✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Daniel Ellsberg: The Effect of Top Secret Clearance – wonkmonk's notes

wonkmonksnotes.wordpress.com · 1,744 words · saved by 6 readers

He apparently recounted one of my favorite Ellsberg stories, and since it’s one of my favorites I’m going to repeat it in full below. It’s from Ellsberg’s book Secrets, and the setting is a meeting…

I took that opportunity to tell him [Henry Kissinger] something that I’d long thought of telling somebody who was about to enter the world of really high secrecy. And I said, “Henry, you’re about to get a lot of clearances higher than top secret that you did not know existed. That’s going to have a sequence of effects on you. First, a great exhilaration that you’re getting all this amazing information that you didn’t know even existed. And the next phase is you’ll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this. But that won’t last long. Ver

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading