I just watched The Most Dangerous Man In America and it is 10 times more interesting than Inception, the previous film I'd seen. And almost as good as Princess Bride, another movie about land wars in Asia.
The Most Dangerous Man In America is the story of Daniel Ellsberg and how he went from Marine Officer to Harvard PhD to Pentagon analyst. In late 1969 and 1970 Ellsberg (with the help of others) released confidential information about the history of the Vietnam war that showed that the American people had been lied to about US involvement since the start of our involvement under President Truman. That release of information was known as the Pentagon Papers.
I think TMDMIA is fairly even handed, if not friendly to Ellsberg. The facts are there and you can make up your own mind about it. A couple of things were new to me. I hadn't appreciated how high up Ellsberg was in the food chain. Never an appointed official, he did have access to senior Johnson administration officials. He quotes conversations he had with Robert McNamara. For some reason I'd assumed he was more a functionary.
The other thing that was interesting were the interviews with Egil Krogh, who led the White House plumbers unit, which broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist office which led to espionage charges against Ellsberg and his co-defendent being dismissed . Krogh, like any one I've ever seen interviewed from the Nixon White House was aghast at his role in the plumbers. I'm pretty sure Henry Kissinger, and maybe Alexander Haig are the only two senior people from the Nixon years who wouldn't repudiate their actions.
That said, there are several excerpts in the film from Nixon's tapes and Kissinger comes out as the 'reasonable' one, trying to talk Nixon down from choosing between bombing the dikes of North Vietnam (estimated civilian casualties: 200,000) and dropping an A-Bomb on them.
And just to show I'm not some Johnny-come-lately to this stuff, below I'm showing the inside cover of my copy of the Pentagon Papers, a birthday present (mom's handwriting on the left) in 1971. Even better is Ellsberg's signature from a talk he gave at Sac State in 2003.
And lest you think this is all ancient history, then you've not been keeping up on the WikiLeaks story and the culture of secrecy that continues to exist.
