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David Greenberg
The Insider
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IN 1969 Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a defense-industry think tank, smuggled from his office safe a top-secret government study detailing American involvement in Vietnam. By night, in the office of an ad agency atop a Hollywood flower shop, Ellsberg and a few confidants duplicated the so-called Pentagon Papers, a page at a time on a first-generation Xerox machine. Ellsberg leaked the samizdat to antiwar leaders and reporters, including the New York Times's Neil Sheehan. In June 1971, the Times astounded the nation by publishing a lengthy series about the papers and the official deception over Vietnam that they documented. Reactions came swiftly. Peace activists rejoiced. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went ballistic; administration officials sued (unsuccessfully) to stop publication, sought to prosecute Ellsberg (again unsuccessfully) and broke into his psychoanalyst's office, seeking dirt -- descending thereby their own slippery slope. Ellsberg for his part won instant celebrity. The Beatles lined up to get his autograph.
The Pentagon Papers' importance notwithstanding, one wouldn't think the life of a man whose fame rests on a single dissident act could sustain a 700-page biography. But Tom Wells's Wild Man succeeds terrifically. A first-rate historian of the antiwar movement, Wells understands Vietnam's hold on America: If World War II is depicted, from Pearl Harbor to the pop histories of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw, as unambiguously righteous and heroic, Vietnam's reputation remains that of a moral quagmire -- lacking clear heroes, villains or answers. Like such interpreters of the conflict as Maya Lin, Tim O'Brien and Stanley Kubrick, Wells sides politically with the antiwar cause but seldom lets his sympathies harden into simplicities. Rather, in this extensively researched and engagingly written account, Ellsberg comes across as -- all at once -- a brilliant military analyst, a devoted (often fanatical) convert to the peace effort, a victim of Nixon's skulduggery, and an obnoxious and sometimes dishonest egomaniac. Wells realizes that for all the scorn that's been heaped on psychohistory, a biographical subject's psyche must still be probed. He probes Ellsberg's mind circumspectly, without overreaching and with fruitful results. Ellsberg, he demonstrates, bore the lifelong imprint of his highly neurotic Christian Scientist parents. His oppressive mother, convinced her son was destined for greatness as a pianist, forced him to practice constantly, even hiding his copy of Little Women in the clothes hamper (or so he claimed) so he wouldn't waste time reading. Wells, steering clear of both jargon and woolly speculation, suggests that as a result Ellsberg developed into a textbook narcissist -- gripped by a hunger for approbation and an inflated sense of his own importance. These characterological threads resurface as we follow him to Harvard in the '50s, through his indulgence in sex, drugs and the counterculture in the '60s, and through his trial and its aftermath in the '70s. Even more successful than his account of Ellsberg's life is the way Wells uses his subject's career to explore the murky moral universe of Vietnam War politics. He rarely presents Ellsberg's actions as plain rational decisions with easily discerned ethical implications. Instead, he discovers mixed motives and grayness everywhere. Ellsberg's heroic exposure of the government's lies is portrayed as of a piece with his betrayal of his RAND colleagues who had won him access to the Pentagon Papers by vouching for his trustworthiness. Similarly, his reasons for leaking the papers, as Wells sees them, include both a sincere wish to end the war and a self-serving desire to attain fame and glory by age 40. Keeping Ellsberg's flattering and unflattering traits in tension, Wells forecloses any easy judgments by the reader. Indeed, Wells missteps only when he hastily issues his own verdicts. He upbraids Ellsberg, for example, for enlisting his 13-year-old son, Robert, in copying the papers, calling the decision "foolish and irrational." Such a declaration discounts both Ellsberg's credible explanation that he wanted his son to feel "connected" to his conscientious action and Robert's statement that he felt "kind of proud and privileged to have had a sort of small part in something that I feel was important." Wells also dwells too much on (and writes too judgmentally about) Ellsberg's sex life, citing innumerable instances in which he talked about, pursued or engaged in various practices, none of them terribly shocking. Wells plausibly sees this fixation as another element of Ellsberg's narcissism, but he returns to the subject more than enough to clinch his case. On the whole, however, Wells is a fair and perceptive chronicler of the life of this sometimes inspirational, sometimes maddening, always fascinating figure. More important, he is an exceptional historian of the inspirational, maddening and fascinating political drama of which Daniel Ellsberg was a small but significant
Hardcover - 650 pages
Palgrave
David Greenberg is writing a history of Richard Nixon's image in American culture. He teaches at Columbia University and writes for Slate. Comment by clicking here.
