"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers"
By: Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine reviews "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers."
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If you asked anyone to name the greatest drama of politics and the press in the 1970s, they would obviously say Watergate. But when you see the gripping new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, you realize that the story of the Pentagon Papers may be every bit the equal of Watergate in its moral urgency and almost seismic drama.
Ellsberg was a defense analyst who worked with Robert McNamara and believed in the Vietnam War. He even served a tour of duty there. But he began to question the intensity of the escalating bombing. When the Rand Corporation was commissioned to document America's relationship with Vietnam going back to 1945, what Ellsberg learned is that the region had a secret history. The U.S. had been fighting communism there ever since the '50s, when it backed the French Colonialists. Vietnam, he discovered, was always our war, handed off from one duplicitous president to the next.
The Most Dangerous Man in America is really a classic whistleblower tale, as Ellsberg, tormented by his conscience, undergoes an almost religious conversion, coming around to the view that he must do whatever it takes to stop the war in Vietnam. He decides to leak the Rand Corporation report, all seven thousand pages of it, to the New York Times. Just Xeroxing the thing takes months, but when he finally gets the documents to the Times, the drama is just beginning. A government crackdown ensues, and by the time that's over, 17 newspapers have agreed to publish the Pentagon Papers. It's literally a case of the press declaring itself, newspaper by newspaper, to be free.
The Most Dangerous Man in America shows you that the Pentagon Papers was really the first chapter of Watergate, the trigger that drove Richard Nixon to take the law into his own hands. What's really shocking, though, is that Hollywood never made a movie out of this one.