, specifically with the perversity of President Lyndon Johnson continuing to fight war that many of his closest advisers knew could not be won.

I thought of Dan after learning here in Washington that Israel’s—make that Benjamin Netanyahu’s—latest incursion into Rafah would be an all-out ‘go’ unless the Hamas negotiating team, now in Cairo, provides proof of the well-being of the thirty-three Israeli hostages said to be in its control. Without such proof, I was told by a senior American official, it will be “end game on.”

Which brings us to President Johnson. We now know that along with steadily increasing American troop involvement in the war and conducting bombing campaigns in both North and South Vietnam, he made no serious effort to engage in peace talks with the leadership of North Vietnam, despite a series of tentative offers from the North, whose basic precondition before serious talks was a temporary halt in the bombing. Time after time, as many histories of the war have reported, Johnson refused to agree to slow the bombing, and time after time such refusal led the North to turn away. He would announce that he was no longer running for re-election in March of 1968, when it was clear that the burgeoning antiwar movement in America, and the lack of success in the battlefield, made his re-election impossible.

Ellsberg, who never had a job after leaving government service and the national security sector, would go on to write a series of successful books and emerge as a leading spokesman for the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements in America. But he remained haunted by the war and by the seemingly irrational refusal of Johnson to agree to force the corrupt leadership of........

© Pearls and Irritations