'let's call this'

Daniel Ellsberg was indeed once the most dangerous man in America — at least he was to those in the political power structure who had supported the Vietnam War and continued to push it at an unspeakable price. As a high-ranking Pentagon analyst, Ellsberg was one of the conflict’s architects, working alongside Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on an escalation strategy more concerned with mathematical efficiency than messy realities. For a long time he was a gung-ho jingoist, a former marine officer, he went so far as to personally lead combat missions as a civilian advisor, charging into the jungle, rifle in hand. Eventually, like most of the rest of the country, he had an epiphany that the war had been a terrible mistake, but he was actually in a position to do something about it. While soaking up the sun at the Rand Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif., Ellsberg was still in the loop, but far out of sight of military brass, and began Xeroxing the thousands of pages of top secret documents he had access to, and began leaking them to the press in 1971. Those mountainous documents, dubbed “The Pentagon Papers” implicated several former presidents who all steered the nation headlong into the Vietnam disaster, through a long streak of mismanagement, lies, blunders and tragic hubris.