following lrb article... 'pretty good, pretty neat...'

Who's in charge?
Chalmers Johnson

The subject of Daniel Ellsberg's memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet central casting could not have produced a more perfect foil for the American imperial Presidency than Ellsberg. An infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with genuine battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a defence intellectual employed by the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, with the highest security clearances, Ellsberg is as good as the American system can produce in the way of a male citizen working in the foreign policy apparatus. His odyssey from Pentagon staff officer to the man who spirited 47 volumes of top secret documents out of the Rand Corporation, copied them, and delivered them to the New York Times and a dozen other newspapers is breathtaking.

[...]

Ellsberg returned to Harvard to write his doctoral dissertation - on a typically American subject, game theory - and then accepted a position with the Economics Department of the Rand Corporation. He was put to work on command and control problems in fighting a nuclear war. Disillusionment set in at once. In the autumn of 1961, shortly after Kennedy had effectively exploited the so-called missile gap for his own electoral purposes, Ellsberg read a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the subject and discovered that it had all been a lie: there was a gap but it was ten to one in favour of the US. This, he said, had 'a shocking effect on my professional worldview'. There were many more to come.

[...]

Nixon was never enthusiastic about using legal means to try to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, or about getting Ellsberg convicted in a Federal court. He was, however, scared to death that Ellsberg had or was receiving more secret documents not just about previous Administrations but about his own. 'Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America. He must be stopped at all costs,' Kissinger had said in the presence of the President. In fact, Ellsberg did not have any materials touching on the Nixon Administration, but the President and Kissinger didn't know that. Nixon therefore ordered Charles Colson, an official on his staff, to come up with a plan to 'neutralise' Ellsberg. Colson in turn enlisted the services of a former CIA officer called Howard Hunt, who had been the mastermind behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.

[...]

After the charges against him were dropped, Ellsberg expressed himself satisfied that the United States had reaffirmed its identity as 'a democratic republic - not an elected monarchy - a government under law, with Congress, the courts and the press functioning to curtail executive abuses, as our Constitution envisioned'. I wish that were true. My own conclusion is that it was more like the final surge of a consumptive, the false sense that good health has returned actually signalling that death is near. I believe that the advance of militarism in the United States is irreversible. If I am wrong, I will be forgiven because people will be so glad I was wrong.