War & Peace Quote by Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg’s line lands like a casual aside and that’s the point: it turns campaign myth into operational reality. Nixon’s “secret plan” was sold to voters as swaggering competence, the kind of vague promise that lets people project their preferred ending onto a war. Ellsberg strips it down to its hidden engine: not diplomacy, not brilliance, but calibrated terror. The blunt phrase “making threats of nuclear war” punctures the public story with the private one, where credibility is manufactured by flirting with catastrophe.

The intent is accusation, but also demystification. Ellsberg isn’t merely saying Nixon lied; he’s showing how the lie functioned. “Secret” wasn’t secrecy as strategy so much as secrecy as insulation - a way to keep democratic consent out of the room while escalating the stakes. His “and I knew” is doing quiet work too: it asserts proximity to power, implicating the national security apparatus as a system where extraordinary violence can be treated as a managerial option.

Context sharpens the edge. Ellsberg had lived inside the machinery of Vietnam policy before becoming the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. That biography turns the quote into a warning from someone who’s seen how “credible threats” get laundered into rational policy talk. The subtext is that nuclear brinkmanship wasn’t a wild outlier; it was a plausible move in an environment obsessed with “strength” and “saving face.”

Calling Ellsberg a “celebrity” misses the darker cultural point he’s making: in modern politics, spectacle and secrecy can collaborate. The public gets the slogan. The world gets the ultimatum.