James C. Thomson, Jr.

A less well known but early dissenter within U.S. governmental service was James C. Thomson, Jr. Thomson was a typical Kennedy-era Cold Warrior and was part of the national security bureaucracy. He worked for Walt Rostow on the National Security Council staff and earlier was an East Asia specialist in the State Department. He had been born in China (1931), the son of missionaries there. Thomson became a dissenter in 1965 and left the Johnson administration without resigning in 1966. Officially he was to return after a teaching assignment at Harvard. He eventually, after eighteen months, spoke out and decided to "come clean" regarding his opposition to the war. His story first appeared in "Getting Out and Speaking Out," Foreign Policy, Winter, 1973-4. Difficulties encountered by those who sought to register dissent at his level of government service included banishment and "domestication." They were ignored or judged ineffective by superiors.

Daniel Ellsberg

Today, the best known dissenter from within remains Daniel Ellsberg. He worked in the Defense Department and then for the Rand Corporation. By mid-1964, he was writing hawkish speeches for Johnson. With the subsequent escalation and stalemate, however, Ellsberg concluded our Americanization of the war was a crime. He remained in the bureaucracy and was involved in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's 1967-68 study of the war. Ellsberg's special responsibility was to study the 1961 Kennedy escalation. This gave him access to papers which, with continued questioning of our role in Vietnam, led to his release of the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971. Publication of the papers by the New York Times that year was another turning point in the development of antiwar sentiment.

Ellsberg had first protested the war in mid-1969 when he and five Rand colleagues wrote a letter to Nixon. At that time, he had also begun to make copies of what later became the Pentagon Papers. His more public and dramatic shift to the antiwar movement came in May 1970 during a rally at Georgetown University. Ellsberg had first gone to Senator Fulbright with his xeroxed papers. But when hearings were not forthcoming, he decided to offer them to the press. He contacted Neil Sheehan, whom he had known in Vietnam. Both men admired John Paul Vann for Vann's own earlier questioning of war policies (Sheehan would later become Vann's biographer). Furthermore, Sheehan had just published a book review (of 33 books on the war) in the New York Times in which he charged leaders of the U.S. (over the period 1965-71) with possible war crimes. Publication of the Pentagon Papers began June 13, 1971.

Eventually, there would be more and more examples of dissent within. Memoirs and other published accounts by and about policy makers who dissented and began to oppose the war would today fill many book shelves. Most of the so-called Wise Men advising Johnson in 1968 are among them, and some would today include Robert McNamara among these dissenters. He and most of the others went through a period of questioning and reluctance before coming out against the war. Thomson and Ellsberg, however, stand out as the earliest such dissenters.

Pentagon Papers and Trial (1971)

This link takes one to a sample entry from the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and
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