The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009)

 Boy, it was a week of anti-government movies.  First, Fred Hampton, and now Daniel Ellsberg.  Of those two names, Hampton was more familiar to me.  I vaguely knew what the Pentagon Papers were because of trailers for The Post, which I still haven't seen (currently #95 on my list!).

In the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg worked as a civilian in the Pentagon, spearheading the strategic involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam.  Nominally, this was in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident where North Vietnamese troops fired torpedos at a U.S. Navy ship.  Ellsberg was one of the very few people to know that this was a fabrication.  He grew more and more uncomfortable watching President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lie outright to the American people while escalating a war halfway around the globe.  The bombing got worse under Nixon.  Ellsberg decided to do something about it.  Secretly, he started making photocopies of the 7000 page report McNamara had commissioned from the RAND Corp that detailed every lie being told, and then began leaking it to the press.

This is as far as I got yesterday before I had to go Be Social, which took up the rest of my day and evening.  More on that in the next post.

I had something in mind about how I was going to talk about whistleblowers and defining what is "good" for the country as a whole, but now I've forgotten what I was going to say.  Stealing government papers (generally) = bad.  Sending people to die in a foreign war for some mythical democracy brownie points = way worse.  Stealing papers detailing said governmental lies and distributing them to the public to raise awareness of how the government is screwing its people = not bad, pretty fucking important actually.  Hope that clears things up.