A tremendously important lesson for times when it seems like we are always at war. Will the person stopping them always be branded a traitor?
In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg determined that the war in Viet Nam was based on decades of lies and probably never could be won without America physically over running the country. As it was turning out it was not a matter of bombs or even of soldiers. The enemy was simply everywhere. There were no targets other than the ground itself. The body counts were all civilians.
The question is: Who will be the Daniel Ellsberg of the war in Iraq? Or Afghanistan? The answer may be that we really don’t want anybody to declare that the emperor has no clothes. The world has a pecking order and we are at the top of it. Blood must flow accordingly. But that is getting ahead of the story.
Judith Ehrlich’s and Rick Goldsmith’s new documentary is extremely well studied and will resonate profoundly with the baby boomers in the crowd. At least it will resonate with the educated and politically engaged baby boomers in the crown. The rest will go home and watch TV and forget what they have just seen.
Daniel Ellsberg was one of a couple dozen of wunderkind who were selected from the USA’s top colleges to be a part of the military-industrial complex think tank the RAND Corporation. Rand was a government consultant working under the bidding of Robert McNamara. They had one mandate from President Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon: win the war. Everybody nodded and continued to up the ante in terms of bombs dropped and soldiers and civilians killed. But victory came no closer.
The war was conducted to keep American from “losing face.” The stated reason was to stop communism and the “domino effect” whereby the commies would take over the world was they got a foothold in Vietnam. The stated reason for the Iraqi war was the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Both wars are survivors. They took on lives of their own after all rational reason for conducting them was gone. Did we learn? Apparently not.
This film is a gripping and seemingly truthful (remember that the first victim of any war is the truth) suspense thriller about how Ellsberg became determined to execute what many considered to be an outright traitorous plan and then carried it out. Even the act of carrying it out became extremely difficult as he had to copy some 7,000 pages of material. Eventually it took a truck to carry the boxes of documents to the court proceedings that prosecuted Ellsberg’s cases (his potential jail time added to 115 years). In perfect spy format the copying took place at night in the deserted halls of RAND. Unlike most spy thrillers Ellsberg was assisted by his pre-teen children at the time. There was simply too much paper handling to be accomplished and copy machines were relatively rudimentary at the time.
The NY Times was enjoined to stop the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers in June, 1971 but prevailed in a history making legal action shortly after and the entire body of the papers was published.
As history now records, Nixon was so determined to destroy Ellsberg that he created the group that eventually broke into both Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and Watergate. The latter fiasco led to Nixon’s resignation August 8, 1974. In April 1975 funding for the war in Viet Nam was stopped and the USA pulled out. This film has it all in amazing detail and is brought down to earth with shuddering gravity by the narration of Daniel Ellsberg himself. Also features thousands of words of direct interviews with his wife Patricia Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, John Dean, Egil “Bud” Krogh, Hedrick Smith, Max Frankel and Anthony Russo.
Featuring Narration by Narrator: Daniel Ellsberg. Featuring: Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, John Dean, Egil “Bud” Krogh, Hedrick Smith, Max Frankel and Anthony Russo. USA.
Release: September 16, 2009
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