Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
A Daniel Ellsberg documentary, narrated by Daniel Ellsberg, is
over-the-top hero-worship.
By Sean Burns
Mar. 30, 2010
"I never much cared for Ellsberg as a person," riffed a friend of
mine, quite surprisingly, over drinks when I mentioned the movie I
was reviewing this week. Maybe it was the ponytail, his activist
roots or his longtime friendship with Howard Zinnbut I'd assumed my
pal would be jazzed about me covering a movie that chronicles the
most legendary Washington whistle-blower of all time.
"Sure, he did a great thing for this country," my friend noted,
signaling for another round of beers, "But I still think that guy
might be kind of an asshole."
It's my sad duty to report that The Most Dangerous Man in America:
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers will do nothing to sway my
drinking buddy's opinion. Narrated by Ellsberg himself, it's a big,
sloppy, undeniably riveting blow-job of a documentary, allowing its
subject final say with no outside critical perspective or even a
dissenting viewpoint. He also comes off as douchey.
I guess it's probably best to think of this as a much-needed
corrective to Errol Morris' The Fog of War, which began the
incredibly annoying PR rehabilitation of Vietnam War-architect and
former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara under similar
hero-worship terms, until his death last summer passed fairly
unnoticed with few besides my father and I dancing in the streets.
McNamara bears the brunt of it in Most Dangerous Man, as Ellsberg
begins the picture as a geeky, think-tank operator for The RAND
Corporation, so gung-ho he's willing to do a tour in Vietnam just to
see how great everything's going. Upon his return, our hero
eventually grew so disillusioned with the state of things in the
former French Indochina that he Xeroxed and leaked 7,000 pages of a
secret, deeply incriminating McNamara study to his elected public officials.
Stop me if you've heard this one, but sometimes politicians get us
into wars that last forever and go nowhere under false pretenses.
Ellsberg didn't get much response from what Howard Zinn calls "the
culture of timidity" in Congress, so he finally blew it all out with
the New York Times . Government injunctions followed, as did 18 other
newspapers daring to speak the truthdamn the consequences.
Eventually, junior Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska read the contents of
these "Pentagon Papers" into the Congressional record as part of a
filibusterwhere is such bravery today?
It's a problematic film, too beholden to its subjectyet exciting all
the same. I could have done without Ellsberg's bizarre tangents about
his love of body-surfing, or him equating a childhood memory of his
father nodding off while driving the family carkilling his mother
and sister. It was a cheap, Freudian explanation for why he needs to
be vigilant over government. We get the point, "never let your
leaders fall asleep at the wheel." But it's also reductive and
stupid, and feels packaged for anecdotal consumption.
Bizarrely enough, The Most Dangerous Man In America induces a weird
sense of nostalgia for a time when reporters did their jobs and a
leak like this could prove fatal for an administration.
It made me miss larger-than-life gargoyles like Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger, as opposed to their pathetic, tawdry ne'er do well
counterparts George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. (A simple audio clip
of Tricky Dick swearing to take down "that no-good shit-ass
son-of-a-bitching newspaper" had me squealing and kicking my feet.)
The sinister science-fiction-y implications of the RAND Corporation
are so much scarier and more fascinating than tedious profit-motive
machinations of Halliburton, so I guess the movie works best as an
eerily prescient time capsule.
They say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat
it, and if The Most Dangerous Man In America proves anything, it's
that we've been stuck in a feedback loop for decades. It's déjà vu
all over again, except now neither the heroes nor the villains have any balls.
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