in Portland with documentary
By Steve Duin
March 31, 2010
Daniel Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers on a Xerox machine in a
tiny advertising agency off Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles while his
10-year-old daughter, Mary, snipped the words "Top Secret" off each
page with a pair of scissors.
Before he delivered the documents to Neil Sheehan of The New York
Times, he slipped the documents to Sens. William Fulbright and George
McGovern, but not, curiously, to Oregon's anti-war maverick, Sen.
Mark Hatfield.
And when the former Marine infantry commander reflects on his
willingness to question the leadership that was taking the United
States ever deeper into the quagmire, Ellsberg recalls the 1946
automobile accident in which his father nodded off and the car veered
into a ditch, killing his mother and sister.
"I think it did probably leave the impression on me," Ellsberg says,
"that someone whom I loved and respected could fall asleep at the wheel."
"The Most Dangerous Man in America" -- which opens Friday at Cinema
21 with the 78-year-old Ellsberg on hand -- is an utterly engrossing
history of this nation's "pre-eminent whistleblower."
The 90-minute documentary, which was nominated for an Oscar, is not
only flush with anecdotal detail, but also argues persuasively that
Ellsberg's dramatic play to stop the war -- a war he helped to
promote -- is a pivotal event in U.S. history.
The publication of the Pentagon Papers forever changed the
relationship between government and the media. "It was," says Hedrick
Smith of the Times, "a declaration of independence."
The Supreme Court decision that freed the Times and The Washington
Post to resume publication of Robert McNamara's secret 47-volume
history of the war -- after the newspapers were enjoined by the Nixon
administration on grounds of "national security" -- is hailed by Anne
Beeson of the ACLU as "the most important First Amendment decision in
the court's history."
And no less an authority than John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel,
argues that the administration's "over-reaction" to Ellsberg set the
stage for Watergate.
"The leak of the Pentagon Papers changed the Nixon White House," Dean
says. "It was the beginning of what some of us called the dark
period. It was a defining event for the Nixon presidency."
The Pentagon Papers defined several institutions, including Henry
Kissinger, who decried this sudden transparency as "an attack on the
whole integrity of government."
Ellsberg initially subscribed to the notion that such integrity
exists. In 1964, he believed Lyndon Johnson when the president,
hyping North Vietnamese aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin, said he
sought "no wider war."
("As I found out day by day in the Pentagon," Ellsberg notes in the
film, "that was our highest priority."
In 1965, he sought to collect stories of Viet Cong atrocities that
would garner public support for the war (he found one).
And in 1966, Ellsberg volunteered to go to Vietnam, an 18-month stint
that often found him walking point with a Swedish submachine gun.
"I went over with hopes that with a lot of troops there, maybe we
could make something out of this," he tells me on the phone, "and I
was there to do political work, to shore up the Vietnamese government.
"Within six months, it was clear to me those hopes were doomed. The
way we were doing things had no promise of success."
Ellsberg was working for the Rand Corporation in 1969 when he first
read the study on the war commissioned by McNamara, and counted the
number of lies Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon wheeled out to
disguise the United States' true agenda in Vietnam.
Thanks to his future wife, Patricia, he was also meeting with war
protesters who argued that true patriots should be willing to go to
jail to stop the carnage in 'Nam.
"What can I do to help," Ellsberg asked himself, "now that I'm ready
to go to prison?"
That fall, he began wearing out the Xerox machine.
Before Ellsberg contacted the Times, Fulbright, McGovern and Rep.
Pete McCloskey, R-Calif. and a Korean War veteran, all passed on the
chance to take the Pentagon Papers public.
"There was a culture of timidity in Congress," the late Howard Zinn
notes, "a culture so strong that even senators against the war didn't
want to do anything with the papers Dan Ellsberg was offering them."
The Times was also circumspect, uncertain about the implications of
the Espionage Act under which Ellsberg was eventually indicted. The
Times' lawyers argued against publication, but in-house counsel James
Goodale insisted otherwise:
"The risk that the New York Times took was a life-and-death risk of
an institution," Goodale says. "I don't mean the 5,000 people who
work for the Times. I mean the leader of the institutional press in a
free country."
As for the integrity of the U.S. government, that issue was resolved
when Ellsberg went on trial before U.S. District Judge William Byrne in 1973.
In the course of the trial, it was revealed that (a) the FBI had
wiretapped Ellsberg without a court order; (b) the infamous White
House "plumbers unit" had broken into the office of Ellsberg's
psychiatrist, looking for blackmail material; and (c) White House
counsel John Erlichman had offered Byrne the directorship of the FBI.
"The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only
briefly sketched offend a sense of justice," Byrne said in declaring
a mistrial. "The bizarre events have incurably infected the
prosecution of this case."
Almost 40 years later, Ellsberg insists that presidents are still
lying about the course of foreign wars.
President Obama, he says, is escalating the war in Afghanistan, "and
I do not believe he has any intention or expectation of getting all
the troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
"All managers of empire lie. Our situation is different only in what
we have the ability to find out, thanks to journalists and,
occasionally, Congress. We have more chance to do something about it
than citizens of empire do.
"If we don't rise to that challenge, we are all the more complicit."
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