Ojai Valley News Blog

Daniel Ellsberg addresses the press during the height of the Pentagon Papers controversy in a still from “The Most Dangerous Man in America.”

Ojai-Ventura Film Festival hosts dual screenings of ‘The Most Dangerous Man in America’

By Linda Harmon
Daniel Ellsberg, the subject of the film, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” is coming to the Ojai-Ventura Film Festival to make a point; someone needs to step forward and take a stand for governmental transparency on the war in Afghanistan and U.S. involvement in it.

“My message, and what I’ve been saying since I saw the war coming,” said Ellsberg, “is don’t do what I did (during Vietnam).

Don’t wait until the war is started when the bombs are falling, don’t wait until thousands more have died. If you know you are being lied to in a hopeless war do what I wish I had done earlier, in ‘64-’65. Go to the press and to Congress with documents to show that the public has been misled.”

Daniel Ellsberg is no longer a household name. In fact, he and Patricia Marx Ellsberg, his wife of 39 years, agree that if you ask most people under 50 they wouldn’t have a clue who he is.

So, who is Daniel Ellsberg?

According to the Nixon White House, he was one of the most notorious men in America. Ellsberg was responsible, along with his wife and co-worker Anthony Russo, for copying and leaking top secret papers he obtained while he was a political analyst at the Rand Corp. The documents that became known as “The Pentagon Papers,” were a project commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on the history of the Vietnam War. These documents showed four presidents had pursued the U.S. policy that their own military and political analysts knew was unwinnable, for purely political reasons.

After the Nixon White House failed in its attempt to get an injunction to halt their publication, it proceeded to look for information to vilify Ellsberg in the press. The ill-fated “Plumbers” operation to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s Watergate office was an attempt to find incriminating information about Ellsberg.

It was the cover-up of this burglary that led to the downfall of the Nixon presidency and his resignation before impeachment. The break-in only came to light during the prosecution of Ellsberg and fellow defendant Russo, arrested for leaking “The Pentagon Papers” under the Espionage Act of 1917.

The film captures the day-to-day details of the Ellsbergs’ lives during this period.

“It is really a wonderful film.” said Patricia Ellsberg. “It was done completely independent of us. It is heartening, and one of the reasons we are so supportive of the film … is that it does encapsulate the history of that period in reference to the Pentagon papers and the war. It is beautifully done.”

It was during their first year of marriage that they began sending out the papers explained Ellsberg, “when Dan heard the plan was to escalate.”

“We are still friends with Randy (Kehler),” said Ellsberg of the then anti-war activist and anti-nuclear activist, since active in the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Peace Development Fund, and the Working Group on Electoral Democracy. It was Kehler who inspired her husband to take the risk of leaking them to end the war.

According to Ellsberg, she and Dan had trouble earlier in their relationship because of her opposition to the war, and it was only after he began doubting the government’s true motives that he began attending events with speakers opposing the war.

Ellsberg has written about his “epiphany’ attending a War Resisters League in the book “The Right Words at the Right Time.”

“There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger,” wrote Ellsberg. “Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing.”

According to Ellsberg, that is when he decided he was willing to go to prison to help end the war by leaking the Pentagon Papers, which were at home in his safe at the time.

Much time has passed, but the Ellsbergs’ commitment to the need of transparency concerning our country’s foreign policy hasn’t dimmed. An opponent of the Iraq war, Ellsberg is on continued alert and feels our policy in Afghanistan is steering us into dangerous waters once again.

“There is a quote that ‘imperialism killed the republic,’” said Ellsberg, adding he was happy the film premiered in Washington before President Obama made his final decision on whether to increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. “With the troops the generals are asking for now, they are only talking about the immediate short run steps but you can be sure Obama has been hearing about much bigger figures 600, 000 or 800,000.”

Patricia Ellsberg is worried too.

“My husband is possibly one of the remaining leading experts on the failure of counter-insurgency in Vietnam,” she said, speaking about the wartime tactic in Vietnam. “That really was his field, and from everything he knows and sees in the papers and on the internet, the parallels are so real. He feels it is a disaster to go in … We are unaware how as foreigners we don’t really know what to do. There is a nationalist passion. We think we know what to do, but we really are outsiders, particularly when there is a military presence there. He is distraught that it might be the end of Obama.”

The Ellsbergs fear that President Obama will have to deal with his own generals and the right wing if he fails to increase the troop numbers and follow through with his pre-election promise to pursue the war in Afghanistan, even though he may realize that may not be the wisest course of action for the long term.

Ellsberg hopes Obama remembers his history, but doesn’t hold up much hope that he will act on it.

What is Daniel Ellsberg’s solution?

“Its going to take someone going public with the real numbers, not the 60,000 troops we are hearing about now to stop it,” said Ellsberg.

Those who lived through Vietnam era may remember the slow, painful build-up of troops, eventually becoming a huge deployment of our military that led to massive causalities on both sides and a political, military, and social nightmare.

“The parallels are becoming all too clear,” said Ellsberg of the Vietnam era. “That’s my message and that’s the message of this film.”

The film by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith has been critically hailed as “detailed, clearly told, persuasive” by Mike Hale of The New York Times. It will be shown free of charge as part of The Ojai-Ventura Film Festival in the recreation field of the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa at 7 p.m. Nov. 5 and again, as a ticketed event, on Nov. 6  at Brooks Institute at 5 p.m. Both screenings will be followed with a Q&A with the Ellsbergs and the filmmakers.