The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (U.S., 2009)
D: Judith Ehrich and Rick Goldsmith 

Strange times in Madison.  At about 10pm on Wednesday night, the sky turned green and a great almighty fireball blazed across the sky – a meteor, the national news later reported.  Thursday a throng of Tea Partiers gathered at the capitol to listen to Tommy Thompson tell them that he really, really, really wanted to run for Senate, but his wife wouldn’t let him.  And on Thursday night, a crowd threaded from the main entrance of the historic Orphem Theater around the corner, around the corner again and through the parking garage, and back around another corner until it nearly met itself.  A multi-pierced young student asked dazedly what event we were all waiting to see, and a festival goer responded, “Daniel Ellsberg.”  The student nodded vaguely and walked away.  

More correctly, we were all waiting to see The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  A riveting documentary, and a worthy film to hold the prized 8pm Thursday-night-at-the-Orpheum slot for WIFF, I was nonetheless surprised to see the huge theater fill to near capacity.  But this is Madison; we’re strange folk.  The film recounts how Ellsberg, a young Harvard intellectual and a highly-placed military analyst for the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, came to leak a massive, and massively-top secret, report from the Pentagon on the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam.  The film is narrated by Ellsberg, featuring interviews with his wife Patricia (ever-present, and always beaming proudly at her husband and at the cameras, in the 1970’s news footage shown here), as well as his son (who, as a tyke, helped his dad Xerox the Pentagon Papers), key players such as the New York Times’ Neil Sheehan and RAND colleague Tony Russo, and friends such as the late Howard Zinn.  It’s a fairly unassuming documentary, bereft of gimmickry (apart from some crudely-animated, and very amusing, “re-enactments”), and I find it refreshing that the filmmakers let the story provide its own genuine drama and tension, of which there are spades.  Ellsberg took tentative steps out of his own shell, the result of applying his intellectual acumen to a belated and painful self-analysis, realizing that he was, in fact, helping perpetrate the war; at one point he attends an antiwar rally and has a private breakdown, vividly described (the film movingly reunites Ellsberg with the Vietnam vet whose speech at the rally triggered that breakdown).  Then he reinvents himself, and begins secretly and laboriously photocopying the Pentagon Papers on the hope that if its secrets were known - exposing the lies of multiple administrations - America will stop the President and the war.  He first distributes copies to Democratic members of the Senate, senators who had been against the war longer than he’d been, but he’s shocked to find they do nothing.  So he goes to the New York Times…and what follows is historical record but nonetheless gripping: Ellsberg goes into hiding from the FBI; the White House challenges the freedom of the Press; rival newspapers form a united front against the President; the Congress cuts off funding for the war - all of these being important incidents on the road to Watergate and resignation.  And thank God Nixon taped everything.  The excerpts from his recordings are shocking, and I’m not just referring to Nixon’s unwarranted abuse of the nonsensical “son-of-a-bitching.”  Nixon, in vertiginous meltdown mode, rants against Ellsberg, the press, and the citizens of Vietnam (whom he contemplates either drowning or nuking).  But for all the eye-opening facts and anecdotes in The Most Dangerous Man in America, the film has an undercurrent of melancholy.  After the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg notes, the American people are largely complacent; they follow the scandal but seem oblivious to its meaning, and in a short time the evening news moves on.  Nixon is undone, but largely of his own doing.  Ellsberg had a key role in stopping the war, but Nixon was reelected by the people.  It’s clear in the film that Ellsberg is still disappointed by this complacency, and it’s telling enough (and touching) that in the final moments in the film we see the old man getting arrested again, proudly, this time in protest of America’s new wars.  George W. Bush was reelected too, beating out the Vietnam vet running against him.  My mind keeps lingering on one moment in the film, as Ellsberg recounts debriefing a newly-arrived Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam War; Ellsberg then voices his prediction that Kissinger, after receiving high-level clearances, will learn information of such a priveleged nature that he will cease to listen to anyone else, and the advice that analysts like Ellsberg provide will be ignored.  This is what happens, Ellsberg insists – you rise high enough and you stop listening.  But the heartbreak at the center of the tale of The Pentagon Papers is that, despite their impact, the American people wouldn’t listen very closely either, and the problem of popular complacency is hardly isolated to the past.