February 24, 2010: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
I am always surprised when I come across some apparently huge historical news story that I have no real knowledge about. It’s not that I believe I’m particularly well-read, but as often as not, when I see a documentary, the story is painted as a world-changing moment and yet nobody bothered to tell me about it before now.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a documentary which tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a former US soldier who did top-secret intelligence work at the Pentagon in the 1960s, and ended up being the first to break the silence on the real political story behind the Vietnam war. A loyal military man, almost to a fault, he acted in favour of the war for several years even in the face of its great unpopularity, until he came across a report which explained the greater context and put some real data behind the case that it was a losing battle. It was clear that a succession of presidents from both major parties had decided to continue the war rather than lose face over accepting the loss. Ellsberg’s unauthorized release of this perhaps obvious information was what led Richard Nixon to dub him the most dangerous man in America.
The particulars of the leak of the report are fascinating in and of themselves, due to its size (imagine how much room there is in a 1960s car’s trunk – that’s how they needed to transport it). It was distributed to different news organizations, but they had no way of making it available to the public in its entirety, so the big picture viewpoint Ellsberg hoped to achieve was not really possible in the available nightly news airtime. It’s a sobering contrast with the current day, when such a report could at least be made available on the Internet and downloaded by anyone who wanted a complete copy, even if most people never intended to read the whole thing. The broadcast of the contents of the report also sparked debate about whether there was a legal restriction on releasing this information to the public, so the news outlets were sued by the government.
Current-day interviews with Ellsberg, coupled with broadcast and private footage and photos collected through the decades, paint a picture of a man who came to a point where jail time was a risk he accepted in order to stick to his principles. Wrapped up in legal tangles for several years, he ended up not serving any time at all. We could all learn a lesson from Ellsberg about strength of character and how it is indeed possible to change and to redeem oneself based on new information.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is an engrossing documentary, boiling down a lot of information in a digestible way. It got a well-deserved Oscar nomination in the documentary feature category, and was in fact my pick for the award, which instead went to the lesser but more heartstring-tugging The Cove.
Classic footage enhances the documentary form.
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