Daniel Ellsberg’s trajectory through American life took a distinct path: As a policy analyst at the Rand Corp., he supported basic Cold War thinking and helped devise ways to expand the Vietnam War; by the beginning of the 1970s, he was leaking a top-secret government document that revealed the truth about the war.
His shift in attitude is largely the subject of “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” a documentary that (not surprisingly, given Ellsberg’s full participation in it) treats him as the hero of this tale.
Nominated for an Oscar in the documentary category this year, it lost to “The Cove.”
Why the change of mind? At one point in the mid-1960s, as the war escalated, Ellsberg went to Vietnam to see how things were going. A former Marine, he plunged into the action and was disturbed by the disparity between what he was seeing and what was appearing in official reports about the war’s progress.
In the documentary, he recalls standing in a rice paddy, turning to the soldier next to him and saying, “You ever feel like the Redcoats?”
After contributing to the top-secret document that would later be known as the Pentagon Papers, he came to the decision he would leak them — to Congress and to the press — even if it meant going to jail.
The resulting fight with the Nixon White House (which included an effort by some of the Watergate burglars to steal information from Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to discredit him) makes up one of the strongest sections of the movie.
“The Most Dangerous Man” is not notably different from a good PBS documentary, and directors Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith keep their storytelling straightforward and simple.
They have a good eye for compelling detail. When Ellsberg decided to photocopy the papers, he enlisted the service of his 13-year-old son in the laborious process, after informing the boy of the historical significance.
The idea of father and son feeding pages into the Xerox machine in the middle of the night (as Ellsberg’s daughter cuts off the “Top Secret” part of the copies) gives a surreal twist to the controversy.
Richard Nixon is a presence, too, in the secret tapes he kept in the Oval Office. It doesn’t matter if you’ve heard these before, it’s still amazing to hear the president go on about how to “get” his enemies.
What a boon to historians and to documentary filmmakers.
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