The death of Daniel Ellsberg this past summer reminded me of the release of the Pentagon Papers in a personal way. In mid-June of 1971, I was in Rabat. I had just come back from a cross-Saharan hitchhiking trip to West Africa. About to leave for Tunisia to study literary Arabic, I had stopped by the Peace Corps office in Rabat to see Dick Holbrooke, then the Director. I had sent him a postcard from Senegal and thought that he might be interested in my experiences in a half dozen other countries with Peace Corps programs. I had a degree in international relations from an Ivy college, which made me worthy to merit Holbrooke’s attention. He had gone to Brown University and was always impressed by Ivy credentials, not an especially enduring trait for me.
Holbrooke greeted me with a copy of the New York Times. The newspaper had just published the Pentagon Papers. “Have you seen this?” He asked, clearly agitated. Prior to the Peace Corps, Holbrook had spent time in the Paris peace talks between the US and North Vietnam and had even drafted a volume of the Pentagon Papers. His Peace Corps stint in Morocco was, I assume, what chess players call an in between move. His interest was in Southeast Asia, not North Africa. On one occasion, he confided to me that his ambition while in Morocco was to drive every paved road in the country. At the time, I wondered if he was putting me on.
I hadn’t seen the paper, and the war in Souteast Asia was not on my mind. By the autumn of 1965 I had reached my own conclusion, well before and without the Pentagon Papers, that the Vietnam war was poor policy and a bad mistake, and that the US should have learned from the French experience that the mix of nationalism and Communism in Vietnam was a potent one. Nor should it have been assumed that the rest of Asia would inevitably fall to Communism if the US withdrew from Vietnam.
Holbrooke, sitting at his desk on the second floor of the Peace Corps offices, was beside himself that so many secret documents had been published.
As it turned out, Richard Nixon was re-elected President a year later with a “secret plan” to end the war. Nixon left office in disgrace and despite the “secret plan”, the North Vietnamese quickly overran the South.
In his office on Rue Van Vollenhoven, that summer of 1971, Dick Holbrooke was no more interested in the meanderings of a couple of former volunteers in West Africa than he was in Moroccan affairs. More important things occupied him, and I am pretty sure that they did not include a road map of Morocco.
Dick Holbrooke went on to have a successful career. Only mortality thwarted his ambition. I only followed his progress sporadically, and had no interest in what he did until the Balkan wars. The Daytona Peace Accords put an end much of the brutal conflict in Bosnia, with its concomitant suffering largely borne by Muslims, and I think that was his greatest moment.
Morocco That Was 