[4 articles] Vietnam whistle-blower revels in his new role
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/tiff/article/694701 Sep 12 2009 It's been 38 years since Daniel Ellsberg rocked the United States by leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times revealing to the world that several U.S. presidents had been lying to the public. Now at age 78, Ellsberg is in Toronto as the star and protagonist of a riveting documentary called The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which had its world premiere last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Yesterday, when I had lunch with Ellsberg, his wife Patricia, and the co-producers/writers of the film, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, I took the opportunity to ask the obvious: Why now? After all, the Pentagon Papers saga has all the ingredients of a great documentary, and it benefits hugely from Ellsberg's own charismatic personality as he narrates the story. But surely the film could have been made long ago. "Well, there are at least 97 good reasons," says Ellsberg. "One of them is that I didn't want to seem to be cashing in on my celebrity. But a more important one is the striking correspondence between what happened in Vietnam back then and what is happening with Afghanistan right now." Ellsberg has no doubt there are other people in high places sitting on the kind of explosive information about Afghanistan that Ellsberg leaked about Vietnam. "(Barack) Obama sounds like a fool when he talks about Afghanistan as a necessary war," says Ellsberg. He says there are advisers who are holding back the facts including, in his view, that even hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops taking over the country for 10 years would not be enough to defeat the Taliban. But The Most Dangerous Man in America is not a film about Afghanistan or Obama. It's the story of how Ellsberg was converted from a committed Cold War liberal to a devastatingly effective foe of the war in Vietnam. In the 1960s, as a Harvard graduate and former marine officer, he was a brilliant researcher at the RAND Corporation, a military think-tank, and a true believer who was confident the Vietnam War was a way of defending democracy against Stalinist dictatorship. Given the highest level of security clearance, he helped provide Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. president, with the kind of information he needed. But Ellsberg knew that reports about alleged North Vietnamese aggression in the Bay of Tonkin were phony. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked secret documents to The New York Times revealing that several U.S. presidents Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had been lying for years about Vietnam. "It is not just that we were on the wrong side," says Ellsberg. "We were the wrong side." It soon became obvious just who was responsible for the leak, and according to Ellsberg, that turned him into a leper. Ellsberg was even charged with espionage and faced the real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. But the case was thrown out of court and the public eventually realized that the Vietnam War was a horrible folly. Now Ellsberg revels in being a persona non grata in top government, military and academic circles. And far from dwelling in the past, he is working to prevent his country from what he sees as another mistake in Afghanistan. "In Vietnam we thought we could succeed where the French failed. In Afghanistan, we seem to think we can succeed where the Russians failed. There must be books by Russians about what went wrong in Afghanistan. Have any of them been translated? We should be reading them and learning from them." -- [email protected] -------- The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/39644/most-dangerous-man-in-america-daniel-ellsberg-and-the-pentagon-papers-the/ by Jason Bailey September 14, 2009 The press notes for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers don't call it a documentary; they call it a "political thriller," and the description is apt. The film may engage in the most familiar trappings of doc filmmaking--sometimes to its own detriment--but the story it tells is so engaging and engrossing that we're swept right up in it. It's a film about a moment in history--a specific moment, right before the entire house of cards that was the Nixon administration came tumbling down--but it is also an intimate, candid portrait of a man who had a crisis of conscience, and decided to act on it. The film, directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, runs on two tracks: as a personal biography of Ellsberg and a historical snapshot of what he did. The second part is easy, and part of the record: a former Pentagon insider, Ellsberg was a man transformed by the early 1970s. The once-hawk was now a dove, furious about the lies that the American government (particularly, five of its Presidents) had told the people about the circumstances leading up to our involvement in Vietnam. When his attempts to bring Congressional attention to a top-secret Pentagon study highlighting those lies failed, Ellsberg leaked the so-called "Pentagon Papers" to the New York Times, setting up a chain of events that pitted the Nixon administration against the free press, influenced public perception of the floundering Vietnam conflict, and led directly to the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon presidency. The details of that story, the whens and hows and whos, are riveting viewing. But you can find all of that in books and other documentaries. The juice here is Ellsberg's personal journey from one of the architects of the war to one of its staunchest enemies. Careful attention is paid to the details of his psychological make-up, to the doubts that were percolating in the late 1960s, to the concerns and fears that finally led him to conclude that "it wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side." Those are Ellsberg's own words; he both narrates the film and serves as its primary interview subject, a splitting of focus that requires a little getting used to. But that conceit does work, particularly when it leads to scenes like his powerful description of the moment when his life "split in two." Some of the picture's other devices don't play quite as well. The use of reenactments should always serve as a last-ditch, Hail Mary option for any documentary filmmaker who isn't Errol Morris; those scenes, and the cheeseball music and graphics of the opening sequence, give the film the unfortuante feel of a History Channel special (nothing against History Channel specials--I just don't want to pay good money to see one in a theater). Some of the other, more inventive solutions to presenting scenes at which cameras weren't present (like the occasional use of simple animation) are more successful. There are other somewhat amateurish moments (like when Henry Kissinger is identified, via on-screen text as "national securty advisor"), but most are forgivable, particularly as the narrative tightens and picks up speed in the last 30 minutes. Those Nixon tapes continue to stun (was there ever a grown man who used profanity more awkwardly?), and Ehrlich and Goldsmith do a first-rate job of conveying the real risks taken by both the Times and Ellsberg himself (he faced the possibility of 115 years in prison). The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is guilty of occasional missteps, but nonetheless, it is still a riveting, exciting documentary film. -------- The Most Dangerous Man in America http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2009/09/14/tiff-review-the-most-dangerous-man-in-america Posted by J.R. Jones Sep 14, 2009 The title for this documentary about Daniel Ellsberg, the defense department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, is how Ellsberg was described at the time by Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state. Of course, back then plenty of people thought Kissinger was the most dangerous man in America, or perhaps his boss, Richard Nixon. If you wanted to be the most dangerous man in America in 1971, you really had to put in some hours. Because American history has repeated itself so flagrantly in Iraq (and may yet again in Afghanistan), any filmmaker who wants to revisit the Vietnam war for the thousandth time can always claim some relevance to current events. Writer-directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith trace a dully familiar chain of events from the early 60s through the early 70sthe Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the tragic miscalculations of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, the Tet offensive and its political fallout, the widening war and apocalyptic resolve of Nixon and Kissinger. We've all been there before, many times over. But The Most Dangerous Man in America manages to carve out its own little place in the canon by focusing on the ethical journey of one man who refused to shrug off his own slim responsibility for the war and atoned for it with an act that sent shock waves across the country. As an employee at the RAND Corporation in the early 60s, Ellsberg helped formulate U.S. strategy for launching a nuclear exchange, and as an assistant to defense secretary Robert McNamara, he assembled data that President Johnson would use to justify aerial bombardment of North Vietnam. Ellsberg was always on the lookout for the dramatic emotional detail that would sell the war to people, such as the fact that two captured U.S. soldiers had been chained and dragged from the back of moving vehicles by the Viet Cong. Ironically, Ehrlich and Goldsmith have taken his lesson to heart, and the personal details are what give the movie its force. When Ellsberg met Patricia Marx, the Washington journalist who would later become his wife, the only time he had off from work for a date was Sunday afternoon, and she had to cover a peace rally in front of the White House, which put Ellsberg in the ticklish position of being photographed among the protesters even as he was advising LBJ on how to escalate the war. Years later, after he'd turned against the war and resolved to leak the Pentagon's top-secret study on U.S. strategy in Vietnam, he took his two children along to help him photocopy and collate the 7,000-page document, hoping to give them a hand in this seismic act of civil disobedience. On the Saturday night before the Times launched its unprecedented publication of the document, Ellsberg, his friend Howard Zinn, and their wives nervously took in a movie that had become Ellsberg's favorite: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The movie becomes particularly prescient as Ehrlich and Goldsmith explore the battle inside the Times over whether to publish the purloined document; the paper's outside attorneys advised them not to publish, but its legal counsel reasoned that there was nothing in the Pentagon Papers that compromised national security; all the document did was tear the curtain away from the decisions that had led America into the war. All the arguments rehearsed during this period, revolving around national security needs versus the public's right to know, came back around during the Bush years as the Times reported on the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and the CIA's Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. No less than John Dean, who regularly dines out on his own defiance of Richard Nixon, expresses some sympathy for his old boss and notes that the new culture of constant government leaks has made the president's job even more difficult. His observation makes Ellsberg's decision even more fraught with consequences than we might have thought. -------- The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117941052.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 By RONNIE SCHEIB Sep. 13, 2009 An ITVS/Kovno Communications/Insight Prods. presentation of a Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith/ITVS production. (International sales: Films Transit, New York.) Produced by Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith. Executive producer, Jodie Evans. Directed by Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith. Written by Lawrence Lerew, Goldsmith, Ehrlich, Michael Chandler, partly based on Daniel Ellsberg's "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." With: Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Anthony Russo, Howard Zinn, Janaki Natajaran, Randy Koehler, Tom Oliphant, Egil Krogh, Max Frankel, John Dean, Leonard Weinglass, Hendrick Smith, Mike Gravel. Narrator: Daniel Ellsberg. "The Most Dangerous Man in America," Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's cogent docu about Daniel Ellsberg, the high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War planner who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, crams a wealth of material into 90 minutes without losing clarity or momentum. Fascinating for those who lived through the controversy and those for whom the incidentrings only the faintest of bells, the pic wisely allows obvious parallels between Vietnam and Iraq to hover unspoken. Must-see docu is skedded to open Sept. 16 at Gotham's Film Forum after its Toronto fest bow. The pic opens with the publication of the Papers and the resultant media storm, FBI manhunt and branding of Ellsberg by Henry Kissinger as "the most dangerous man in America." The story then backtracks to follow the sequence of key events in Ellsberg's life: the deaths of his mother and sister (when his father fell asleep at the wheel); his seminal doctoral thesis on decision theory; his 1954-57 stint in the Marines ("the happiest time of my life"); and finally his position in the Defense Department under Robert McNamara. Ellsberg was instrumental in compiling reports to justify bombing North Vietnam. The docu dramatizes the glee with which Ellsberg sought and found a Viet Cong atrocity (complete with graphic details) to strengthen the case for a policy that he personallyopposed. Guilt over this deed would color all his subsequent actions. Some may criticize the filmmakers' strict adherence to Ellsberg as both narrator and star, but the docu focuses on his moral turnaround, which directly impacted history. This unique fusion of personal and social drama allows the pic to avoid the usual canned montage-of-the-times approach. The footage places Ellsberg at the center of both polar factions regarding Vietnam: playing Pentagon war games and marching in peace protests. Ehrlich and Goldsmith's varied storytelling techniques include interviews with eclectic talking heads, re-enactments of shadowy figures Xeroxing thousands of pages, crude animation of secret transfers of boxes of documents, and tape recorders spinning Nixon's uncensored commentary. Once Ellsberg resolves to publish the 7,000 page secret Rand history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, detailing the lies of four American presidents who plunged the country ever deeper into what increasingly proved to be an unwinnable war, his action (and its attendant threat of a life behind bars) is mirrored by a succession of newspaper editors who reprinted the documents, despite injunctions and court orders, in an impressive show of First Amendment solidarity. While a present-day Ellsberg complains that the massive number of bombs dropped on Vietnam, which he repeatedly mentioned in press conferences back then, was never duly reported, Ehrlich and Goldsmith redress that silence with a bombardment of newsreel images of aerial destruction. Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Vicente Franco, Dan Krauss; editors, Chandler, Goldsmith, Lerew; music, Blake Leyh; sound, Nick Bertoni, Goldsmith. Reviewed on DVD, New York, Sept. 11, 2009. (In Toronto Film Festival -- Real to Reel.) Running time: 94 MIN. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
