Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg’s line lands like a controlled detonation: the casual, almost stumbling repetition ("with the, with") signals someone choosing accuracy over polish, trying to name an ugly thing without hiding behind eloquence. That matters, because the allegation isn’t merely that the Tonkin Gulf incident was misunderstood, but that risk was engineered - that American ships were placed where an encounter was likely, and then the encounter was rhetorically laundered into certainty.

The specific intent is prosecutorial. Ellsberg frames Johnson’s actions as a pattern ("not only once, but several times"), pushing back against the comforting myth of a single chaotic night at sea. The subtext is darker: the machinery of escalation doesn’t always start with a lie after the fact; sometimes it starts with a desire for the lie to become usable. "Hoping that it would lead to a confrontation" is a charge of motive, not just method. "Claiming that it had" is the second move: once you’ve primed the conditions for friction, you can narrate any spark as a casus belli.

Context sharpens the blade. Ellsberg isn’t a detached commentator; he’s the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, someone who watched how ambiguity gets weaponized inside government - uncertain intelligence, bureaucratic incentives, political need. The quote’s moral pressure point is the human cost he tacks on at the end. He’s reminding you that this wasn’t chessboard strategy. It was a willingness to gamble with sailors’ lives to unlock congressional authority and public consent, turning a manufactured brink into an open-ended war.