Becoming Wolves

The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn

“We thought of ourselves, I think, as trying to defeat communists, accepting a view…that enabled you to think of the conflict in really World War II terms. That was an unquestioned assumption and I’d say it had an idealistic flavor to it, but it was the underpinning of an imperial policy, basically. I shared the assumption, very easily, and felt it, as an idealistic one, really. We were doing something for them.”

-Daniel Ellsberg

All Is Not Well

It is rare for one’s work and insights to be truly appreciated by those in charge. Daniel Ellsberg had the rare opportunity to witness this firsthand on a flight back to Vietnam in October 1966. He had spent two years in South Vietnam with the State Department, but prior to this had worked as a special assistant to John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. In addition to McNaughton, the windowless military aircraft also carried Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense, who displayed an immense interest in the memos written by Ellsberg that he had transported with him from Saigon. It may also have had something to do with the fact that McNamara lacked other reading material on the trip. McNaughton would finish reading a page of Ellsberg’s work, pass it to McNamara, with Ellsberg watching with pride. This was the highlight, in his view, of his bureaucratic career. “Normally you never know if a boss has really read what you’ve written,” he later wrote, “let alone shown it to his boss.”

A week later on a return flight back to the United States, McNamara sought Ellsberg’s feedback directly. Calling him to the back of the plane, McNamara asked him to settle a dispute with Bob Komer, who had been coordinating the United States’ pacification efforts in Vietnam, also known as the “winning hearts and minds” strategy.

“Dan, you’re the one who can settle this,” McNamara cajoled. “Komer here is saying that we’ve made a lot of progress in pacification. I say that things are worse than they were a year ago. What do you say?”

“Well, Mr. Secretary,” Ellsberg responded, “I’m most impressed with how much the same things are as they were a year ago. They were pretty bad then, but I wouldn’t say it was worse now, just about the same.”

“That proves what I’m saying!” McNamara said with excitement. “We’ve put more than a hundred thousand more troops into the country over the last year, and there’s been no improvement. Things aren’t any better at all. That means the underlying situation is really worse! Isn’t that right?”

Ellsberg saw some sense in this interpretation: “Well, you could say that. It’s an interesting way of seeing it.”

With that, the plane began its descent and within ten minutes had landed on U.S. soil. On the tarmac, McNamara approached a podium with microphones and informed the gathered reporters: “Gentlemen, I’ve just come back from Vietnam, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that we’re showing great progress in every dimension of our effort. I’m very encouraged by everything I’ve seen and heard on my trip…”

Embarrassing to Kill Us

“For Christ’s sake, that round is live!” a military officer yelled at Ellsberg, who was again back in Vietnam, absentmindedly taking photographs of a 60-mm shell that had nearly killed him in his room. He soon realized the danger of this photographic endeavor. The U.S. Army demolition team ordered him out of the vicinity immediately. Not my most professional moment, Ellsberg thought.

For this tour of duty, Ellsberg was in Vietnam as a civilian working for the U.S. embassy, tasked with providing assessments of the troops’ progress in the war. While on the way to a Christmas Eve banquet in South Vietnam in 1966, he was warned that there would be a Vietnamese major of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in attendance known for his dislike of Americans. What he was not told was that this major had been moved from his previous post for firing his gun on Americans soldiers tasked with advising him.

“Why are you Americans here? What do you think you have to teach the Vietnamese, in Vietnam?” the major put to them bitterly through a translator, after the Vietnamese attendees at the banquet had just finished singing songs and the Americans answered with Christmas carols. “Do you think we are not brave enough to fight the Communists?” The major kept speaking, louder and faster, so much so that the translator could not keep up. As his monologue turned into shouting, the Americans asked what he was saying. “Americans were arrogant, stupid, ignorant,” came the translation, “it was a disgrace for Vietnamese to have to pretend to take advice from them.” His superior, a Vietnamese commander, had heard enough. He confronted the major and after some harsh words, left along with other ARVN members who stood up from the table. The major remained seated, slapping the table forcefully with his hand and grabbing a bottle of cognac.

Once the Americans decided to leave, an ARVN lieutenant approached them to apologize on behalf of the commander for the major’s behavior. “He was drunk,” the lieutenant explained. “We knew that,” they replied. Ellsberg asked him if the officers agreed with the major's perspective. “They were very sorry that he said these things in front of you. They did not agree with that. They are angry at him. But he is a major.”

“But do they disagree with what he said?”

“The battalion commander does not agree at all.”

“What about the others?”

“Well,” the lieutenant hesitated, “they might agree with some things that he said, but not so strongly.”

A gunshot rang out nearby, loudly, which startled those present. The lieutenant jumped a little but did not seem surprised. He waved his hand and reassured them: “Don’t worry. It’s nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? That was right outside!”

“It’s nothing. It’s all right. Don’t worry.”

Another shot followed; this time it sounded farther away. The lieutenant urged them to stay indoors for the time being. The major was outside and firing his gun into the air, he explained.

“Well, what do you think?” Ellsberg asked the U.S. captain, after the lieutenant had told them to go to sleep. The captain shrugged, put down his M-16 and began taking off his pants. “Let’s turn in,” he replied. “We’re OK here. They won’t let him near us. It would be embarrassing for them if they let him get us.”

Ellsberg listened and could hear more shouting from what sounded like the major and another gunshot. He seemed to be walking around their building in circles. More shots followed, each one accompanied by shouting. Ellsberg offered to keep watch for the next four hours and the captain quickly fell asleep. Unable to find an adequate place to keep his pistol at arm’s length, Ellsberg laid it on his chest. At around midnight, he could hear machinegun fire coming from a nearby village. He listened to the sound, like crickets in the night, as he balanced the weight of the pistol on his chest and he began thinking of his children back home. This is a shitty way to spend Christmas Eve, he thought.

Redcoats

“Were you taking personal photographs in a firefight?” asked a red-faced sergeant, indignant that Ellsberg had been snapping photos while they had sustained gunfire.

“No,” Ellsberg responded calmly, “I’m here observing for the deputy ambassador, and I’m taking pictures for him.”

The sergeant was unconvinced and Ellsberg made a snap decision: “After that, when people around me were firing, I was too.” As a former Marine himself, Ellsberg understood the dynamics at play: he was seen as a liability and he had noticed the others protecting him instead of focusing on their tasks, as if their weapons granted them an immunity shield. Ellsberg had begun carrying a Swedish K submachine gun, “impressively ugly and simple,” which he had obtained from a CIA officer. Some of the troops thought he might be CIA, but they no longer thought he was a reporter.

The company’s mission in the Mekong Delta was a frustrating one: surprise attacks from snipers they never saw, taking casualties with no sign of any progress. Additionally, they were unable to obtain cooperation from the local population, who were either unable or unwilling to assist. There was no talk of body counts; besides American deaths, the only body they found was of a 18-year-old girl, a student from Saigon visiting her family who was hit by a stray U.S. artillery shell. Morale subsequently decreased and the troops became resentful, particularly of the locals who would not point out the locations where the snipers were hiding for their attacks. Ellsberg realized that the snipers must have been the same young men missing from these households when they asked but he did not have the heart to point this out.

It took seventeen months in Vietnam before Ellsberg finally came face to face with the enemy on January 1, 1967. Water up to their knees, the platoon was walking through tall rice up to their chests when they heard firing from close range behind them. A young teenage boy, about 14 or 15 years of age, wearing only ragged black shorts with his back to Ellsberg, was shooting an AK-47 at the U.S. troops in the other direction. On either side of him were two other boys, also firing, their heads just below the rice. Unable to return fire because it would have meant shooting in the direction of their own soldiers, Ellsberg fell to the ground and watched the teenager shoot continuously until he and his compatriots disappeared. He later saw another boy, only briefly, carrying a weapon and wearing a black jersey. These were locals who knew the area extremely well and could hide in an instant, since they were in their own backyards. “They thought that they were shooting at trespassers, foreign occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn’t,” Ellsberg later realized.

On another day, Ellsberg saw what were presumed to be friendly uniformed soldiers setting up a machinegun tripod near a rice paddy. When they received radio confirmation that there were no friendly troops nearby, Ellsberg and other members of the platoon approached the unknown enemy. They crawled in the paddy, their heads slightly above water, as bullets came at them from both the enemy in front and from their own soldiers shooting from behind. The friendly fire felt “like a sheet just over our heads, sizzling and whishing as though the sheet were being ripped. I didn’t see how people in an assault generally survived the friendly fire from their rear. I couldn’t see how we were going to survive it. You didn’t need to be told to keep your ass down.”

In front of him, Ellsberg could see the flashing of the machinegun. He took two grenades off his belt and, pulling their pins, tossed one after the other in the direction of the flashes. The machinegun suddenly stopped and so did the firing in both directions. As they entered the nearby forest, the enemy had already taken the machinegun away along any of their dead or wounded. The snapping of brush could be heard in the near distance ahead of the U.S. soldiers. Ellsberg became excited and overstepped his civilian role: “I had been taught and passed on to my troops a decade earlier, to pursue the enemy hard, to move through the objective, not to stop on the forward edge or to mill around on top of it waiting to be mortared. At that moment I forgot my role, the lieutenant being far behind us, and I yelled out to the others to keep moving, keep after them. But they didn’t seem to have been trained that way. They stopped and waited for the others to come up to us, and I shut up.”

Ellsberg picked up some of the cartridges on the ground as souvenirs of the bullets that nearly killed them. Having just been fired recently, they burned his hand and he dropped them into the water, which made a hissing sound. The platoon continued taking fire from all directions that day. At first, they were unable to tell if the enemy was able to move that quickly or if there was enemy in every direction around them. They moved in the direction of the shots each time, until it became clear that there were two groups attacking them: As one retreated, the other would pick up the attack from another direction. “They were playing with us, a kind of leapfrog, and they were doing it very well, probably not for the first time.” After a tiring day of this never-ending back and forth, his platoon had seen five or six wounded while barely any enemy troops were seen, alive or dead. “There were local men with them, who knew these paddies. Maybe the same wild boys in black shorts who had run circles through us that morning, or their brothers.”

Nearing the base camp at the end of a tiring day and taking a break, Ellsberg thought of his grade-school history class and could not miss the parallels with the American Revolutionary War: “Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, walking along dikes in formation and getting shot at every half hour mostly by ragged local irregulars firing from tree lines that bordered their homes.”

Reflecting on their latest experience, Ellsberg asked the platoon’s radioman, “By any chance, do you ever feel like the redcoats?”

He responded instantly in a Southern drawl: “I been thinking that...all...day.”

No Need to Learn

Henry Kissinger, then U.S. National Security Advisor, was drumming his fingers on the table of his “Western White House” office in San Clemente, California. He was growing impatient listening to Ellsberg in August 1970 criticize U.S. policy in Vietnam and how it would lead to unending war. “Well,” Kissinger said, “I do not want to discuss our policy; let us turn to another subject.” Not wanting to miss the opportunity right in front of him, Ellsberg pressed Kissinger on whether he knew about the McNamara study on Vietnam, which Ellsberg had worked on.

“Do you have a copy of it in the White House?” Ellsberg asked.

“Yes,” Kissinger replied.

“Have you read it?”

“No, should I?”

Ellsberg pointed out that he ought to at least read the summaries of each volume in the study, or have an assistant pick out important passages. “They make a very readable story,” Ellsberg urged. “You really should make the effort.”

“But do we really have anything to learn from this study?”

Ellsberg’s heart began to sink. My God! he thought. He’s in the same state of mind as the rest of them all along. They each thought that history started with his administration and that they had nothing to learn from earlier ones. Yet in fact each administration, including this one, repeated the same patterns in decision making and pretty much the same (hopeless) policy as its predecessor, without even knowing it.

“Well, I certainly do think so,” Ellsberg replied, regaining his composure. “It’s twenty years of history, and there’s a great deal to be learned from it.”

“But after all,” Kissinger remarked, “we make decisions very differently now.”

“Cambodia didn’t look all that different,” Ellsberg responded, feeling more depressed by the moment.

Kissinger began to look uncomfortable. “You must understand, Cambodia was undertaken for very complicated reasons.”

“Henry, there hasn’t been a rotten decision in this area for twenty years which wasn’t undertaken for very complicated reasons. And they were usually the same sort of complicated reasons.”

Ellsberg later came to believe he had been summoned by Kissinger on occasion so that the National Security Advisor could appear to be consulting with all manner of opinions, even war critics “like Dan Ellsberg.” Kissinger would insist on repeating in the coming years the line: “I learned more about Vietnam from Daniel Ellsberg than any other person.”

Ellsberg would have one last opportunity to make an impression on Kissinger’s mind. The origins of his final Kissinger strategy could be traced to a conversation he had in the fall of 1970 with Kissinger’s special assistant, Winston Lord. By this point Ellsberg had already made copies of the McNamara study, later known as the Pentagon Papers, but he was not prepared to reveal that yet to his former colleague. Ellsberg got into a heated discussion with Lord’s wife, Bette Bao Lord, who happened to be “very hawkish on the war, much more than Winston,” Ellsberg recalled.

Over dinner, Bette kept pushing him on various points and challenging his positions. Exasperated, Ellsberg criticized the callousness of both political parties: “You know, these people don’t have any concern on Vietnamese deaths. It’s not a consideration.” In response, Bette expressed skepticism that this would be the case. “We never collected statistics on it,” Ellsberg went on. “Ted Kennedy, in the Senate, did what he could to get statistics. They were never confirmed by the Defense Department. Here’s a situation, after all, where we collect statistics on rubber tires that are needed for the B-52s, and on how many bicycles may come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and how many of this and that, everything, but nothing on Vietnamese deaths. Look, to give you an example of that, I proposed a study when I was working on the Options Paper, I proposed a study of Vietnamese casualties, that we do a serious study of what the bombing was causing in the way of Vietnamese casualties. There had never been such a study. I knew that, and I proposed that they do one, and Kissinger had rejected it. There was just no interest in knowing, because it might leak out, and there was no concern. It was not possibly a concern.”

Ellsberg was surprised by what happened next: “Suddenly, this quite conservative woman—very brilliant woman, very intellectual woman, brilliant—who had been pressing me up until this time, suddenly her whole demeanor changed.”

She turned to her husband, asking: “Is this true, Winston?”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he replied.

Bette said nothing further, “she looked very disturbed,” Ellsberg recalled, and she left the room and went upstairs.

Ellsberg returned to this moment in his mind months later while attending a Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference at which Kissinger was speaking in January 1971. The conversation he remembered with the Lords gave him an idea for a question to ask Kissinger and in order to prepare, he phoned Winston Lord from a payphone during a break in the conference.

“Winston, do you remember the proposal I made for another NSSM [National Security Study Memorandum]? Remember that I proposed the study of Vietnamese casualties, and you remember that discussion we had with your wife?”

“Sure, sure,” Lord replied.

“Have they, ever since, done such a study?”

“No, not to my knowledge.”

“Okay, good, that’s what I wanted to know.”

Kissinger’s speech to the gathered MIT crowd was a fine example in Ellsberg’s mind of “why he was so enormously effective as a PR man. He was extremely smooth and persuasive.” Kissinger handled the questions he received with great effectiveness and then Ellsberg stood up to confront Kissinger on the policy he had been so reluctant to discuss:

“You have said that the White House is not a place for moral philosophizing. But in fact the White House does educate the people by everything that it does and everything it says and does not say. Specifically, tonight you are expressing moral values when you tell us that the war is trending down and will continue to trend down, and then in that connection you mention only U.S. troop presence and U.S. casualties. You failed to mention Indochinese casualties, or refugees, or bombing tonnages, which in fact are trending up. By your omission, you are telling the American people that they need not and ought not care about our impact on the Indochinese people, and you encourage them to support decisions that ignore that impact.

“So I have one question for you. What is your best estimate of the number of Indochinese that we will kill, pursuing your policy in the next twelve months?”

This was the first break in Kissinger’s composure that night. He frowned and turned partially away from the audience. He turned back to give Ellsberg a penetrating look and all Ellsberg could think of was Kissinger drumming his fingers on the table in San Clemente. Kissinger realized he was in a bind: “That is a very cleverly worded question…I answer even if I don’t answer.”

“I’m not trying to be clever. That is a very fundamental issue. Can you give an answer?”

Kissinger thought in silence for a few moments as he thought of how to respond. He landed on a dodge: “You are accusing us of a racist policy.”

Ellsberg thought this reply only served to distract and waste time. “Race is not the issue here. Let me put it: How many human beings will we kill under your policy in the next twelve months?”

Kissinger paced back and forth and the audience silently awaited his answer. “What are your alternatives?” he countered.

“Dr. Kissinger, I know the language of alternatives and options very well, and that has nothing to do with this question. I’m asking you for an estimate of the consequences of your own policy in the next twelve months, if you know them. Do you have an estimate or not?”

After more silence, the student moderator offered: “Well, it’s been a long evening, and I think we’ve had enough questions now. Perhaps we should let Dr. Kissinger go back to Washington.”

Ellsberg wrote of Vietnamese casualties at the time: “At least 300,000 civilians have been killed in South Vietnam—mostly by U.S. firepower—between 1965 and 1970, out of at least one million casualties. Of these…about 50,000 civilians were killed in Nixon’s first year in office, about 35,000 in his second.”

He later learned that at the very moment Kissinger was speaking to the elite audience gathered in Massachusetts, a pre-invasion bombing of Laos had commenced. Kissinger’s busy schedule had somehow accommodated this talk, after which he flew back to Washington to monitor the invasion’s progress. Ellsberg remarked: “He must have been up most of the night.”

Think Big

The American press began publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers June 13, 1971 based on material provided by Ellsberg from the McNamara study. White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman summarized the administration’s thoughts on the impact of the release on the public: “What it says is, [Donald] Rumsfeld was making this point this morning...to the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook, 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 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.”

In pursuing a court case against Ellsberg based on these leaks and under the Espionage Act, the trial fell apart when it was discovered that the government had committed crimes in their pursuit of Ellsberg, including illegal wiretapping. On July 27, Kissinger and Nixon had discussed how to handle the Ellsberg prosecution:

Kissinger: I think [U.S. Attorney General John] Mitchell ought to go easy trying Ellsberg until we’ve broken the Vietnam War one way or the other. Because that son-of-a-bitch—First of all, I would expect—I know him well...I am sure he has some more information...I would bet that he has more information that he’s saving for the trial. Examples of American war crimes that triggered him into it. I don’t know, but it would be my instincts.

Nixon: Uh huh.

Kissinger: It’s the way he’d operate.

Nixon: Postpone Ellsberg prosecution...

Kissinger: Secondly, once we’ve broken the war in Vietnam, then we can say, this son-of-a-bitch nearly blew it. Then we have, then we’re in strong shape—then no one will give a damn about war crimes...Because he is a despicable bastard.

The next day, E. Howard Hunt drafted a memo on the neutralization of Ellsberg: “I am proposing a skeletal operations plan aimed at building a file on Ellsberg that will contain all available overt, covert and derogatory information. This basic tool is essential to determining how to destroy his public image and credibility.” The list of activities included: “Request CIA to perform a covert psychological assessment/evaluation on Ellsberg” and “Obtain Ellsberg’s files from his psychiatric analysis,” a burglary which set in motion Watergate and the end of the Nixon presidency.

The government also sent agents to attack Ellsberg in 1972. Ellsberg later confronted CIA Director William Colby about it two years later: “My wife asked me what I hoped to achieve by leaking, by revealing information to the citizens of this country. She happened to believe throughout that I was exposing myself to possible attempts to kill me by members of the government, or attempts to beat me up, which she didn’t want to see. I thought those were not dangers. From my experience in the government with gentlemen like yourself, I did not in fact believe that was the way we operated. Parenthetically, she was correct. The nine or so people who came to beat me up on the steps of the Capitol in this city on April 3rd, 1972, who failed, because they were the same people who had been sent to the Bay of Pigs...So, she wasn’t wrong. A judgment of competence is another thing, but intent, she was correct.”

Reading the Pentagon Papers had taught Ellsberg most about the nature of institutions: “What I think I learned from the Pentagon Papers that I didn’t know before was that it hadn’t made much difference to the amount of lying which party was in power, which president had held; it was not a matter of personality. I had to conclude it was a matter of role and institutions.” Ellsberg later outlined these lies, how they impacted the Vietnam War, and how they were a feature of every U.S. President:

“Truman lied from 1950 on, on the nature and purposes of the French involvement, the colonial reconquest of Vietnam that we were financing and encouraging. Eisenhower lied about the reasons for and the nature of our involvement with Diem and the fact that he was in power essentially because of American support and American money and for no other reason. Kennedy lied about the type of involvement we were doing there, our own combat involvement and about the recommendations that were being made to him for greater involvement. President Kennedy lied about the degree of our participation in the overthrow of Diem. Johnson, of course, lied and lied and lied, about our provocations against the North Vietnamese prior to and after the Tonkin Gulf incident, about the plans for bombing North Vietnam, and the nature of the build-up of American troops in Vietnam. Nixon, as we now know, misled and lied to the American public for the first months of his office in terms of our bombing of Cambodia and Laos, ground operations in Laos, the reasons for our invasion of Cambodia and of Laos, and the prospects for the mining of Haiphong that finally came about in 1972 but was envisioned as early as 1969. The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations…It’s a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to. It’s no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public.”

It was not until thirty years later that Ellsberg discovered how much Nixon had proposed to escalate the war even after the release of the Pentagon Papers, after he read the following transcripts from the Nixon White House tapes, beginning with a conversation from April 25, 1972:

Nixon: We’ve got to quit thinking in terms of a three-day strike [in the Hanoi-Haiphong area]. We’ve got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack—which will continue until they—Now, by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond…I’m thinking of the dikes, I’m thinking of the railroad, I’m thinking, of course, the docks…

Kissinger: …I agree with you.

Nixon: …we’ve got to use massive force…

[Two hours later:]

Nixon: How many did we kill in Laos?

Ron Ziegler, White House Press Secretary: Maybe ten thousand—fifteen?

Kissinger: In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen…

Nixon: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind…power plants, whatever’s left—POL [petroleum], the docks…And, I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no . . . I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?…I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Over a week later on May 4, 1972, Nixon outlined his views on the world while pounding on his desk in the Oval Office:

Nixon: Vietnam—Here’s those little cocksuckers right in there, here they are. (Thump) Here’s the United States (thump). Here’s Western (thump) Europe, that cocky little place that’s caused so much devastation…Here’s the Soviet Union (thump), here’s the (thump) Mid-East…Here’s the (thump) silly Africans…And (thump) the not-quite-so-silly Latin Americans. Here we are. They’re taking on the United States. Now, goddamnit, we’re gonna do it. We’re going to cream them. This is not in anger or anything. This old business, that I’m “petulant,” that’s all bullshit. I should have done it long ago, I just didn’t follow my instincts.

…I’ll see that the United States does not lose. I’m putting it quite bluntly. I’ll be quite precise. South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made the decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam.

…For once, we’ve got to use the maximum power of this country…against this shit-ass little country: to win the war. We can’t use the word, “win.” But others can.

In a later conversation, Nixon discussed the politics of killing with Kissinger, validating Ellsberg’s assumption on casualties:

Nixon: The only place where you and I disagree…is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.

Kissinger: I’m concerned about the civilians because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher…

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson predicted that tragic consequences would follow if the American public were to be kept in the dark by their leaders. In his view, operating in secret would lead a government with unchecked power to commit atrocities. He wrote from Paris of his observations on the governments of Europe and how the same fate could befall the United States: “Under pretense of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”