Vietnam whistle-blower revels in his new role
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/tiff/article/694701
Sep 12 2009
It's been 38 years since Daniel Ellsberg rocked the United States by
leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times revealing to the
world that several U.S. presidents had been lying to the public.
Now at age 78, Ellsberg is in Toronto as the star and protagonist of
a riveting documentary called The Most Dangerous Man in America:
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which had its world premiere
last night at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Yesterday, when I had lunch with Ellsberg, his wife Patricia, and the
co-producers/writers of the film, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith,
I took the opportunity to ask the obvious: Why now?
After all, the Pentagon Papers saga has all the ingredients of a
great documentary, and it benefits hugely from Ellsberg's own
charismatic personality as he narrates the story. But surely the film
could have been made long ago.
"Well, there are at least 97 good reasons," says Ellsberg. "One of
them is that I didn't want to seem to be cashing in on my celebrity.
But a more important one is the striking correspondence between what
happened in Vietnam back then and what is happening with Afghanistan
right now."
Ellsberg has no doubt there are other people in high places sitting
on the kind of explosive information about Afghanistan that Ellsberg
leaked about Vietnam.
"(Barack) Obama sounds like a fool when he talks about Afghanistan as
a necessary war," says Ellsberg. He says there are advisers who are
holding back the facts including, in his view, that even hundreds
of thousands of U.S. troops taking over the country for 10 years
would not be enough to defeat the Taliban.
But The Most Dangerous Man in America is not a film about Afghanistan
or Obama. It's the story of how Ellsberg was converted from a
committed Cold War liberal to a devastatingly effective foe of the
war in Vietnam.
In the 1960s, as a Harvard graduate and former marine officer, he was
a brilliant researcher at the RAND Corporation, a military
think-tank, and a true believer who was confident the Vietnam War was
a way of defending democracy against Stalinist dictatorship.
Given the highest level of security clearance, he helped provide
Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. president, with the kind of information he
needed. But Ellsberg knew that reports about alleged North Vietnamese
aggression in the Bay of Tonkin were phony. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked
secret documents to The New York Times revealing that several U.S.
presidents Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had been
lying for years about Vietnam. "It is not just that we were on the
wrong side," says Ellsberg. "We were the wrong side."
It soon became obvious just who was responsible for the leak, and
according to Ellsberg, that turned him into a leper.
Ellsberg was even charged with espionage and faced the real
possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. But the case
was thrown out of court and the public eventually realized that the
Vietnam War was a horrible folly.
Now Ellsberg revels in being a persona non grata in top government,
military and academic circles. And far from dwelling in the past, he
is working to prevent his country from what he sees as another
mistake in Afghanistan.
"In Vietnam we thought we could succeed where the French failed. In
Afghanistan, we seem to think we can succeed where the Russians
failed. There must be books by Russians about what went wrong in
Afghanistan. Have any of them been translated? We should be reading
them and learning from them."
--
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The Most Dangerous Man in America:
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
by Jason Bailey
September 14, 2009
The press notes for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel
Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers don't call it a documentary; they
call it a "political thriller," and the description is apt. The film
may engage in the most familiar trappings of doc
filmmaking--sometimes to its own detriment--but the story it tells is
so engaging and engrossing that we're swept right up in it. It's a
film about a moment in history--a specific moment, right before the
entire house of cards that was the Nixon administration came tumbling
down--but it is also an intimate, candid portrait of a man who had a
crisis of conscience, and decided to act on it.
The film, directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, runs on two
tracks: as a personal biography of Ellsberg and a historical snapshot
of what he did. The second part is easy, and part of the record: a
former Pentagon insider, Ellsberg was a man transformed by the early
1970s. The once-hawk was now a dove, furious about the lies that the
American government (particularly, five of its Presidents) had told
the people about the circumstances leading up to our involvement in
Vietnam. When his attempts to bring Congressional attention to a
top-secret Pentagon study highlighting those lies failed, Ellsberg
leaked the so-called "Pentagon Papers" to the New York Times, setting
up a chain of events that pitted the Nixon administration against the
free press, influenced public perception of the floundering Vietnam
conflict, and led directly to the Watergate scandal that toppled the
Nixon presidency.
The details of that story, the whens and hows and whos, are riveting
viewing. But you can find all of that in books and other
documentaries. The juice here is Ellsberg's personal journey from one
of the architects of the war to one of its staunchest enemies.
Careful attention is paid to the details of his psychological
make-up, to the doubts that were percolating in the late 1960s, to
the concerns and fears that finally led him to conclude that "it
wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side."
Those are Ellsberg's own words; he both narrates the film and serves
as its primary interview subject, a splitting of focus that requires
a little getting used to. But that conceit does work, particularly
when it leads to scenes like his powerful description of the moment
when his life "split in two."
Some of the picture's other devices don't play quite as well. The use
of reenactments should always serve as a last-ditch, Hail Mary option
for any documentary filmmaker who isn't Errol Morris; those scenes,
and the cheeseball music and graphics of the opening sequence, give
the film the unfortuante feel of a History Channel special (nothing
against History Channel specials--I just don't want to pay good money
to see one in a theater). Some of the other, more inventive solutions
to presenting scenes at which cameras weren't present (like the
occasional use of simple animation) are more successful.
There are other somewhat amateurish moments (like when Henry
Kissinger is identified, via on-screen text as "national securty
advisor"), but most are forgivable, particularly as the narrative
tightens and picks up speed in the last 30 minutes. Those Nixon tapes
continue to stun (was there ever a grown man who used profanity more
awkwardly?), and Ehrlich and Goldsmith do a first-rate job of
conveying the real risks taken by both the Times and Ellsberg himself
(he faced the possibility of 115 years in prison). The Most Dangerous
Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is guilty of
occasional missteps, but nonetheless, it is still a riveting,
exciting documentary film.
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The Most Dangerous Man in America
Posted by J.R. Jones
Sep 14, 2009
The title for this documentary about Daniel Ellsberg, the defense
department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York
Times in 1971, is how Ellsberg was described at the time by Henry
Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state. Of course, back then plenty
of people thought Kissinger was the most dangerous man in America, or
perhaps his boss, Richard Nixon. If you wanted to be the most
dangerous man in America in 1971, you really had to put in some hours.
Because American history has repeated itself so flagrantly in Iraq
(and may yet again in Afghanistan), any filmmaker who wants to
revisit the Vietnam war for the thousandth time can always claim some
relevance to current events. Writer-directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick
Goldsmith trace a dully familiar chain of events from the early 60s
through the early 70sthe Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the tragic
miscalculations of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, the Tet
offensive and its political fallout, the widening war and apocalyptic
resolve of Nixon and Kissinger. We've all been there before, many
times over. But The Most Dangerous Man in America manages to carve
out its own little place in the canon by focusing on the ethical
journey of one man who refused to shrug off his own slim
responsibility for the war and atoned for it with an act that sent
shock waves across the country.
As an employee at the RAND Corporation in the early 60s, Ellsberg
helped formulate U.S. strategy for launching a nuclear exchange, and
as an assistant to defense secretary Robert McNamara, he assembled
data that President Johnson would use to justify aerial bombardment
of North Vietnam. Ellsberg was always on the lookout for the dramatic
emotional detail that would sell the war to people, such as the fact
that two captured U.S. soldiers had been chained and dragged from the
back of moving vehicles by the Viet Cong.
Ironically, Ehrlich and Goldsmith have taken his lesson to heart, and
the personal details are what give the movie its force. When Ellsberg
met Patricia Marx, the Washington journalist who would later become
his wife, the only time he had off from work for a date was Sunday
afternoon, and she had to cover a peace rally in front of the White
House, which put Ellsberg in the ticklish position of being
photographed among the protesters even as he was advising LBJ on how
to escalate the war. Years later, after he'd turned against the war
and resolved to leak the Pentagon's top-secret study on U.S. strategy
in Vietnam, he took his two children along to help him photocopy and
collate the 7,000-page document, hoping to give them a hand in this
seismic act of civil disobedience. On the Saturday night before the
Times launched its unprecedented publication of the document,
Ellsberg, his friend Howard Zinn, and their wives nervously took in a
movie that had become Ellsberg's favorite: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The movie becomes particularly prescient as Ehrlich and Goldsmith
explore the battle inside the Times over whether to publish the
purloined document; the paper's outside attorneys advised them not to
publish, but its legal counsel reasoned that there was nothing in the
Pentagon Papers that compromised national security; all the document
did was tear the curtain away from the decisions that had led America
into the war. All the arguments rehearsed during this period,
revolving around national security needs versus the public's right to
know, came back around during the Bush years as the Times reported on
the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and the
CIA's Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. No less than John Dean, who
regularly dines out on his own defiance of Richard Nixon, expresses
some sympathy for his old boss and notes that the new culture of
constant government leaks has made the president's job even more
difficult. His observation makes Ellsberg's decision even more
fraught with consequences than we might have thought.
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The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117941052.html?categoryid=31&cs=1
By RONNIE SCHEIB
Sep. 13, 2009
An ITVS/Kovno Communications/Insight Prods. presentation of a Judith
Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith/ITVS production. (International sales: Films
Transit, New York.) Produced by Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith.
Executive producer, Jodie Evans. Directed by Judith Ehrlich, Rick
Goldsmith. Written by Lawrence Lerew, Goldsmith, Ehrlich, Michael
Chandler, partly based on Daniel Ellsberg's "Secrets: A Memoir of
Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers."
With: Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Anthony Russo, Howard Zinn,
Janaki Natajaran, Randy Koehler, Tom Oliphant, Egil Krogh, Max
Frankel, John Dean, Leonard Weinglass, Hendrick Smith, Mike Gravel.
Narrator: Daniel Ellsberg.
"The Most Dangerous Man in America," Judith Ehrlich and Rick
Goldsmith's cogent docu about Daniel Ellsberg, the high-level
Pentagon official and Vietnam War planner who leaked the Pentagon
Papers to the New York Times, crams a wealth of material into 90
minutes without losing clarity or momentum. Fascinating for those who
lived through the controversy and those for whom the incidentrings
only the faintest of bells, the pic wisely allows obvious parallels
between Vietnam and Iraq to hover unspoken. Must-see docu is skedded
to open Sept. 16 at Gotham's Film Forum after its Toronto fest bow.
The pic opens with the publication of the Papers and the resultant
media storm, FBI manhunt and branding of Ellsberg by Henry Kissinger
as "the most dangerous man in America." The story then backtracks to
follow the sequence of key events in Ellsberg's life: the deaths of
his mother and sister (when his father fell asleep at the wheel); his
seminal doctoral thesis on decision theory; his 1954-57 stint in the
Marines ("the happiest time of my life"); and finally his position in
the Defense Department under Robert McNamara.
Ellsberg was instrumental in compiling reports to justify bombing
North Vietnam. The docu dramatizes the glee with which Ellsberg
sought and found a Viet Cong atrocity (complete with graphic details)
to strengthen the case for a policy that he personallyopposed. Guilt
over this deed would color all his subsequent actions.
Some may criticize the filmmakers' strict adherence to Ellsberg as
both narrator and star, but the docu focuses on his moral turnaround,
which directly impacted history. This unique fusion of personal and
social drama allows the pic to avoid the usual canned
montage-of-the-times approach. The footage places Ellsberg at the
center of both polar factions regarding Vietnam: playing Pentagon war
games and marching in peace protests.
Ehrlich and Goldsmith's varied storytelling techniques include
interviews with eclectic talking heads, re-enactments of shadowy
figures Xeroxing thousands of pages, crude animation of secret
transfers of boxes of documents, and tape recorders spinning Nixon's
uncensored commentary.
Once Ellsberg resolves to publish the 7,000 page secret Rand history
of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, detailing the lies of four American
presidents who plunged the country ever deeper into what increasingly
proved to be an unwinnable war, his action (and its attendant threat
of a life behind bars) is mirrored by a succession of newspaper
editors who reprinted the documents, despite injunctions and court
orders, in an impressive show of First Amendment solidarity.
While a present-day Ellsberg complains that the massive number of
bombs dropped on Vietnam, which he repeatedly mentioned in press
conferences back then, was never duly reported, Ehrlich and Goldsmith
redress that silence with a bombardment of newsreel images of aerial
destruction.
Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Vicente Franco, Dan Krauss; editors,
Chandler, Goldsmith, Lerew; music, Blake Leyh; sound, Nick Bertoni,
Goldsmith. Reviewed on DVD, New York, Sept. 11, 2009. (In Toronto
Film Festival -- Real to Reel.) Running time: 94 MIN.
.
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