The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (***1/4)

It was a war begun under a false pretense that lasted way longer, was more deadly, and proved much more costly than predicted. The outcome was not as planned, and that severely impacted the political fortunes of the president who had poured hundreds of thousands of troops into a faraway country. That was Vietnam. People under 45 or 50 won’t remember Daniel Ellsberg, and yet his actions indirectly may have led to the downfall of a president and to one of the most important First Amendment verdicts by the United States Supreme Court.

Ellsberg’s goal was to end the Vietnam War, though. Through his job as a United States foreign policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, he had access to a top-secret report about the history of US involvement in Vietnam. Notably, it was top secret not because it would aid the enemy, but because it would demonstrate the deception of American presidents and the unreality of upbeat assessments about the likelihood of success. After handing the report to The New York Times and other newspapers, Ellsberg earned both a federal indictment and, from President Richard Nixon, the epithet that gives this film its title.

This can be seen as a companion piece to The Fog of War, the Errol Morris documentary that featured Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara and Ellsberg were both originally supporters of the war (though Ellsberg with more reservations), and both realized that the US was not, as President Lyndon Johnson had told the public, winning the war. But whereas McNamara felt, until decades later, that his duty was to be loyal to his boss, the president, Ellberg came sooner to feel otherwise. Directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith allow Ellsberg to narrate his own story, incorporating recent interviews of him and others. Stylistically, the movie is not noteworthy. There is no Philip Glass score a la Morris’s work to lend a sense of urgency, and no fancy graphics. Minor re-enactments of certain scenes are included, and period footage, but mostly the movie is a typical “talking heads” documentary. Almost all of the voices, though, are of those directly involved in leaking the document, in Ellsberg’s life, or in related matters. One academic, people’s historian Howard Zinn, appears, but as one who knew Ellsberg in the 1970s. Nixon is heard on tape, wondering in one excerpt whether dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam might not be a good idea.

While little new information is revealed, this is a very well organized look at a piece of history that any American ought to know.

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viewed 4/14/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/15/10