He apparently recounted one of my favorite Ellsberg stories, and since it’s one of my favorites I’m going to repeat it in full below. It’s from Ellsberg’s book Secrets, and the setting is a meeting with Henry Kissinger in late 1968 when he was advising him about the Vietnam War. The idea of Kissinger seeking out Ellsberg for advice on Vietnam initially seems a bit unlikely, but in 1968 Ellsberg was a highly respected analyst on the war who had worked for both the Pentagon and Rand, and Kissinger was just entering the government for the first time. Here’s what Ellsberg told him. Enjoy:
Kissinger was not rushing to end our conversation that morning, and I had one more message to give him. “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.“
It was a speech I had thought through before, one I’d wished someone had once given me, and I’d long hoped to be able to give it to someone who was just about to enter the world of “real” executive secrecy. I ended by saying that I’d long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine. They became incapable of human speech and couldn’t help one another to find their way home.
Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.
Source: Kevin Drum: Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge (2010)
Daniel Ellsberg: Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2003)
CONAN: Hmm. There’s the – of course, we then go on to the Nixon administration. There’s a fascinating part – we’re going to play a little clip from the movie -you’re talking about telling Henry Kissinger, who’s just about to receive security clearances to read all that top secret information, and you walk in through three mental stages of what that knowledge is going to do to him. And let’s hear this.
(Soundbite of movie, “The Most Dangerous Man”)
Mr. ELLSBERG: First, a great exhilaration, for getting all these amazing information that you didn’t know even existed. And the next phase is you’ll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this. But that won’t last long. Very soon, you’ll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening too.
CONAN: And that’s a pretty apt description of the corrosive effect of top security clearance.
Mr. ELLSBERG: You know, it’s – I should correct one thing there. Henry had -Kissinger – had had top secret clearance for many years, as I had in RAND. What I was really telling him was what I have – I’d had a dozen clearances higher than top secret, what are called compartmented information, when I was in the Pentagon. And I knew – as far as I knew, he did not have those earlier. He was about to get them. We were in the hotel Pierre and he hadn’t gone to Washington yet. It was after the election.
And so I was really telling him the effect, the specific effect of having these much higher clearances which involve sort of listening in on the world’s party line in communications, just listening to everybody, or reconnaissance, that sort of thing. He was about to get information that he didn’t know existed. Now, it isn’t that all that information is true. Imagine listening in on a party line in your community. You get a lot of false rumors and disinformation and mistakes. It wouldn’t give you a real picture. But you would have a different sense of reality than you’d get just at a local grocery store from talking to people. So, it gives you the feeling that you’re in a different world. And these other people, who don’t have the clearances, don’t have anything to tell you that’s worth hearing.
Actually, later, in a much later conversation, the next year, I was with Kissinger in San Clemente and I was urging him to read the Pentagon Papers, which ended in 1968, he had a copy. And he said: But do we really have anything to learn from these documents? I said: Well, yes. I think you do. And my heart was sinking at this point. And he says: But we make policy very differently now. And I said: Well, Cambodia – the fiasco debacle that had just happened in the spring – I said that didn’t look so different. He said: Well, that was done for very complicated reasons. I said: Henry, every rotten decision in the last 20 years in Vietnam has been done for very complicated reasons and pretty much the same ones; political considerations, legislation in Congress, fear of being called weak, or you know, not giving the whole.
And actually, I even referred to him some of his colleagues from Harvard, led by Tom Schelling – who’s in the film, by the way – who had come to him to tell him they were breaking off all relations with the government, all consulting -they were all consultants – because of Cambodia. And – so I – this came up. And he actually said to me: But they didn’t have clearances. And I thought, oh God.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ELLSBERG: He has really drunk deep of what I thought of as Circe’s potion that he gave to Ulysses’ troops that turned men into swine so they could no longer communicate and could no longer make their way out of the enchanted isles.