It’s very hard for someone who spent his life the way I did in the Executive Branch to read those words. When I first read them, I’d like the experiment done of, say, a McNamara or a McGeorge Bundy or Rusk being forced to read those aloud, say, to his family, his family who may have had the chance to read the Pentagon Papers and read the style of discussion and decision making that they were doing at the office during the day and to see the films—and I think films have been shown—and to hear the sorts of detail that will come out in these {Honeywell Project's} War Crimes Hearings here. To hear those, to see what was really happening with those pieces of paper at the other end of the automated battlefield, and to face what they really ought to do about that.But of course it isn’t just Honeywell or Congress or IBM. How many people here—and I made it clear, I hope, that I’m not one—have followed up all those bloody footprints in the snow and have changed their lives as a result? A lot of you didn’t have to; some of you are too young to have been challenged by that. People who are my age or older face that question more. Well, I think the responsibility of those who are lied to is not the same as those doing the lying, and even Congress is not as responsible as five presidents. Maybe even Honeywell can say in some degree of good faith that they didn’t know how wrongful a war these weapons would be used to kill women and children in. That doesn’t sound too good for them. On the other hand, they’re in the unusual position of being that close to the killing machine. IBM is probably a step further away, for example, and other firms, but for the rest of us as well the same problem really arises. The candidates who have talked about ending the war but have not voted against defense appropriations, and that’s nearly all of them, have not taken that responsibility, have not filibustered. I’d have to say, for example, that McGovern has not filibustered. Nobody’s filibustered. Nobody, in other words, has acted as forthrightly and with as much dedication against the war as southern senators routinely act to preserve segregation.So the question is really posed far beyond that but posed to all of us as voters, as people who have choices to make with our lives as to how we spend them and whether we throw our whole influence against what we know is wrong. Not only refuse to collaborate but obstruct, resist all our lives. The phrase is really that of Thoreau: Cast your whole vote only. “Your whole vote, not a strip of paper only, but your whole influence,” talking then about the Mexican War, as a matter of fact. Frank Kroncke obviously was casting his whole vote. In my case, with a series of decisions to make over a two-year period, the earliest decisions were influenced not by Kroncke, Frank—it was a year earlier—but by other people very like him, people I know he would like to meet, brothers and sisters; some of them have just gotten out of prison. {See dedication to various War Resisters in Ellsberg's book Papers on the War.} The process has been so long and they went in about the time that I gave the Pentagon Papers. It was their example immediately that told me what casting your whole vote means. What resistance means and obstruction means. So they went to prison for non-collaboration. As I say, some of them are out.But the process wasn’t over for me in 1969. So the decisions, the strength I found, I took again and again from the examples of other brothers and sisters, Americans in this country who showed me what the standards were you had to set for yourself, what you had to be willing to do to end this 25-year war. Certainly meeting the Minnesota 8 here was a major step in putting me where I am today—on my way to trial for having found a way to expose an unjust war.Everybody can invent his own way in his own environment. The question you have to face could be put in these terms, finally, and I’ll conclude with this. For 12 years I took for granted that although the president could be wrong, was wrong a lot of the time, it was his job to run the foreign policy, and the best you could do was to try to influence him and to help him solve problems. In September ’69, when I read those early parts of the Pentagon papers, I suddenly discovered the president was the problem, or was a large part of the problem. So I stopped trying to inform the president, who was using whatever information I gave him as one part of input or another in the killing machine, and I turned to trying to inform Congress. Well, it took a year and a half to discover that Congress was part of the problem, so I gave the information to the public through the press. I’m not certain what you’re applauding there because it’s obviously too soon for us to applaud each other on that because the war hasn’t stopped. The bombing hasn’t stopped. In fact, I think the president’s recent speech means, most of all, a reiteration of his determination to use more bombing against the offensive that they have been preparing us to expect for months now. So we’re going to see more bombing. More products of the automated factories here and the automated battlefield from Honeywell and many other places will be dropped on people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Half a million tons could be dropped at the current rates between now and the time we could elect a new president.So the problem that’s up to us is not just to elect a new president, if we’re to stop this war before another half-million tons of bombs get dropped on the people of Indochina. More will be needed. More pressure on congressmen, more examples, more commitment, some new ways that haven’t been tried and might work have got to be found to block the machine with our spirits, with our bodies, with our love, whatever we have, to work with each other. If we don’t, a year from now, nobody will be able to say, a year and a half after the Pentagon Papers have come out, “We didn’t know what was going on.” The word will be out and the complicit will be very widely shared if we have not found a way to resist it by then. And we will have to admit that America, that we, are the problem to the rest of the world. It’s up to us to determine whether that’s the judgment the world has to make of us.