NEW YORK -- Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, Thursday accused the Reagan administration of promoting a military buildup with 'deceptive' arguments similar to those used to justify the Vietnam war.
'I recognize the administration's White Paper on El Salvador as a virtual reprint of the one I was involved in 1965,' said Daniel Ellsberg at a conference on how the U.S. became involved in the Vietnam War.
Ellsburg, a former Defense Department official who gave the media the Pentagon Papers detailing the secret history of the Vietnam War, contributed to the 1965 State Department White Paper justifying U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Ellsberg said the Reagan adminstration has exaggerated the military strength of the Soviet Union in order to manipulate American public opinion.
'The government accounts (of Soviet strength) are extremely deceptive and the press has amplified them,' he said.
Ellsberg added that the 'extreme skepticism' that greeted the El Salavador White Paper showed that the 'press had learned useful lessons from the Pentagon Papers.'
Former State Department spokesman Hodding Carter, who also spoke at the conference, said the administration was excellent at the 'orchestration' of the public on the military buildup.
Carter said the administration was taking advantage of American confusion over the Vietnam war.
'We've never faced the reality of losing the war. It's an undigested lump sitting in the stomach of the nation,' he said.
The conference sponsored by the World Without War Council brought together journalists, former government officials and anti-Vietnam war activists for a discussion of the war.
Pacifist David Dellinger said he was 'uneasy' with the presence of William Bundy, an assistant Secretary of State under former President Lyndon Johnson. Critics of the war regarded Bundy as one its chief proponents.
'It doesn't pay to pretend that Vietnam was not a criminal war,' he said. 'We can't gloss over the fact that the country was governed by war criminals.'
Dellinger said we are living in an 'age of insanity' when government officials talk about 'winning nuclear wars.'
Ellsberg, who questioned Bundy, said his anger over Vietnam had cooled a bit.
'I'm not as inclined to personalize responsibility for the war now,' he said after questioning Bundy about the 1964 congressional Gulf of Tonkin resolution that resulted in the escalation of the war.
Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam during the Johnson years sat a few feet from Ellsberg but did not join the discussion.
