Daniel Ellsberg helped start the Vietnam war, then realized the horror he had created and helped end it. His story is told powerfully in "The Most Dangerous Man in America," a stylish documentary that opens today. And in one frightening scene after another, without saying a word or pointing a finger, it illustrates exactly how the American military misadventures there were echoed almost 20 years later in Iraq. Both wars were similarly plotted out of whole cloth by presidents and politicians who dreamed of conquest only to be find themselves put in abhorrent situations and doing evil to avoid being tagged as losers.
The Vietnam mess actually began when Harry Truman was president, continued through the Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy administrations with propaganda and "advisors," came to a head when Lyndon Johnson, Robert MacNamara, Henry Kissinger and others cooked up the so-called Tonkin Gulf incident, the same rationale that George W. Bush followed with the so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction event. Both were flat-out lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction and there was no threat in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But preaching fear almost always has the preacher's desired effect on Congress and on the American people. And Richard Nixon, who succeeded Johnson, was a master at it. Excerpts from the Nixon tapes are priceless, if vulgar.
Ellsberg, a brilliant political scientist, strategist and tactician, admits he was caught up in the talk of the hawks. He had been a Marine, wearing his manhood on his uniform, and like Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in "Apocalypse Now," he obviously loved the smell of napalm, in the morning or at any other time.
So he helped fabricate tales of atrocities and horror, and war was next. The lies continued. Stories about combat patrols in the jungle were fiction, but more troops were drafted and sent across the Pacific. But Ellsworth soon (if not soon enough) realized that the war was unwinnable, and in an act of penance, he copied thousands of documents and sent them to the New York Times. The rest was history, and the war ended, if not in glory and certainly not able to teach a lesson to enough others.
Ellsberg is the focus of the film, but many others, media types and scholars, take the opportunity. The most heart-rending, perhaps, comes from Egil (Bud) Krogh, one of Nixon's "plumbers," who admits he was part of "the collapse of integrity" in the White House, and regrets his inability to show the courage that Ellsberg displayed.
Ellsberg was arrested and tried for a variety of offenses, but the government's case was so farcical that the charges were dismissed. The New York Times printed the stories, despite Nixon's anger, but the newspaper was exonerated on First Amendment grounds by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision. Watching the pattern of the current court, one wonders how a similar case would be judged today. And a final question remains as we hear how Ellsberg's former colleagues at the Rand Corporation shunned him: Was he considered a traitor to his country? Or to the corporation?
Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith directed this intense and dramatic documentary, and
collaborated on the screenplay with Lawrence Leven and Michael Chandler. A strong, passionate film that reminds a viewer of the old adage–those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes.
Opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe