Boring though it may be in terms of writing, the actual story told in this book is phenomenal. It is a first-hand account of life as a high-level policy maker, and the reality of being in one of these inside positions is startlingly different from being on the outside peering in. One very strong message I took from this book was that when it comes to foreign policy the electorate, the press, anyone who isn't in the Executive Branch, they have no say (of course), but also they aren't even heard. Ellsberg explains this excellently, describing his frame of mind while working under Secretary of Defense McNamara:

"It was [my] understanding that it was the president's job to make foreign policy, with the advice of [me and my] bosses, not, in any serious sense, with the advice of Congress. It didn't matter that much to us what the public thought." (Page 51)

Ellsberg's narrative makes it quite clear just how little insiders pay attention to the public: He is shocked to learn that Martin Luther King Jr. is an outspoken anti-war activist, just two days before King is murdered. As he slowly gains his conscience and becomes active in the anti-war community, he is surprised at how cogent and comprehensive their espousals are, as he had previously thought of them, as did everyone with the president's ear, as "extremist, simplistic, and negative." (Page 264)

Reading this book, I was struck by the number of times the word Vietnam could've been replaced with Iraq and it would have made perfect sense. The parallels are quite apparent, though often disturbing to think about because I'm not an insider in the US's current regime, so it only seeded my mind with the untoward possibilities going on at the highest levels of government. One of the most interesting parallels was the fact that Nixon ran his election campaign on a very clear anti-war platform, specifying a vague and "secret" plan to "restore peace" to Indochina. The American electorate understood that to mean a vote for Nixon was a vote to end the war shortly. Nixon had never planned at all to end the war, and instead he'd planned all along to expand the war, to begin aggressively bombing the North, even discussing with Henry Kissinger, his eventual Secretary of Defense, the possibility of using a nuclear weapon against Hanoi. He was the most hawkish of the contending candidates, yet Americans understood him to be anti-war. He won in a landslide.

Obama was apparently anti-war. He made very vague campaign promises about reducing troop-levels in Iraq, but aside from a few questionable quotes, never once stated he would present a firm deadline for total withdrawal. Americans again assumed, somehow, that a vote for Obama was a vote against the war. Yet Iraq is still going on.

The war against Iraq is still being waged, although as far as I can tell, it's not at all discussed in the media anymore. This is identical to what happened between 1969 and 1972: Americans assumed the war was ending, they figured because of one statement Nixon made about reducing infantry numbers on the ground that the war was ending. Now, Nixon did reduce troop numbers, but at the same time he upped the bombing of the North and began secret invasions of Laos and Cambodia. At his peak in 1970, he was responsible for dropping a tonnage of bombs equivalent to the entire tonnage of bombs dropped in all of WWII every single month on targets all over Vietnam, north and south. All the while, the press was silent--they didn't know anything, so tightly held were these secrets. What secrets is the current American administration holding?

Reading this book is an exercise in frustration for anybody interested in being an informed citizen. It's a commonly held belief these days that the mass media is totally broken. I'd say that much is entirely obvious, and it didn't take Noam Chomsky telling me for me to figure it out. But even were the media to function correctly, even if media sources hadn't become increasingly concentrated over the past two decades, control being gathered up by fewer and fewer hands, even if key players in the media were asking the tough questions, were grilling elected officials and being the fourth estate they should be, governments are still very, very good at keeping secrets. The media could be perfect, and we could never be certain, still, that there wasn't any more to the story than we knew.

One reason I enjoyed this book so much was it gave factual credence to one of my favourite novels of all time: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. As I was reading, I was immediately struck with the similarities between the characters in Tree of Smoke and how well the aligned with some in Secrets. Skip Sands, the protagonist of Smoke, is a soft-spoken, learned, studious, academic worker for the CIA, in Vietnam to meet with the people and work with his uncle, Colonel Xavier Francis Sands, at winning the war with hearts and minds. Eventually, he winds up disillusioned and a traitor. Details notwithstanding, that's a fairly accurate retelling of the story arc of Ellsberg's life.

But the similarities don't end there. While in Vietnam, working for the State Department, Ellsberg spent two years under Major Lansdale, who was then working for the CIA. Lansdale was atypical for a high rank military man in Vietnam: He believed the war could be won, but he disagreed with the violence. He wanted to win hearts and minds, but he didn't use that phrase as bullshit--he advised Ellsberg to find people who spoke Vietnamese, to meet with the locals and find out what the situation is for the Vietnamese, and not to become immersed in the American will in Vietnam. He advised driving around the country to the various provinces and meeting the locals that way, instead of being helicoptered in like a king. These are all traits characteristic of the enigmatic Colonel in Vietnam. In fact, Lansdale himself was working with the CIA but had great success operating as a kind of free agent: He chose and ran his own missions, he commandeered vehicles and was given platoons of men to run ops, all without approval or sanction from the usual chain of command. Which amounts to pretty much a character description of Colonel Xavier Sands.

Even the details of how the chain of command influences intelligence was presented in either book. In Smoke, Sands talked about upwards- and downwards-pressure. Upwards pressure was what compelled people of lower rank to present intelligence data and analyses to their commanding officers in a light that they assumed their commanding officers would like. Downward pressure was the opposite: Higher-ups influencing (consciously and sub-) the analyses and intelligence data of their subordinates based on what they want to hear. The entire result (which Ellsberg studied academically, the ways in which policy failures happen as a result of poor decision making) is presented exactly the same in Secrets.