On the Politics of Suspicion
American responses to the Pentagon Papers and revelations
of government deception during the Vietnam War
Fabian Jankovic
University of British Columbia
December 2012
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The Vietnam War marks an important stage in American history and in the history of the
Cold War. Only a decade removed from involvement in Korea and World War Two before it, the
United States soon found itself mired in another military engagement far from home. In
Indochina, they prosecuted a war against an enemy largely unknown to Washington through a
method of combat wholly unfamiliar to the American war machine, while simultaneously trying
to prop up a succession of unstable and unpopular governments in Saigon. Nonetheless,
American inability to succeed in any of these endeavours did not deter policymakers from
maintaining the status quo. American intransigence, however, began to be compromised in the
wake of military setbacks on the ground and growing antiwar sentiment at home. Finally, in the
spring of 1971, Daniel Ellsberg presented the Pentagon Papers to Neil Sheehan of the New York
Times, and in the following weeks and months, they revealed to the American public the lies,
secrets, and general deception that lay behind American involvement in Vietnam for over two
decades. This essay will argue that the Pentagon Papers, as a result of the gravity of their
revelations, sealed a perception of government betrayal and long-term deception over the state of
affairs in Southeast Asia, thereafter establishing the “politics of suspicion” as a way of life and
thought for the American people. This essay will begin by defining the term “politics of suspicion”
and how it interacts with such conceptual ideas as lying, secrecy, and the “credibility gap.” The
second part of the paper will examine the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the revelations
of government deception during the Vietnam War era, examining the conflict’s central themes
before moving to analyze some of the most significant examples of government deceit, including
the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Washington’s responses to the 1968 Tet Offensive. Third, this
essay will show how the politics of suspicion were legitimated in American political life by tracing
American attitudes toward Washington, the emergence of alternative media sources during the
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Vietnam War, and President Nixon’s vindictive responses to the publication of the Papers.
Overall, this essay will show how the Pentagon Papers inaugurated the politics of suspicion in
American public life, a phenomenon that remains with the American people through to the
present day.
I. Defining the “politics of suspicion”
In his seminal work Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricoeur
outlined what he called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Essentially, Ricoeur argued that
hermeneutics—the study of how written texts are interpreted—inherently involves suspicion, and
that the meaning of a given text is arrived at only through its critical interpretation. This style of
interpretation—a middle road between the credulousness of total trust and the nihilism of
complete distrust—strives to separate the apparent from the real; it argues that underneath stated
intentions often lay a different kind of reality. Ricoeur illustrated the hermeneutics of suspicion
through a study of the meaning of religion, as interpreted by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and
Sigmund Freud. Marx argued that religion’s true purpose was to provide a flight from “the reality
of inhuman working conditions" and to make "the misery of life more endurable.”1 Religion in this
way served as "the opiate of the masses.” Nietzsche saw religion as “the refuge of the weak,”
elevating weakness to a position of strength in order to make weakness “respectable" and life a
little more endurable.2 Freud believed religion to be an illusion that merely expressed “one’s wish
for a father-god.”3 These three men, whom Ricoeur dubbed the “masters of suspicion,” disagreed
in their interpretations of religion, but were nonetheless united in their “suspicion[s] concerning
the illusions of consciousness.”4 David Stewart writes that the three intellectuals were unified by
their “common interest in finding the true meaning by stripping away the false meaning.”5
Suspicion, through its critical approach, can thus open up a text to a new reading, one which is
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often “even more powerful than the first reading,” and which correspondingly can evoke in us “an
even stronger response.”6 This critical approach is the essence of what I call the “politics of
suspicion.” As adapted to this essay, it describes the post-Vietnam War consciousness of the
American public, whereby those searching for truth could no longer rely on the official
government or mainstream media interpretation of events, but instead had to look underneath
the mainstream interpretation of events for the underlying reality. As its hermeneutical
namesake, the politics of suspicion engages the American people to seek out the truth, to separate
the apparent from the real. Paul Ricoeur’s work can thus provide a starting point for how to
analyze governmental behaviour and American responses to it.
The concept behind the politics of suspicion is reflected in the works of other intellectuals
as well. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter identified this common critical sentiment as the “paranoid
style” in American politics, in a famous essay by the same name. Hofstadter referred to the
paranoid style as an old and recurrent phenomenon in American public life that has been
frequently linked with movements of public discontent.7 As Hofstadter acknowledged, the
concept of the paranoid style as a force in politics “would have little contemporary relevance or
historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of
paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon
significant.”8 Moreover, this paranoid style was further justified by its “frequent historical
recurrence.”9 Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified the term “postmodern paranoia”
to refer to an aesthetic preference for “alternative” modes of thought that led to a playful interest
in conspiracy theories about government secrecy “just for the hell of it.”10 Daniel Hellinger has
argued that conspiracy theories sometimes serve popular resistance and empowerment because
they cast suspicion on the transparency and legitimacy of actions undertaken by the police,
military, and intelligence agencies, whose missions sometimes include “actually undertaking
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conspiracies.”11 The creator of the science fiction hit The X-Files, a former television series that
dealt with conspiracy theories, affirmed that his own personal “paranoia and mistrust of authority
came of age during Watergate.”12
The politics of suspicion often flourish where a “credibility gap” exists between the leaders
of a society and that society’s citizens. Imaginably, a credibility gap opens up when policies of
official secrecy and deception begin to come undone. This begs the question: can secrecy and
deception be reconciled in a democracy? While government secrecy may appear to be inherently
undemocratic, John Orman argued that “paradoxically, a certain amount of government secrecy is
required for the maintenance of a political system.”13 Orman conceded that secrecy can benefit
society in several ways, such as through the protection of intelligence, the guarding of other
nations’ information, and in allowing for greater flexibility in the conduct of diplomacy. Like
Orman, Sissela Bok allowed for a more consequentialist reading of secrecy, recognizing that while
it may be “prima facie wrong,” lying and secrecy “may accompany the most innocent as well as the
most lethal acts.”14 Nonetheless, secrecy in governance is inherently undemocratic because, as
Orman reasoned, it “encourages presidential lying and further abuses of secrecy, it hides dissent
within the executive over major policy decisions, and perhaps most importantly, creates a loss of
trust and support for the government among the public, where a “real or imagined credibility gap”
exists or may emerge.15 Bruce Franklin identified the historical trap associated with lying and
secrecy: A consequence of decades-long deception is the widespread belief that government is not
to be trusted. Whatever the government denies may be true, and the more the government
denies, the more likely it is deceiving the people in the first place.16 This cycle only results in the
exacerbation of the credibility gap in societies and as such, there is clearly an inherent
contradiction between government secrecy and Western liberal democracy. Citing Vietnam, Eric
Alterman noted that “A policy asking that young men be sent into battle to become killers, and
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even die for reasons no one can sensibly explain, is hardly tenable for long in a political
democracy.”17 Noam Chomsky, writing in 1970 during his travels to Indochina, noted the
irreconcilability of a democratic country fighting an imperialistic war:
The plain fact is that a democracy cannot fight a brutal, drawn-out war of aggression.
Most people are not gangsters. Unless public concern can be deflected, unless
intervention is discreet and covert, there will be protest, disaffection, and resistance.
Either the war will have to go, or the democracy.18
With the definition and meaning of the term established, this essay will now turn to discover how
the politics of suspicion emerged as a reality of American political life.
II. The publication of the Pentagon Papers and revelations of government deception
during the Vietnam War
In the spring of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara authorized a study to
answer fundamental questions concerning how the U.S. became bogged down in the war in
Vietnam. Officially titled “History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-1968,” the Pentagon
Papers project was commissioned by McNamara for two purposes: to write an “encyclopedic
history of the Vietnam War” compiling for future scholars the essential raw materials for
historical analysis of the war, but more pressingly to help Washington policymakers understand
the course and trajectory of American involvement in Indochina over the previous two decades.19
Beginning in 1967 under the direction of Morton H. Halperin and Leslie H. Gelb, the study was
completed two years later, a year after McNamara had left office in 1968, eroding any likelihood
that its publication could have spurred a change in policy from within Washington. Fifteen copies
were made of the study, two of which were given to the RAND Corporation, the think-tank where
Daniel Ellsberg worked after serving in Vietnam. Ellsberg, beginning to grow disillusioned with
the war, decided one day to read the study in its entirety, and upon completion, he became
convinced that if the American people had a chance to read the Papers, they would demand an
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immediate end to the war.20 As he later recalled, “As I saw it then, the war not only needed to be
resisted but remained to be understood.”21 For Ellsberg, Nixon’s Vietnamization policy had been a
“bloody, hopeless, uncompelled, hence surely immoral prolongation of US involvement in this
war.”22 After deciding that the documents needed to be leaked into the public sphere, Ellsberg
approached several Congressmen and Senators with the study. However, nobody on Capitol Hill
was willing to present the documents to the public, and so Ellsberg turned to his friend at the
New York Times, Neil Sheehan. On Sunday, 13 June 1971, the Times began publishing excerpts of
the Pentagon Papers and in doing so, confirmed the American people’s suspicions of the
government’s dishonest portrayal of events in Vietnam.
The Pentagon Papers revealed several narratives about the war. Foremost, the Papers
showed the American people that four administrations—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and
Johnson—progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non-communist Vietnam, a
willingness to protect South Vietnam at almost all costs, and an ultimate frustration with this
effort.23 They showed that Washington’s Vietnam policy had been cloaked in secrecy going all the
way back to 1945. When the White House decided to support France’s efforts to recolonize
Vietnam militarily and financially, they tried from the very beginning to keep their actions
secret.24 Similarly the documents showed that Lyndon Johnson had been the inheritor and not
the originator of Vietnam policy. Beginning in May 1961, Kennedy had ordered the CIA to begin a
program of covert action against North Vietnam, which included the infiltration of agents into
North Vietnam to gather intelligence and commit acts of sabotage. However, these actions were
expanded in December 1963 at Lyndon Johnson’s request.25
The Papers also illustrated how the internal justification for the war shifted over time from
the containment of communism to the protection of American national prestige abroad.26 They
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indicated that the CIA had already been publishing pessimistic intelligence reports for several
years, painting a grim picture of the situation on the ground and revealing a lack of optimism
about American chances for success in Indochina. As the Papers exposed, those intelligence
reports were frequently ignored by policymakers who were foremost preoccupied with not
“losing” Vietnam the same way that Truman had “lost” China. Moreover, the Papers revealed that
the Johnson administration was concerned about the public opinion of the nation’s Southeast
Asia policy, which was already “badly divided” by this time, as early as the spring of 1964.27
Unwilling to make all-out war because of the general opposition that would cause among the
voters, Washington instead favoured a policy of “gradual escalation.”28
Further, the Papers illustrated how U.S. policy in Indochina was rooted in total denial and
ignorance of the region’s history and culture. American policy ignored the legality and authority
of the Geneva Accords, the origin and character of Ngo Dinh Diem’s dictatorship in South
Vietnam, the indigenous roots of the rebellion against his regime, and the identity of forces on all
sides of the conflict.29 Those Americans who knew anything about Vietnam before the war would
have known that the U.S. had been allied with the Viet Minh during World War II, providing
arms and support to the guerilla forces of Vo Nguyen Giap. However, in the following two months
after the war, the U.S. committed its first act of warfare against the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam, by arming and transporting French colonial forces and French Legionnaires who were
working to recolonize Indochina. Soon after, the U.S. portrayed Ho Chi Minh as a man with
communist credentials and ignored Vietnamese appeals for American support, going back on
their wartime alliance.30 Perhaps most tragically, however, the Papers revealed that at no time
over a period of twenty-three years did Washington ever take into account the human and
material costs to the Vietnamese themselves.31 Rarely, if ever, did American policymakers show
any regard for the loss of Vietnamese life during the conflict.
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Perhaps the most important revelation of the Papers was that the American people were
deliberately deceived by the Gulf of Tonkin incident to secure popular support and Congressional
approval for a ground war in Vietnam. On 4 August 1964 (incidentally, Ellsberg’s first day in the
Pentagon as a staffer for Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton), two days after the
American destroyer USS Maddox engaged three North Vietnamese warships in the Gulf of Tonkin,
it was alleged that another incident took place. However, the Pentagon Papers have since revealed
that there was no attack on the fateful night.32 Before the second incident could be confirmed,
Johnson had already decided that retaliatory action would take place. Johnson went to Congress
and told the House “Some of our boys are floating around in the water.”33 Congress believed that
an attack had taken place in the Tonkin Gulf because Johnson and company offered no reason for
Congressional leaders to doubt it. On 7 August 1964 Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, which read: “Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as
Commander-in-Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces
of the United States and to prevent further aggression [original emphasis].34 There was some
unease about the vague language of the resolution; Senator Wayne Morse called it “a predated
declaration of war.”35 Senator J. William Fulbright, who sponsored the resolution in the upper
house, acknowledged the broadness of the language but reassured the senators that, after talks
with Johnson, “there was no consideration in the administration of using the resolution as an
authorization for changing the American role in the war.”36 The Senate also passed the resolution.
As events would soon reveal, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was used as the only constitutional base
for the expansion of the war in Vietnam. The Papers showed how Johnson and Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara misled Congress, the media, and the American public about the U.S. presence
in the Gulf and the incident itself. The reports Washington issued were intended to portray the
Vietnamese as more aggressive than they had been, the Americans as more pacific, and the
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situation in Indochina to be simpler than it really was.37 For Senator Moynihan, the case for going
to war was built on “an edifice of information that would not survive even the most cursory of
audits.”38 It remained to Lyndon Johnson to sum up what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin,
which he did four years after the fact. “Hell,” said the president, “those damn stupid sailors were
just shooting at flying fish.”39
The presidential election later that year pitted Lyndon Johnson against the Republican war
hawk Barry Goldwater. The Democratic incumbent won in a landslide after pledging during the
campaign “I shall never send American boys to Vietnam to do the job that Asian boys should
do,”40 and in the wake of the passing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, “We still seek no wider
war.”41 It was not until the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 when Americans would
finally learn that within four days of assuming the presidency in November 1963, Johnson had
secretly signed National Security Action Memorandum 273 which implemented an undercover
plan for a full-scale war in Vietnam to be covered by “the plausibility of denial.”42 In Secrets,
Ellsberg detailed how every Washington insider expected a wider war under President Johnson to
begin no later than the start of the New Year.43 After the Papers were released in 1971, Barry
Goldwater later revealed that “During the campaign, President Johnson kept reiterating that he
would never send American boys to fight in Vietnam… I was being called trigger-happy,
warmonger, bomb happy, and all the time Johnson was saying he would never send American
boys, I knew damn well he would.”44
The Pentagon Papers also showed how policymakers in Washington were forced to
reconsider their chances of success in Vietnam after the success of the Tet Offensive. At this point
of the war, in 1968, “the Tet Offensive showed that progress in many ways had been illusory… a
clear-cut military victory was probably not possible.”45 To continue the war after 1968, something
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was needed to spoil the Paris peace negotiations, to counter the antiwar movement, and to
generate some zeal for continued war. After South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu
scuttled the negotiations by refusing to sign the treaty, Nixon and future presidential candidate
Henry Ross Perot solved the problem by concocting a brand new issue after Nixon’s inauguration
in 1969: they demanded a “full accounting” for Americans missing in action and the release of
American prisoners of war as a precondition of any peace accord.46 This demand, what came to be
known as the POW/MIA issue, deadlocked the Paris negotiations for over four years. However, as
Franklin observed, “We know with as much certainty as could ever be possible that there are not
now, and never have been, American prisoners held in Vietnam after the war.”47 In the words of a
former Victory in Vietnam Association (VIVA) chair, an organization that embraced the
POW/MIA issue, “Nixon and Kissinger just used the POW issue to prolong the war.”48 The two
years between Johnson’s announcement not to run for president on 31 March 1968 and Nixon’s
invasion of Cambodia on 30 April 1970 were thus characterized by a misguided public confidence
that peace was at hand, as American warplanes stopped bombing North Vietnam during this
interval. As Ellsberg noted, however, they had simply shifted their targets to South Vietnam and,
secretly, to Laos and Cambodia as well, while dropping a higher total tonnage than before.49
Because of their early termination, the Papers did not provide a clear record of the secret war in
Laos, though the documents did offer some evidence of American efforts stop North Vietnamese
troop movements within the country, in addition to showing Johnson to have expanded the secret
war into a brutal air war while the CIA funded a secret ground campaign fought by their
makeshift group of Meo tribesmen, other Lao minorities, and Thai recruits.50
Neil Sheehan observed that “To read the Pentagon Papers in their vast detail is to step
through the looking glass into a new and different world. This world has a set of values, a
dynamic, a language and a perspective quite distinct from the public world of the ordinary citizen
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and of the other two branches of the Republic – Congress and the judiciary.”51 Sheehan likened
the contents of the Papers to “a thermonuclear vial.”52 Hannah Arendt noted that “the
administration’s policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy… but was destined chiefly, if
not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home, and especially for the
purpose of deceiving Congress.”53 Peter Schrag believed that the publication of the Papers
“threatened the larger faith in the candor of the federal government and the common theory that
Vietnam was an aberration in American history, a momentary departure from a tradition… of just
wars waged in a just cause by a just government.”54 American poet W.D. Ehrhart described his
experience of reading the Pentagon Papers as “a journey through an unholy house of horrors
where all one’s worst fears and darkest nightmares had suddenly become reality, hard, cold, and
immutable; where all of the ugliest questions that had first arisen in the ricefields [sic] and jungles
of Vietnam had suddenly been answered in the starkest and most unmerciful terms.”55 Senator
Mike Gravel argued that only a person who “has failed to read the Pentagon Papers” can believe in
“[America’s] good intentions” or that [America was] fighting for “freedom and liberty in Southeast
Asia.”56 The revelations of the Pentagon Papers brought these dark conclusions home to the
American people, thereafter inaugurating the politics of suspicion as a state of consciousness for
the American people.
III. The legitimation of the politics of suspicion in American political life
The examples of deception listed above all contributed to shaping the politics of suspicion
as a way of life and thought for the American people. While it is argued here that this
transformation was confirmed by the publication of the Pentagon Papers, it is still difficult to
determine precisely how much the Papers and their revelations about the Vietnam War
contributed directly to the emergence of this phenomenon in American public life. However,
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public attitudes toward Washington have been traced every two years since 1958 by the University
of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies and analyzing those numbers may help to understand
this development. In 1958, on the eve of direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, 76.3 percent
of the American people believed that the government was run “for the benefit of all,” while only
17.6 percent believed that it was run “by a few big interests.” By late 1972, after the presidential
election, those numbers had reversed themselves: only 37.7 percent of people still thought that
the government was run for the benefit of all, while 53.3 percent now believed Washington to be
run by a few big interests. Admittedly, economic worries and social strife likely played a role in
these measurements, in addition to multiple political assassinations and Nixon’s felonies during
the Watergate scandal, but as Bruce Franklin noted in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies,
none of these events were unrelated to the war. As Franklin concluded, it was first during the
Vietnam War that distrust of Washington became “rampant.”57
In addition to the examples of government subterfuge revealed in the Papers, the politics
of suspicion were further legitimated by two other phenomena: the quality of journalism
produced by the mainstream media and Nixon’s responses to the publication of the Pentagon
Papers. The failures of the mainstream media to report the events in Vietnam fairly or accurately
eventually resulted in the creation of an alternative press that sought to paint a different picture
of the war. The underground press came into force around 1968, the decisive year of the conflict,
to challenge the hegemony of the establishment media, what historian Bruce Franklin has
referred to as “the traditional organs of corporate America.”58 The discrepancy between their
reporting can be shown through the comparative reporting of events in late 1967 and in early
1968. When Lyndon Johnson summoned General William Westmoreland home in November 1967
for a “public relations offensive,” the President wanted the military leader to paint an optimistic
picture of the course of the war in Vietnam, to which the establishment media duly obliged. This
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was contrasted by the reporting of the alternative media, and that of Wilfred Burchett in
particular, who protested in the National Guardian on 6 January 1968 that
the true facts about the war have been denied the US public by the extraordinary antics of
Gen. William Westmoreland and his public relations team in Saigon… Unable to present
any successes in terms of terrain reoccupied or population won back from areas controlled
by the NLF, the US-Saigon command has resorted to an old trick the French used until the
fall of Dien Bien Phu – the claim to be wiping out tens of thousands of enemy troops for
the loss of a handful of their own.59
Burchett, whose reporting on the war was informed by his personal experiences reporting
alongside the NVA and NLF combat units, also went on to boldly predict a North Vietnamese
victory in the conflict.60 The comparative reliability of the establishment and underground press
was also demonstrated by their conflicting reporting of events during the month-long Tet
Offensive in early 1968. For people who only got their news from the television and the
mainstream press, the offensive had come out of nowhere, while in contrast, the offensive and its
eventual success legitimated the reporting of the underground press, which had, according to
Franklin, “accurately assessed the military situation and predicted such an eventuality.”61
Likewise, with the military and the Pentagon exaggerating American progress on the ground
throughout the conflict, the public was given no reliable information from the government, the
military or the mainstream media to prepare it for the possibility that the U.S. could actually lose
the war.62
The impact of the Pentagon Papers on the politics of suspicion was further exacerbated by
Nixon’s ham-handed efforts to keep them secret. Though few people read the Papers in their
entirety, many Americans witnessed the White House’s vindictive campaign against Ellsberg.
Nixon was initially ambivalent about their publication, since the misdeeds the Papers revealed
were the work of the Democrats. However, he was pressured into action by his Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, who was engaged in secret negotiations with Chinese leaders and was told that
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15
Chinese secret parleys of intelligence would end if Washington was seen as being unable to keep
its own secrets.63 Nixon thereafter embarked on a mission to discredit Ellsberg and the Papers:
“[G]oddamn it, somebody has to go to jail! [original emphasis]... [T]hat’s all there is to it!... Can
you haul in that son-of-a-bitch Ellsberg right away?” Nixon demanded of his Attorney General,
John Mitchell.64 Nixon used all the legal and extralegal means at his disposal, seeking a courtordered injunction against the New York Times and Washington Post on further publication of
the Papers and indicting Ellsberg and Anthony Russo under the Espionage Act of 1917, in addition
to sending the Plumbers to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst. Nixon’s efforts were
in vain, however, as the courts found that there was no law and no precedent in the broadlyworded Espionage Act preventing the publication of the Papers.65 Justice Hugo L. Black wrote that
“The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative
government provides no real security to the public.”66 Even Nixon’s Solicitor General Erwin N.
Griswold, who accordingly had argued the government’s case before the Supreme Court, admitted
nearly two decades after the fact that
I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication…
There may be some basis for short-term classification while plans are being made, or
negotiations are going on, but apart from details of weapons systems, there is very rarely
any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to
transactions of the past, even the fairly recent past. This is the lesson of the Pentagon
Papers experience.67
This essay has shown how the politics of suspicion became established as a way of life and
thought for the American people during the Vietnam War era. While the historical process has
been presented here, the politics of suspicion is more than just a historical movement: it remains
today part and parcel of the American consciousness and is arguably even more relevant in 2013.
Since Vietnam and Watergate, the American people have been forced to think twice about many
events, including the CIA backing of the mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
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16
the 1980s, the Iran-contra affair, Ronald Reagan’s policies in Latin America, the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, the hastily-organized wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama’s drone
policy in the Middle East, and the indefinite detention of Bradley Manning (who is accused of the
same “crime” as Daniel Ellsberg was forty years ago), to name but a few examples. While
government secrecy and deception continued with the conscious aim of deceiving the American
public, after the Pentagon Papers experience, the American people became armed with the
knowledge that, to discover the underlying truth, they must first separate the apparent from the
real.
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17
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Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University
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Robinson, G.D. “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique.”
Premise 2 no. 8 (27 September 1995): 12. http://www.gongfa.com/robinsonlike.htm.
(Accessed 11/12/2012)
Schandler, Herbert Y.. The Unmasking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1977.
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(Accessed 01/12/2012)
Schrag, Peter. Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1974.
On the Politics of Suspicion
Sheehan, Neil. The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times. New York: Quadrangle
Books, 1971.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House,
1988.
Stewart, David. “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” Journal of Literature & Theology 3 (Nov 1989),
296-307.
Ungar, Sanford J.. The Papers & the Papers; An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the
Pentagon Papers. 1st ed. New York: Dutton, 1972.
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http://www.upi.com/Audio/Year_in_Review/Events-of-1971/The-PentagonPapers/12295509436546-7/#ixzz2FIO6T7ZP (Accessed 16/12/2012)
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
19
On the Politics of Suspicion
20
Endnotes
1
G.D. Robinson, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique,” Premise
2 no. 8 (27 September 1995): 12, http://www.gongfa.com/robinsonlike.htm. (Accessed 11/12/2012)
2
David Stewart, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Journal of Literature & Theology 3 (Nov 1989): 301.
3
Ibid., 302.
4
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970),
34.
5
Stewart, 298.
6
Ibid., 306.
7
st
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, 1 ed. (New York: Knopf,
1965), 6.
8
Ibid., 4.
9
Ibid., 7.
10
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 47.
11
Daniel Hellinger, "Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony in American Politics,” in Harry G. West and Todd
Sanders, Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), 205.
12
Ibid., 216.
13
John M. Orman, Presidential Secrecy and Deception: Beyond the Power to Persuade, (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1980), 37.
14
Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989), xv.
15
Orman, 39.
16
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000), 46
17
Alterman, Eric. When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its Consequences. New York:
Viking, 2004, 237.
18
Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia, (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005), 40.
19
Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, (New
York: Times Books, 1995), 280; Mike Gravel, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of
United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition, 5 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 1:x.
Robert McNamara offered this ex post facto reasoning in his 1995 memoir, though the explanation given in
the Pentagon Papers by Senator Mike Gravel is the more likely of the two.
20
Moynihan, 29-30.
21
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, (New York: Viking, 2002), vii.
22
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, (New York: Random House,
1988),739.
23
Ibid., The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times, (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), xii.
24
Franklin, 25.
25
Moynihan, 202.
26
Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Rethinking the Pentagon Papers” National Affairs, no. 4 (Summer 2010), 81,
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/rethinking-the-pentagon-papers (Accessed 01/12/2012)
27
Moynihan., 169-170; See also Gravel, 3:174.
28
Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1974), 57.
29
Franklin, 25.
30
Schrag, 57.
31
Ibid, 57.
32
Moynihan, 199.
33
Donald R. Kelly, Divided Power: the Presidency, Congress, and the Formation of American Foreign Policy,
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005), 53
On the Politics of Suspicion
34
Ellsberg, 16.
Ibid., 16.
36
Ibid., 17.
37
Moynihan, 203-204.
38
Ibid., 178.
39
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 280.
40
Franklin, 54.
41
Ellsberg, 48.
42
Marvin E. Gettleman, Vietnam and America: A Documented History, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Press,
1995), 241-242.
43
Ellsberg, 48.
44
“1971 Year in Review: The Pentagon Papers,” United Press International, 1971,
http://www.upi.com/Audio/Year_in_Review/Events-of-1971/The-Pentagon-Papers/122955094365467/#ixzz2FIO6T7ZP (Accessed 16/12/2012)
45
Gravel, 4:604.
46
Franklin, 178.
47
Ibid., 201.
48
Ibid., 186.
49
Ellsberg, 226-227
50
Orman, 102.
51
Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, xiv.
52
George C. Herring, The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon
Papers, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), viii.
53
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience ; On Violence ; Thoughts on
Politics and Revolution, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 14, quoted in Alterman, 216.
54
Schrag, 56.
55
Franklin, 34.
56
Gravel, 1:x.
57
Franklin, 43.
58
Ibid., 91.
59
Ibid., 93-94.
60
Ibid., 94.
61
Ibid., 91.
62
Moynihan, 220-221.
63
Ibid., 32.
64
Ellsberg, 426.
65
Moynihan 204.
66
Ibid., 205.
67
Erwin N. Griswold, “Secrets Not Worth Keeping,” Washington Post, February 15, 1989, quoted in
Moynihan, 205-206.
35
21