Ellsberg - 'The Most Dangerous Man'

[6 articles]

Movie Review:
Documentary focuses on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/11/AR2010021101459.html'

By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 12, 2010

"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon
Papers" was nominated last week for an Oscar for Best Documentary,
and rightly so. Although Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's film
deserves recognition as an exemplary piece of nonfiction filmmaking,
it pulses with the suspense and momentum of a sleek thriller -- a
wily caper flick that just happens to revolve around one of the most
crucial chapters in recent American history.

As "The Most Dangerous Man in America" opens, Ellsberg describes how,
in the fall of 1969, he photocopied 7,000 pages of a classified
history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and ultimately made it public
in the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets. A
highly respected strategic analyst who served in the Pentagon, at the
State Department and at the Rand Corp., Ellsberg had been a committed
Cold Warrior and a supporter of the Vietnam War through most of his
career. It was only when he read the war's secret history, beginning
with Harry Truman supporting French forces against an indigenous
Vietnamese nationalist movement, that Ellsberg came to see the war as
one built on lies.

Narrated by Ellsberg and told through a carefully layered collage of
archival footage, reenactments, animation and present-day interviews
with eyewitnesses, "The Most Dangerous Man in America" grabs viewers
with intrigue and high-stakes derring-do and never lets go. After a
combination breakdown-breakthrough, when he decides to risk his
career and blow the whistle, Ellsberg is hounded by Richard Nixon's
administration and the FBI, indicted on charges that could mean life
in jail and finally targeted in a plot that would come to light
during the Watergate investigation. Like a Rosetta Stone linking
Vietnam, Watergate, the role of the press in a democracy and the
enduring tension between national security and the public's right to
know, "The Most Dangerous Man in America" manages to be both
engrossing history and astonishingly germane to present-day political debates.

Most amazingly, "The Most Dangerous Man in America" succeeds not just
as a documentary, but also as an example of genres that most fiction
films struggle to get right: It has romance (Ellsberg's off-and-on
early relationship with his wife, Patricia), action (late-night
meetings in front of the Mayflower Hotel), family drama (he enlisted
his two kids in the photocopying effort, with sobering results) and,
most important, the classic, compelling tale of one man's moral
courage in face of corrupt and overweening state power. There's even
the occasional dash of unlikely comedy, especially in the profane
presidential outbursts captured on the Nixon tapes. If you find
yourself laughing, it's only because it hurts too much to cry.

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The Most Dangerous Man in America

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/feb/16/most-dangerous-man-in-america

Daniel Ellsberg is handsome, clever and does magic for kids. He also
helped bring down Nixon

Tim Dowling
16 February 2010

'I began to Xerox the McNamara study in the fall of '69," said Daniel
Ellsberg, now an old man, in his quiet, deceptively soporific voice.
The document in question was called United States-Vietnam Relations
1945­1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defence, but became
better known as The Pentagon Papers. It was 7,000 pages long and took
him months to copy in secret. Did nobody notice how much toner he was
getting through?

The Most Dangerous Man in America (BBC4) is a title conferred on
Ellsberg by Henry Kissinger, which leads one to believe he must have
been doing something right. In fact, the threat Ellsberg posed to the
establishment and the Nixon administration stemmed from his being a
former Marine commander, military analyst and adviser to the Johnson
administration. He was handsome, brilliant and did magic tricks for
children. He supported the Vietnam War, and even went there to see
how things were progressing. A reporter ran across him in the jungle,
armed and leading a patrol.

That trip, however, convinced him that America couldn't win. He
­managed to convince the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, that
things weren't going well, but McNamara still told reporters that
"military progress has exceeded our expectations".

McNamara did at least initiate a ­top-secret study into the war, a
study that began to uncover a history of unwarranted intervention and
misleading statistics. Ironically, they made the study secret so that
President Johnson wouldn't get wind of it and cancel it.

In one sense this programme ­ made of interviews, news footage,
recordings and reconstruction ­ was a study of a government slowly
succumbing to paranoia. But it was also an intriguing portrait of a
man whose fierce moral sense led him to put his career and his
liberty at risk. In one scene he recalled the death of his mother and
sister ­ his father crashed their car after falling asleep at the
wheel ­ and said it taught him that even good men could do wrong by
accident. Our leaders, he felt, had also fallen asleep at the wheel.

Nixon was elected on the promise of an exit strategy, but he didn't
have one. "For once we've got to use the maximum power of this
country," he said in private, "against this little shit-ass country."
Meanwhile, at a rally for some draft resisters, Ellsberg had a
painful epiphany. "It was as if an axe had split my head," he said,
"but what had really happened was that my life had been split in two."

Ellsberg leaked McNamara's study to the press. When an injunction
halted publication, he passed the documents to a senator who read
them into the congressional record during a sub­committee meeting.
Ellsberg faced a possible 115 years in prison, although his trial
eventually collapsed as the Nixon administration imploded.

Ellsberg's courage stood in sharp contrast to those around him who
also saw wrong, but did nothing. The film reveals him to be
thoughtful, humble, and still profoundly changed by the decision he
made 40 years ago. The leak itself had huge unintended ramifications:
the supreme court decision permitting publication is considered among
the most important in the court's history. Nixon's seething desire to
"get" Ellsberg led directly to the formation of the covert "Plumbers"
unit, who burgled Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office before they
bungled the Watergate break-in. The Pentagon Papers didn't stop the
war, but they probably did for Nixon.

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Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/movies/96818-most-dangerous-man-in-america-daniel-ellsberg/

Hail to Daniel Ellsberg

By GERALD PEARY
February 16, 2010

At age 79, Daniel Ellsberg is getting the last guffaw. The lying,
conniving American presidents responsible for our murderous Vietnam
policy are moldering in their graves. Ellsberg is still active and
vocal, even cheery, as he's hauled off in a police van for protesting
the war in Iraq. What's more, he has a fabulous current forum for his
views: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the
Pentagon Papers, for which he's an adviser, a frequent talking head,
and also the off-screen narrator. And he's achieved a new credibility
now that this important, sometimes dramatically thrilling documentary
by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith has been nominated for an Oscar.

But who is this Daniel Ellsberg? What makes the dude so dangerous?

Well, let's catapult back in time . . .

As he's the first to admit, Ellsberg wasn't always a danger. For
years, he was a typical individual, politically ignorant at first,
and then, when politically knowledgeable, keeping his trap shut to
appease his peers and bosses. A Harvard grad with remarkable Paul
Newman­ish looks, he became a cocky Marine officer in the late 1950s,
happy as a lark commanding his plebian battalion. As a civilian, he
slithered upward, getting recruited for the staff of Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara. He was a liberal Cold War true believer
camped out in John F. Kennedy's Camelot. Life in early-'60s
Washington was A-OK.

It was Vietnam that blew apart his smug convictions. He watched as
JFK and, far more, LBJ, fibbed through their molars about what the
North Vietnamese Commies were doing, and why the American military
should bolster the puppet South Vietnamese government. Ellsberg
traveled to Vietnam and saw the escalating battles up close. Although
he and McNamara soldiered on as self-muzzled loyalists, by the mid
'60s, they had both reached the same lethal conclusion: this war was
unwinnable. Ellsberg went farther, hoarding a secret, genuinely
seditious thought: America was on the wrong side!

That's a lot of historic backstory, and The Most Dangerous Man in
America sets it up with jumbled, confusing timelines. But the movie
reaches its exciting heart with Ellsberg's late-'60s conversion to
pacifism, and with his decision to reveal to the world the stinky
truth about Vietnam. He smuggled the so-called Pentagon Papers out of
the files of his employer, the Rand Corporation. These papers
contained the hidden story of how the Vietnam War had been sold, by
fake and fraud, to the American public.

There's a famous quote from E.M. Forster: "If I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have
the guts to betray my country." In this documentary, Ellsberg
dismisses Forster's statement as folly. He consciously betrayed his
friends at the Rand Corporation (at least one got fired), in the hope
of saving his nation.

The cool follow-up: muckraking American newspapers defied the White
House and printed highlights. Even cooler: an enlightened Supreme
Court backed the publication 6-3. (If the same case were heard today,
the jailhouses would bulge with journalists.) Richard Nixon tries to
stop them, and he emerges as Ellsberg's chief enemy. The documentary
offers the paranoid president in a disembodied form: audiotapes of
Tricky Dick cursing and blaspheming.

In contrast, there's the late Howard Zinn (probably in his final
screen appearance) offering affectionate stories about his pal ­ like
how, in the midst of the fray, Ellsberg dragged him to Daniel's
seventh viewing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

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The Most Dangerous Man in America

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/the-most-dangerous-man-in_b_473685.html

Frances Moore Lappe
Posted: February 24, 2010

If you can remember Nixon, you probably know the name Daniel Ellsberg.

Either way you've almost certainly heard of the Pentagon Papers --
the explosive documents detailing government deception of the public
during the Vietnam War, which Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times
and other papers in 1971.

The Most Dangerous Man in America, a new documentary by Judith
Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, tells Ellsberg's story, from his early
role as a top military analyst under Robert McNamara to his growing
doubts and decision -- and subsequent struggle -- to expose the truth.

After the alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack on a U.S. ship by North
Vietnam, the Pentagon rushed to make the case for war. Daniel
Ellsberg, who had just arrived at the Pentagon as a military analyst,
played a key role -- digging to find an incident of prisoner abuse to
further justify a U.S. attack on North Vietnam.

Yet what became known to the public only much later became clear
"within days" to the Pentagon, according to Ellsberg.

There had been no attack.

No one spoke out. It was a conspiracy of silence perpetrated by
thousands. And the war in Vietnam rolled forward.

The film invites comparisons with the invasion of Iraq -- a war sold
to the public with faked intelligence. At the film's Boston debut,
with Ellsberg present afterward, the first audience comment made the
link. But Ellsberg's story offers much more than a history lesson
about citizen responsibility in the face of government deceit.

From the start, Ellsberg was personally against a bombing campaign
yet justified the war because he saw it through an overarching Cold
War lens. This powerful mental frame, reinforced all around him,
turned Ellsberg into a living contradiction -- facilitating something
he opposed morally.

Ultimately, it was reading the war's secret history in the Pentagon
Papers, to which he himself had contributed, that convinced Ellsberg
the conflict had been "a crime from the start."

And more, as he says in the film, that "keeping silent in public
about what I'd read and heard made me an accomplice."

Ellsberg began showing up at anti-war events where he was exposed to
the courage of young draft resisters -- notably Randy Kehler.
Ellsberg's self-justifying mental frame shattered as he met men
willing to be imprisoned rather than fight in a war they opposed.

In his words: "My life split in two."

Here, for me, is the film's edge that extends beyond war or any
single issue. It speaks to the hearts of millions of Americans who
sense their democracy is being taken from them. With $3.5 billion
spent lobbying last year, privately held government -- the ultimate
oxymoron -- seems disturbingly apt. Eighty percent of Americans
disapproved of the January Supreme Court's decision that only made
matters worse, further unleashing corporate campaign spending.

In Getting a Grip2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We
Really Want, I suggest that many Americans are experiencing something
akin to what Ellsberg felt: a "moment of internal dissonance" where
one realizes that a long-held way of seeing no longer helps make
sense of the world.

For Ellsberg, suddenly he saw the entire situation differently and
his action followed suit.

Copying the Pentagon Papers to get them to the press was a Herculean
task involving 7,000 pages of documents, copied one page at a time.
Then, when getting the explosive reports to liberal congressmen had
little effect, Ellsberg risked everything -- his career, his
credibility and his very freedom to do what he thought was right.

He took the highly-classified documents from the RAND Corporation to
the press himself. Government charges against him piled up and he
eventually faced up to 115 years in prison.

Ellsberg's act of courage worked.

It wouldn't have worked if he'd been alone, but he wasn't, for a
simple yet powerful reason:

Courage is contagious.

Ellsberg's wife Patricia, whom he had earlier rejected because she
didn't support his role in the war, encouraged his stand, and went
into hiding with him. Randy Kehler inspired Ellsberg, too. Ellsberg's
willingness to act in turn inspired others, like his friend Tony
Russo, who helped copy the papers and later risked 35 years in prison
for refusing to testify against him. And the chain of courage
continued -- from the New York Times and Washington Post editors who
sent the stories to press, the newspaper publishers who resisted
enormous government pressure to kill the story, and to a young Sen.
Mike Gravel, who read the Pentagon Papers in an emotional and daring
filibuster to enter them into the public record should the Supreme
Court rule against the newspapers' right to publish them.

Recent science shows that when we observe an action it affects our
brains, via "mirror neurons," as if we ourselves were acting. It
literally changes us. So, in a basic sense, seeing courage in action
can actually makes us braver.

Why was Daniel Ellsberg so "dangerous"?

Because one person's courage has such unpredictable power -- the
power to effect others and, in doing so, the power to generate broad
and lasting change. Ellsberg's actions, for example, played a role in
Nixon's later impeachment and helped establish a Supreme Court
precedent on the freedom of the press, thereby affecting the very
nature of American democracy.

Daniel Ellsberg said "no" to an immoral war, but in today's
collective moment of dissonance, our courage to say "no" to privately
held government won't get us far unless it is combined with a "yes":
a practical vision of democracy that does work because it is
accountable to us. Henry David Thoreau, whom the film quotes, perhaps
says it best: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but
your whole influence."

Ellsberg's story shows us what's possible when a citizen summons the
courage to engage fully in democracy -- to cast his whole vote -- and to act.

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Review: Ellsberg - 'The Most Dangerous Man'

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/18/MVS51C213D.DTL

Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Friday, February 19, 2010

Daniel Ellsberg has always been a tough guy. But because he looked
like a patrician and could seem prickly and superior, and because he
was called Dr. Ellsberg, this toughness didn't always come through in
his media appearances. For years - I was in elementary school when
the Pentagon Papers story detonated, so I had an excuse - I assumed
Dr. Ellsberg was some radical professor who somehow got hold of
secret government documents and leaked them to the press.

In fact, he was the government's worst nightmare: A former Marine
officer, a military adviser with access to the highest government
officials, and a government researcher who knew where all the bodies
were buried. Ellsberg knew McNamara. He knew Kissinger. He knew
everybody. He was a true believer, with the courage to spend two
years in Vietnam getting shot at, because he wanted to see the
situation for himself. ... And then he stopped believing.

In a transformation that wasn't just political but spiritual,
Ellsberg went from being a man unafraid of getting killed in Vietnam
to a man unafraid of spending the rest of his life in prison, so long
as the truth got out. In another time and culture, a story on this
scale would deserve an opera. Instead, it's the subject of "The Most
Dangerous Man in America," a superb documentary by Judith Ehrlich and
Rick Goldsmith, which Ellsberg, now 78, narrates.

It tells the story of an era in American political history, the
pattern of lies that got the United States into Vietnam and the mix
of lies and propaganda that kept us there. But it's also the
fascinating story of a particular personality in collision with that
era - not the most cuddly guy, not the most lovable, but someone
exacting and rigorous, with no sympathy at all for moral weakness
(especially his own); someone temperamentally endowed with strategic
cunning and an advanced ability to get fed up and stay that way.

The title is not meant to be ironic. Ellsberg is exactly the enemy
you would not want to have.

The film is packed with stories, from numerous talking heads,
including Ellsberg. A wealth of information is conveyed with complete
clarity. Ellsberg himself corroborates Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara's claim that even before the Tet Offensive, McNamara was
telling President Lyndon Johnson to pull back on the bombing and to
seek a military solution in Vietnam. But Ellsberg also recalls that,
on one of the very days McNamara was expressing doubt about the war,
he was appearing before TV cameras and lying through his teeth about
the military progress being made.

Working inside the government, Ellsberg knew that the whole story of
the Gulf of Tonkin attack, which precipitated Johnson's escalation of
the war, was based on false information. And Ellsberg himself
participated in the creation of a specious report on North Vietnamese
war crimes.

Henry Kissinger comes across as a reasonable man in this account,
both in Ellsberg's recollections and on the Nixon tapes. Richard
Nixon, by contrast, sounds like a lunatic in these recorded
conversations, ranting and cursing and seeming, at every other turn,
to be trying to shock Kissinger by threatening to use nuclear
weapons. JFK at least had the sense to turn on the tape recorder only
when he was about to say something good. It's hard to imagine what
Nixon was thinking, recording himself raving like Sterling Hayden in
"Dr. Strangelove."

In addition to Ellsberg, the other hero of this documentary is the
American press. After the New York Times was forced, by court
injunction, to stop printing the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post
picked up the ball, and then other newspapers followed suit - all of
them mighty names in American journalism, most of them struggling
today just to keep afloat. Anyone with any doubt as to the
importance, in a functioning democracy, of American newspapers - with
working newsrooms full of professional, paid journalists - needs to
see this movie.

-- Advisory: Some disturbing war footage.
--

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

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The Most Dangerous Man in Kensington

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2010-02-18/article/34689?headline=The-Most-Dangerous-Man-in-Kensington

By Gar Smith, Special to the Planet
Thursday February 18, 2010

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America is
like Avatar for activists. Slip into this movie and suddenly you're
riding shotgun on Daniel Ellsberg's shoulder as the Pentagon war
planner turned peace activist makes the fateful decision that will
eventually topple a president. But, for all its national and
geopolitical ramifications, Dangerous Man is a hometown product.
Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg reside in Kensington and co-directors
Rick Goldsmith and Judith Ehrlich are based in Berkeley. Goldsmith
has an office at the Saul Zaentz Media Center in West Berkeley;
Ehrlich teaches film at Berkeley City College and rents workspace over Bubi's.

Dan Ellsberg was not just another war hawk. A former Marine company
commander with a Harvard Ph.D., Ellsberg wrote Lyndon Johnson's
Tonkin Gulf speech­framing the hoax that launched the nation into
war­and ginned up evidence to justify the carpet-bombing of Vietnam.
But pouring over all 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg
discovered how five presidents­Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson
and Nixon­had all brazenly lied to the American people about Vietnam.
"It's not that we were on the wrong side," Ellsberg realized. "We
were the wrong side. It was a crime from the start."

Ellsberg's physical appearance began to reflect his moral conversion.
The Marine buzz-cut gave way to sideburns and a crown of '60s curls
as Rambo morphed into Rimbaud. But the reborn anti-war strategist
soon found that evidence of a crime is useless if you can't hand it
to the cops. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to several anti-war
politicians­including presidential candidate George McGovern­but no
one dared reveal the damning information contained in a top-secret
document. After the politicians failed him, Ellsberg leaked the
Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. When White House lawyers tried
to silence the Times, the news establishment famously revolted­one
newspaper after another publishing portions of the leaked document.
It was the Fourth Estate's version of the Sproul Hall sit-in.

Ellsberg and Tony Russo went on trial for "theft" in 1973 but, after
four months, the trial collapsed around revelations that Nixon's
"plumbers" had illegally tapped Ellsberg's phone and burglarized the
office of his psychiatrist. (The White House also screwed up by
attempting to bribe the judge by offering him the directorship of the
FBI.) All charges were dismissed and the defendants were freed­and
free to speak.

That same week, Congress voted to cut off further funding for the
war, but still the war dragged on. Whenever Dan and Patricia spoke to
the media, they made a point to mention the number of U.S. bombs
dropped over Southeast Asia: "200,000 tons! One Hiroshima a week!"
Sadly, Ellsberg recalls, the press "didn't even mention we'd said it,
let alone reflect on the fact that it was happening." Exposing lies
was not enough, Ellsberg learned. People looked at the evidence,
absorbed it, and moved on to something else. Had Nixon been impeached
and jailed, that might have halted the metastasis of the Imperial Presidency.

The film meticulously recreates Ellsberg's film-noir, think-tank
world with '60s-era manual typewriters and bakelite desk phones.
Xerox offered a vintage copier but the logistics proved too daunting
for a low-budget documentary, so Ehrlich's husband, Nick Bertoni of
the Tinker's Workshop, fabricated a passable look-alike out of truck
parts. But who provided the copies of the Pentagon Papers that appear
in the film? Did Ellsberg keep a personal copy all these years?

"We made them, " Ehrlich chuckles. "We worked from the real documents
in the National Archives." Goldsmith adds: "One of our researchers
dug out photocopies of the cover at the LBJ library in Texas. We
reproduced them and made our own Pentagon Papers."

It took six months of wooing before Ellsberg agreed to let Rick and
Judy transform his book, Secrets, into a film. With three other
filmmakers bidding for the opportunity, it probably helped that
Ellsberg had worked with Judy on her earlier award-winning PBS
documentary, The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It.

"He gave us total editorial control. He was very clear about that,"
Judy told the Planet. Dan and Patricia didn't see the film until the
filmmakers screened a "fine cut" at the Ellsberg's home. "Dan took
out a notepad and started taking notes," Judy recalls, "He's always
taking notes." The next day, Ellsberg told the filmmakers he'd
watched the DVD five more times and had a few suggestions. "He gave
us 22-pages of single-spaced commentary!" Judy recalls. She described
the notes as "extremely helpful and detailed."

There was a debate over whether to have Ellsberg narrate the film. In
the end, Ellsberg agreed to lend his voice­as one of many compelling
speakers in the film. With Ellsberg's voice emerging over archival
photos and videos, we seem to be inside Ellsberg's head, listening to
his thoughts rather than listening to a narrative.

Twenty remarkable interviews are featured, including sit-downs with
two former Nixon operatives (John Dean and Egil "Bud" Krogh) and
Ellsberg's long-time friend and fellow activist, the late historian
Howard Zinn. "They said we'd never get Kissinger, and they were
right!" Rick chuckles. Ditto Al Haig. The filmmakers did manage to
catch up with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam
following a speech at UC Berkeley. After recording a fascinating
interview on "a crappy tape-recorder that wasn't broadcast quality,"
Halberstam signed on to the project. Tragically, he was killed in a
car crash later that night.

There's a marvelous scene in Dangerous Man where a gray-haired
Ellsberg is entertaining children at a Berkeley garden party. The
kids gape and giggle as Ellsberg pulls colored scarves out of his
hands and makes them vanish. This is followed by a moment of pure
cinematic magic: Thanks to a film editor who found an old 8mm clip,
we next see Ellsberg in the 1960s, doing magic tricks with scarves
and delighting a group of laughing children in a village in Vietnam.

"That's something we discovered about Dan," Judy says. "He's always
carrying scarves in his pockets." She speculates that this gift for
sleight-of-hand may have helped Ellsberg whisk the Pentagon Papers
past the Rand Corporation's security guards.

The filmmakers caught another extraordinary moment where Ellsberg and
Randy Kehler are reminiscing at a kitchen table and Ellsberg suddenly
breaks into tears. He has just recalled the speech that Kehler, then
a young draft resister, gave as he prepared to face prison. His voice
breaking, Ellsberg explains that was the moment that changed his
life. The moment when he knew he needed to break the law, betray his
professional trust and risk his personal freedom to get the Pentagon
Papers before the eyes of the public.

"So few of us have a moment like that," Judy marvels. But this
extraordinary moment almost didn't happen. On the day of the shoot,
she explains, "everyone was busy and needed to be somewhere else.
There wasn't even time for a proper lighting." For most of the
conversation, Ellsberg's face was lost in shadow. It took some
creative (and costly) visual enhancement to salvage this remarkable scene.

Dangerous Man marks the first time Richard Nixon's secretly taped
outbursts will be widely heard without the expletives deleted. Here
is Nixon railing against the New York Times ("That son-of-a-bitching
paper"), the Vietnamese resistance ("We've got to use the maximum
power of this country against this shit-ass little country"), and his
advisor, Henry Kissinger ("You're so goddamned concerned about the
civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care!"). But the most
horrific exchange (one that deserves to be hung on Nixon's tombstone
and nailed to the wall International War Crimes Tribunal) occurred
between Nixon and Kissinger on April 25, 1972:

Nixon: I think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: That will drown about 200,000 people.

Nixon: Well, no, no, no, no, no, I'd rather use a nuclear bomb. Have
you got that ready?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much, uh…

Nixon: A nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just want you to think
big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Since becoming a peace activist four decades ago, Daniel Ellsberg has
been arrested more than 70 times. In 2006, he was honored with the
Right Livelihood Award ("the Alternative Nobel Prize") for "putting
peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk."

Will the Ellsbergs will be accompanying the filmmakers to the Academy
Awards? "That's the plan," says Judy. Rick will be renting a tux. As
of press time, Judy was still looking for a gown.
--

Note: The Pentagon Papers can be found online at
www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pejnt1.html

.