Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg’s line lands like an indictment that refuses the comfort of “well-intentioned” leadership. The craft is in the contrast: “By ordinary standards of presidents, he is a decent man.” It sounds like praise until you notice it’s a trap. Ellsberg is attacking the moral insulation we grant officeholders, where decency becomes a personality trait you can cite while ignoring the body count. The subtext is blunt: if your job includes authorizing mass violence, “ordinary standards” are morally bankrupt.

The phrasing “by American hands” is doing quiet, ferocious work. It rejects the bureaucratic fog of “collateral damage” and “kinetic operations” and forces agency back onto the nation and the commander in chief. Then Ellsberg compresses the entire machinery of war into a binary: “either to kill or not to kill.” Critics might call that simplistic; Ellsberg’s point is that simplification is the only honest move when institutions turn murder into process. He’s collapsing policy debate into an ethical yes-or-no because the victims experience it that way.

Context matters: Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, spent his life arguing that democratic oversight fails most catastrophically in wartime. Here he’s also puncturing Obama’s brand: the Nobel laureate of restraint as the executor of escalation (the surge-era Afghanistan logic, drone warfare’s normalization, the language of “necessity”). The intent isn’t to deny complexity; it’s to deny absolution.