The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

This documentary lets its subject (and hero) speak for himself: Ellsberg is the narrator. You may feel that it can hardly be taken in fully at one go -- that you ought to sneak back to see it more, maybe look up some of the history involved. The twists and turns of events, the turbulent full political context, are complicated indeed. But maybe what you really cannot assimilate is the complexity of the man himself, and the feeling contemplating that complexity gives you of being very small in comparison.

It still seems hard to understand the Pentagon Papers story. 7,000 pages, finally published or written about at the time by a dozen or more big city papers, so it became impossible to suppress them: what are the Pentagon Papers? I was around then, but I never read them. Who did? Why did they turn the tide against the Vietnam War? Did they do that? Ultimately the Nixon administration's "dirty tricks" men, the "plumbers," brought down Nixon for their mission in California of breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. It was the last straw. And why was that? Coming after the exposure of the Watergate break-ins, this clumsy, stupid act further showed Nixon's henchmen for for the Keystone-Cop thugs they were, and the game was up for Nixon, though the war was to be pursued by Lyndon B. Johnson, and ultimately take him down, though more honorably.

Ellsberg was one of those at the Rand Corporation in 1967-68 who contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents related to the conduct of the Vietnam War commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara, later known as "the Pentagon Papers." Perusing these documents, Ellsberg discovered total cynicism about the war at the highest level all along. Officials knew the war would lead to heavy casualties and not be won, and expressed an indifference to loss of human life and to the outcome of the conflict that totally shocked him. Eventually this shock led to his decision that he couldn't be silent about this, could not be a good soldier and play the game any more; that the only course was ultimately to expose what he had learned.

This came, of course, in the context of a growing anti-war movement at home and abroad and of the post-1968 revolutionary spirit of the times. But Sixties hippies and anti-war activists were one thing, and Ellsberg was another. Ellsberg was an insider. His voice carried a special conviction. A year or so after his initial discovery of the import of the Papers, Ellsberg tried to get them released on the Senate floor, preferably by Senator William Fulbright or George McGovern. When this failed he turned to the New York Times. This led eventually to the Supreme Court case, and to the Nixon effort to block and discredit Ellsberg. Ellsberg, who was on the brink of going to jail for many years, needed enormous courage through all this, and he not only marshaled that courage, but has gone on tirelessly using the moral capital he he earned at the time of the Pentagon papers to oppose illegal and immoral wars in the decades since.

In this documentary, Nixon White House tape excerpts are heard, Nixon with Kissinger especially, the most damning, foul, small-town mafioso voice of evil: "get the son-of-a-bitch!" Nixon cries. These voices are surprising, even now. We have heard such voices in other documentaries, but perhaps never as naked and crude as here.

Ellsberg and his Rand Corporation cohort Anthony Russo, who photocopied the Papers, were absolved by a judge in California who declared a mistrial because of administration misconduct in persecuting the two men. That was nearly forty years ago and Ellsberg, as late, great liberal-left American historian Howard Zinn declares here, has lived his Iife in keeping with the principles he followed in exposing the Pentagon Papers ever since. But only a few visuals in this film cover that life of anti-war activism.

Part of what may move us about him and what may make him important is that Ellsberg's is a conversion story. Elssberg was far inside the establishment in what he originally did, a researcher for the Pentagon and a man who worked for the ultra-right-wing West-Coast-based Rand Corporation. Thus his later-to-be wife of many years Patricia, an anti-war activist when they met, broke off their engagement after he went on a paid trip to Vietnam. On that trip, Ellsberg learned how the Vietcong operated by leading a military operation himself; he was a former Marine. He married another woman. But when he got his teenage son and ten-year-old daughter to help photocopy the Papers, she broke with him, and he married Patricia, after all.

The most powerful sequence is between Ellsberg today and a pacifist of those days among those whose willingness to go to jail to fight the war convinced Ellsberg to become willing to do the same. This man was a turning point in Ellsberg's life, and his voice breaks with emotion sitting with him today and remembering that.

What makes this story so powerful is that it's not only about a First Amendment battle that went to the top -- the resulting Supreme Court decision remains essential in protecting the press from outside pressure -- but about the total transformation of a man from a liberal establishment figure into a voice for independent activism. And the information Ellsberg brought out is a magnifying glass through which to view the post-9/11 world and American hubris as characterized by Chalmers Johnson in his 'Blowback Trilogy.' We might consider the inevitable possibility that there are other Pentagon Papers, millions of pages, about America's other wars and occupations, that similarly expose their futility, brutality, and cynicism.

'The Most Dangerous Man in America' carries off the difficult task of sketching a portrait of a key figure of modern US political history without slighting either him or the complicated context in which he rose to fame.

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I did not know much about Daniel Ellsberg before watching this movie. I think Daniel Ellsberg is more remembered because of the fact that the plumbers broke into his psychiatrist's office. The story of the Pentagon Papers is also known, but not as much. As can be seen in the film, the release of them did not have the kind of large impact one would expect.

I never knew that Ellsberg had such a large influence of the implementation of the Vietnam War. I was always under the impression he had just been a pen pusher not making logistical decisions. I would have never guessed that he served in that country as a civilian.

We see some other interesting facts about Ellsberg. I never knew that he was participating in peace rallies with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I didn't know he had an emotional sea change in his life after he heard about individuals going to prison to protest the war. It is a very interesting story.

Besides that, the documentary is well put together. There aren't any interesting or outlandish cinematographic choices. The film is very basic in this respect. I think subject of the documentary carries more that the people involved in making it.

The leaking of 'the Pentagon papers' about the Vietnam War in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, and their publication in the New York Times, was an epochal event in modern American history. At the time, Ellsberg was widely reviled as a traitor, and many still say that about him. This begs the question as to whether one can be a traitor for informing the public of one's own country about what their leaders are doing in their name and with their money. The story of the 'Pentagon Papers' is complicated by the revelations a year later, in 1972, by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, in his book THE SECRET TEAM. Prouty, who was an even more important whistleblower than Ellsberg, states unequivocally that the 'Pentagon Papers', were fabricated by the CIA as a means of shifting the blame for the unsuccessful Vietnam War onto the US military, whereas the Vietnam War was started by and entirely run by the CIA themselves, and all those generals like Maxwell Taylor who were involved were really CIA employees in uniform; as for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, they supplied men and machines when required, but it was the CIA who ran the whole show. Prouty is at pains to differentiate between the intelligence division of the CIA (of which he apparently approves), which merely collects information, and the special ops part of the CIA, which he claims went out of control in 1955 and became a state within a state which manipulated presidents, cabinet members, and members of Congress with skewed briefings and kept the truth under wraps by unjustifiable secrecy classifications, whose sole purpose was to conceal from Americans what their own secret service was doing and spending. Prouty states that Daniel Ellsberg was a CIA man, despite the many other posts he subsequently held. This is highly likely, because he probably could not have entered the Rand Corporation in 1958 or had so many 'higher than top secret' clearances subsequently if he had not been CIA. In this film, Ellsberg states that he had signed more than a dozen secrecy agreements. Since Ellsberg narrowly missed being jailed for 75 years on one charge, he has clearly never been in any position to state that he was a CIA man, because that would mean breaking a secrecy agreement, and would give his enemies the opportunity to take him back to court again on another charge. Prouty believed that Ellsberg was a knowing participant in a CIA disinformation campaign, and that his being a whistleblower was phoney. It is not really possible to believe that, however, after seeing this revealing documentary film. Yes, he was probably a CIA man, but no, he was probably not a conscious member of a disinformation conspiracy. In other words, he was probably manipulated. But in 'the Shadow World' everyone is manipulated, and even the manipulators themselves are being manipulated by their own insane delusions. That would explain why Ellsberg's phone calls were being monitored for two years before he leaked the documents, and yet the security people just sat back and waited for him to leak them rather than taking pre-emptive steps to stop him doing so. It was all too easy. It was all a setup. I wonder if even Ellsberg knows.

The documentary is about a man with a conscience and a love for his country. He experiences an epiphany and realizes the government(s) of his country have been lying to its people for years, specifically about the Vietnam war, and decides to take steps to end the war and bring to light the artifice behind the government's public facade.

He sees the costs incurred, in terms of dollars and lives spent, he experiences the hawkish behaviour driving the war in Southeast Asia and in the end puts his career and life on the line to see the truth brought to life.

Terrific movie, the qualities embodied by Ellsberg should be encouraged in anyone seeking public office. Those who call him a traitor perhaps should not be so quick to judge this man. Would anyone be happy to see a son come home in a flag draped box because a lying politician sent him to war? Ellsberg thought not, and became an enormous figure in US history because he dared speak out.

This documentary is a must-see for anyone interested in American history. The most important reason to see it is that it illustrates the cozy nature of press-government relations in the 1960s, and how that relationship changed radically, albeit slowly, as a result of Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

The Pentagon Papers were top secret documents that detailed the real reasons for America's entry into the Vietnam War. They clearly showed that presidents Kennedy and Johnson had lied to the American public and flouted international law in sending troops to Southeast Asia. What was revolutionary was the mainstream press's eventual willingness to publish the classified documents. This had never been done before in America. The story as told in this film is as riveting as any spy caper, and shows how individual acts of courage on the part of several people were crucial to the success of Ellsberg's efforts to reveal the truth.

There is also some black humor in the film, where President Nixon reveals his vengeful anger against Ellsberg on excerpts from his famous tapes. It is no exaggeration to say that Ellsberg almost single-handedly set in motion the events that would bring down the Nixon presidency and end America's involvement in Vietnam.