In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson \u201clied and lied and lied.\u201d Nixon lied.<\/p>\n
Ellsberg concludes: \u201cThe American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it\u2019s a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it\u2019s no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg exposed were not military secrets. They were historical secrets\u2014a history of U.S. intervention and deceit that Ellsberg believed, if widely known, would undermine the U.S. pretexts in defense of the war\u2019s prosecution. Like this one that President Kennedy offered in 1961: \u201cFor the last decade we have been helping the South Vietnamese to maintain their independence.\u201d No. This was a lie. The U.S. government\u2019s Pentagon Papers history of the war revealed how the United States had sided with the French in retaking its colony after World War II, ultimately paying for some 80 percent of the French reconquest. By the U.S. government\u2019s own account, from Truman on, Vietnamese self-determination was never an aim of U.S. foreign policy.<\/p>\n