Col. Rheault

I just got my copy of Daniel Ellsberg's new memoirs, Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. I flipped it open to the passage on pages 286-9 where the author narrates a turn in his thinking, on the occasion of watching the Robert Rheault case play out in the papers and in the bureaucracy.

A plan to indict this Army colonel was withdrawn by Stanley Resor, though it had become clear to many that some officers under his command had deliberately killed a man working for them. Ellsberg tells it as a moment in his realization that the entire government he was working for was capable of lying, all the way up the chain of command.

Oh, I thought, that's interesting, Ellsberg knew something that settles that case once and for all and now he's going to tell us what happened. But he doesn't. First he says (page 288) that a newspaper reporter had suggested that Rheault's subordinates lied to the colonel. The next we hear (page 289), Ellsberg is on his bunk reflecting that everyone including Rheault had lied.

Does anyone have any evidence or argument about this?

I believe Jeff Stein's book _A Murder in Wartime_ is pretty trustworthy on this subject. According to this account, Rheault's subordinates were having real trouble deciding whether to kill the Vietnamese (Chuyen). So they consulted Rheault, and he was a participant in the decision to kill Chuyen. If the subordinates had been able to make up their minds on their own, they would then have had to decide what to say to Rheault, but that was not the way this incident worked.

It was when Rheault was speaking to his superiors that the lying occurred. General Abrams heard about the incident, and asked Rheault to come to MACV and report on it. Rheault reported to some of Abrams' senior staff officers--General William Rosson [Stein mis-spells this Rossen], General William Potts, and General Elias Townsend--and then directly to Abrams. He lied. I don't know of any way to tell whether Abrams would have had criminal charges brought if Rheault had come clean and said yes, Chuyen had been killed, and explained the reasons. When Abrams decided Rheault had lied to him, charges were brought.

This is not a case I would choose as an example if I were trying to prove that everybody in the chain of command was capable of lying. Abrams seems to have wanted, and expected, to get honest reports in this case.

Ed Moise