virek213 The Vietnam War was the singular defining era of our history in which the trust that we had held for so long in our governmental institutions began to crumble. The longer that war went on, and the greater the number of American soldiers coming home in body bags and boxes, the more we realized that our trust was being abused. But the war had a further embittering effect on American society itself, one that divided us in a way not seen since the Civil War, and whose differences are even more corrosive now in the Age of Trump than they ever were back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Probably the biggest way we learned about our government's dissembling about that war occurred in June 1971, when a secret 47-volume, 7000-page study of the war commissioned in 1967 by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was leaked to the press, first to the New York Times, and then to as many as seventeen other major newspapers throughout America. The man who blew the whistle on this was a former Defense Department analyst who had worked at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California by the name of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg became, in the words of then-National Security advisor Henry Kissinger, "the most dangerous man in America", a man who, to his mind and, of course, that of his boss Richard Nixon, had to be stopped at all costs. And in 2009, that Kissinger phrase became the title of an Oscar-winning documentary about perhaps the greatest case of whistle blowing in U.S. history, both then and now, eventually leading to future whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.Co-directed by Judith Ehlrich and Rick Goldsmith and narrated by none other than the man Daniel Ellsberg himself, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA details how Ellsberg went from a war hawk working inside the Pentagon at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in August 1964 to feeling more and more culpable for the deaths of American soldiers and innocent Vietnamese civilians, and coming to that moment in October 1969, when he began sneaking out of his Rand Corporation office at night with copies of the Pentagon Papers in his briefcase to start the process of photocopying all the pages, an act that took many months; and what's more important, each one of those 7,000 pages was marked TOP SECRET, in big, bold, and unmistakable letters. He took the risk of prosecution and even conviction by giving them to the New York Times in the late winter of 1971; and after three months of intensive debate among the Times' staff, they made that monumental decision that put them and the rest of the American press on a collision course with the Nixon Administration. While the press and Ellsberg eventually won their fight with Nixon in the highest court in the land, it also had the effect of paving the way to the formation inside the Nixon White House of "The Plumbers", a self-contained dirty tricks unit whose extreme malfeasance, egged on as it were by a naturally paranoid president, would eventually lead to Nixon's cataclysmic downfall.Ehlrich and Goldsmith, besides interviewing Ellsberg himself, interview members of Nixon's inner circle, including John Dean and Egil "Bud" Krough, who lend a great deal of insight as to how Ellsberg's revelations made Nixon, a man prone to fits of paranoia and viciousness, even more so. And through mountains of film and TV footage, the film depicts what the Pentagon Papers revealed: that five successive administrations-Truman; Eisenhower; Kennedy; Johnson; and Nixon-had so completely lied to the American people about Vietnam, and helped to collapse the whole idea of the Domino Theory of containing Communism. The whole film cannot help but bring out a huge torrent of memories, stimulate intense thinking (which any really good film, documentary or otherwise, does), and make us question the values we had been taught for so long to uphold, when those people who gave us those values betrayed them in the name of stamping out a system that most of them hated with a purple passion, but at the same time none of them ever understood.Without question, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA is a '10'-worthy film.

dougmcnair This is a decent documentary and history lesson, chronicling the evolution of Daniel Ellsberg from Marine Corps company commander and true believer in the Vietnam War to radical anti-war whistle blower. It's told entirely from the perspective of Ellsberg and his fellow travelers so it's likely skewed to the left, but it's still a good portrait of the late war era and how public opinion turned against the war. Of particular interest was the saga of how the press fought for the right to publish the Pentagon Papers, with one paper after another picking up publication of the documents after the courts had stopped other papers from doing so. It was the first time the free press had taken on the government like that. Another interesting sequence was the chronicle of Nixon's increasingly paranoid reactions to the Pentagon Papers' release and the courts reactions thereto, setting him on a course of action that would eventually lead to his downfall. Six stars.

bobbobwhite Documentaries can often be boring if the subject does not relate to our own experiences, but as this one did to mine and still does thus it was a success to me even though it had its faults, not in what it did but what it did not do. New and old footage was interlaced throughout and did a great job of telling the entire sick story up until President(I am a damn good crook)Nixon resigned, but it missed being a complete story in having no follow up about Ellberg's life afterward other than what he now looks like in interviews for this film.......how is he now publicly perceived?... how did he make a living after?... did he ever get his life back to "normal"?... and, most importantly, what does he think of his actions now and would he do it all over again after what money/reputation/street cred it cost him, or made him? These answers needed to be told and would have made it a full and complete story.We sure needed someone like Ellsberg to expose Bush's Folly in Iraq. The very same lying caused the Iraq war........faked news stated by the President. Maybe that causes all wars? Why don't we learn better from these failures and not repeat them only one or two generations later? I think it is mostly because the people in power later are no longer the same people as earlier, and America is not a country that cares about or learns well/anything from its elder's experiences like some great, long-term societies of the past that were successful over thousands of years as a direct result of elder wisdom.

James J Cremin John Lennon is probably the most famous peace activist during the Vietnam War. But it took an inside man who actually had been over there who would not only shed light on the history of the United States's involvement with Vietnam but upon whose actions actually led to the resignation of a sitting American president.Four years in the making, this got Ellsberg's participation as narrator and having the final word after publishing his best seller "Secrets" and subsequent book tour of "Secrets". Just like the book, it focuses on his career of being an outstanding Marine and researcher of nuclear energy that led to him being employed by Robert McNamara in 1961, then the Secretary of Defense under President John F. Kennedy.However, Ellsberg's story really starts getting interesting when he's assigned to uncover covert operations of the North Vietnamese against American troops stationed in South Vietnam in 1964. What had initiated this was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which in itself later proved to be an American ship misfiring upon another but at the time blamed on the Vietcong.Ellsberg said he could only find one, a minor one involving two servicemen that became an excuse for the most damaging one sided bombing of one nation towards another the world has ever seen. In 1965, he went on a fact finding tour in which he dressed in battle fatigues and came back disillusioned as to why the United States was doing there.He worked in Rand, a military think tank in Santa Monica and because of his position, traveled to Washington, D.C. where he began to make friends and meet his future wife at non violent peace rallies. He realized he had access to documents that would later be called "The Pentagon Papers" that exposes the lies of presidents going back to Truman of the American involvement after France lost its colonies at Indochina.However, 1968's peace candidate would prove he was nothing of the sort and would be Ellsberg's chief antagonist for most of the documentary, the infamous Richard M. Nixon.I have seen negative comments about the cheesy animation, admittedly unnecessary because it's well known that Ellsberg's main role was to copy the documents and have been exposed to the New York Times to Nixon's chagrin. Ellsberg comes across quite heroically in this and even he was surprised that he played no small part in giving Nixon enough rope to hang himself that led to his resignation.Very chilling is hearing Nixon considering dropping atomic bombs on Vietnam as if all to the other bombs including the infamous Christmas bombing of 1972 wasn't enough. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, comes across much better, giving words of caution and even heard early on of having a "Peace with Honor" exit strategy with Nixon within the first month Nixon was in office.Present at the screening at Beverly Hills Music Hall was Ellsberg's wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg and film maker Judith Ehrlich. Scheduled to appear but he passed away recently, Howard Zinn is among the talking heads of this important documentary. Paralels of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan were not mentioned but still very difficult to ignore.This was echoed repeatedly during the q and a. Ehrlich did try to repeatedly to get Kissinger as this documentary does show him in a positive light but all attempts were futile. It is a quote from him that gives the title of this movie.She was more successful in getting John Dean, Nixon's counsel who got fired during the Watergate trials and bestselling author of "Blind Ambition", that gave first hand accounts of Nixon's involvement of ordering the break in Ellberg's psychoanalyst's office.Patricia gave a more personal side of her husband. He's now seventy-nine and probably has been arrested seventy-nine times as he still attends peace rallies and not pleased with the most current surge in Afghanistan.If Ellsberg hadn't done what he done in 1971, it's really hard to imagine what the seventies would have looked like in the political arena. There would have been no Watergate. The Vietnam War would have been prolonged and many more innocent people would have died. However, Ellsberg sadly notes that it doesn't look like our government has really learned its lesson. 58,000 American and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives were lost during the Vietnam War. No matter how one looks at it, that remains a very disturbing fact in American history.