Before Henry Kissinger was secretary of state in the Nixon administration and Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, they met in Saigon in July 1966 to swap views on Vietnam and discuss how the war was going. Then a Harvard professor looking to make his move into politics, Kissinger was visiting Vietnam as a consultant to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a fellow Harvardian and former senator who was serving as US ambassador. Ellsberg, a military analyst who had been in Vietnam for ten months as an assistant to the CIA agent Edward Lansdale, gave Kissinger two important pieces of advice: never talk to someone in the presence of their boss, and do not go to official briefings. Rarely for an American in Vietnam, he also suggested that Kissinger interview some Vietnamese.

Ellsberg was studying pacification for Lansdale, which meant he was looking for ways to subdue the rural population. This was Lansdale’s second tour of duty in Vietnam. He had become famous in the 1950s when he helped to establish the former French colony of Cochinchina as an independent state, eventually called the Republic of Vietnam. After France’s defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the United States had plucked Ngo Dinh Diem, the country’s first leader (1954-63), out of a Belgian monastery and equipped him with an army. Aided by lots of money from the CIA, Lansdale managed to create South Vietnam as a client state led by a corrupt but reliable group of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam.

• Tags: Daniel Ellsberg, Issue 22, Thomas A. Bass, Vietnam