The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Sick Product of a Sick System

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

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.

Daniel Ellsberg was a very, very important figure during the 60s and 70s and today most people 50 and younger probably have no idea who he is. This is a shame, as his story is fascinating and well worth hearing.The documentary begins in the mid-1960s. Ellsberg is a big name in the Pentagon. He'd served in Vietnam and was rather hawkish about the war. However, as he gained more and more power, he came into contact with more and more super-secret documents and what he read disturbed him. There in black & white he could see some evil facts. First, that the Gulf of Tonkin attack that justified President Johnson escalating the Vietnam War was a hoax! Yes, Johnson KNOWINGLY expanded the war and brought in US combat troops after the American public was informed American ships were attacked--but there was no attack! Second, that Pentagon and State Department documents showed that they KNEW the war was unwinnable--yet they were pushing to expand it and throw young folks into this mess! As a result, Ellsberg went from begin pro to anti-war. In fact, he began to speak out publicly. But, this wasn't enough--Ellsberg decided that he need to release these documents regardless of whether or not this would result in him being sent to prison. How all this later led to the downfall of the Nixon White House, you'll need to see for yourself.Overall, this is an excellent documentary. It uses contemporary film footage and modern interviews to tell the story of a man who felt compelled to violate his oath of loyalty to the President. See this--it's fascinating from start to finish.

Daniel Ellsberg was indeed a man of conscience who did his country a great service when he told the truth about the Vietnam War. This documentary explains in great detail how his personal experience both as a Marine Corps officer and later as a Rand Corporation officer made this possible. His unique POV put him in a position that compelled him to release the information as a matter of conscience to stop the killing. I see NOW that the Wikileaks case could very well develop along similar lines. The message I got from this documentary is to trust NO POLITICIAN - they all lie and the people must be informed. Finally, the American press has become lazy. We need a Walter Cronkite for the 21st Century. Oh, and Richard Nixon was not just a crook - he was evil, too. The documentary (and Nixon's own words) will make that clear.

This movie is excellent in its execution. There are definitely some facts revealed that I did not know of. I did not know how high level he was, which makes his crimes even more offensive. He is trying to apologize for his past. It is narrated by Ellsberg himself, which definitely compromises its credibility, since he is a criminal. However, it is still about a man that should have been executed for treason. Now, unfortunately, he is considered a hero by left wing anti-Americans. That is really sad. Anyone who actually approves of him is not an American. I agree that the war on Viet Nam was wrong, but do NOT agree that a high-level government official should betray his country.