What becomes of the Op Ed writer…something good or redeeming. This article questions all that.
Set aside whether the writer is a courageous patriot or a gutless coward, and whether the Times was right or wrong to grant anonymity. Set aside the White House’s mole hunt to flush out the leaker, and the two dozen “senior administration officials” who rushed to insist they were not the traitor in their midst. Set aside, too, the rash insistence of the libertarian Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky that suspects should submit to lie-detector tests to prove their fealty.
Settle on this, though: The writer who would shoot the king to save him, and by extension the country, aimed the arrow awfully low. Defending “effective deregulation, historic tax cuts, a more robust military and more.” Seriously? Defending those relatively modest goals and achievements when—by the writer’s own perfervid, urgent reckoning—the security of the republic, the sanctity of the Constitution, and, just maybe, the fate of the Earth is at stake?
The smallness of those stakes calls to mind Sir Thomas More’s famous remonstrance in A Man for All Seasons, when he upbraids a colleague for perjuring himself in exchange for a minor Welsh appointment: “For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … But for Wales?”
Ellsberg had no such luck. For his troubles, when his identity became known, the Nixon White House Plumbers broke into his psychiatrist’s office in search of incriminating information. None was found, but the damage was done, as the White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman noted in a taped conversation with Nixon in June 1971. Haldeman cited the observation of Donald Rumsfeld, then a White House domestic-policy adviser, that to “the ordinary guy” the Pentagon papers were “a bunch of gobbledygook.”
“But out of the gobbledygook,” Haldeman added, “comes a very clear thing … You can’t trust the government, you can’t believe what they say, and you can’t rely on their judgment. And the—the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.”
Think about that: Nixon’s own most loyal aides—Haldeman, Rumsfeld—recognized the damage that Ellsberg’s revelations had done. Sure, they acknowledged the damage only in private, and, yes, they launched the unsparing campaign of retribution that helped lead to Nixon’s downfall. But Ellsberg’s leak involved something much bigger, vastly more important than “effective deregulation, historic tax cuts, a more robust military and more.”
If only the Times’ Mr. or Ms. X had shown the courage (or folly) of Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, David Stockman. Thirty-seven years ago, he had the temerity to say (out loud, and under his own name) that the administration’s economic policy was out of whack, that its much-promised, much-lauded tax cuts had not been matched by comparable spending discipline. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” Stockman told the journalist William Greider. Where did he say that? In the pages of this magazine. Its editorial heirs are all ears for anyone in the Trump administration who cares about more than “effective deregulation, historic tax cuts, a more robust military and more,” and who might be willing to say as much to the whole wide world, out loud.
