I was making my way from the screening yesterday evening of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers to an adjacent auditorium where we were told that Ellsberg himself would make a surprise appearance. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a white-haired man walking ahead of me with the assistance of a cane—a slender, handsomely dressed man whom I guessed immediately was the world’s most famous whistleblower himself.
I followed him into the auditorium and down to the stage before he noticed me, and since we were the only two people in the room, I introduced myself and welcomed him to ALA. Soft-spoken and gentlemanly, he told me he would be happy to sit for an interview with me following his Auditorium Speakers program the next morning (which he did, and which American Libraries videotaped and will be editing and posting ASAP).
Following our conversation, a lucky couple dozen ALA conference-goers—many representing the program sponsors, namely the Social Responsibilities Round Table, Office for Intellectual Freedom, Office for Literacy and Outreach Services, and Video Round Table—filed into the room for an informal question-and-answer session, a bonus that past ALA president and program emcee Mitch Freedman arranged.
For those who had not followed Ellsberg’s career closely after his notoriety in 1971 for releasing The Pentagon Papers, a top-secret U.S. government study about the Vietnam War, to the New York Times, both his talk and the film were a revelation. Ellsberg has been arrested some 80 times for civil disobedience, roughly once for every year of his life.
It was 1969 when he first saw the secret documents, and soon Ellsberg began to realize that President Lyndon Johnson had launched what became an 11-year war “with lies to the public.” He said that Johnson rejected even Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s advice to move to a diplomatic solution, saying, “We are going to win.”
Following a tour in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, Ellsberg became convinced that the war was unwinnable and that it was his moral obligation to expose the lies being fed to the American people. He also said, “It is not entirely fair to let the American people off the hook for what happened in Vietnam.”
No president wanted the Vietnam War to be lost on his watch, Ellsberg said, or to be accused of being a loser or unmanly or a weak appeaser. This continues today with President Obama, who is taking the same stance in Afghanistan, and instead of ending the war is sustaining it. The lesson for all of us, he stated during his Auditorium Speakers program today, is that “smart guys can get us into dumb wars and can’t get us out of them.”
Ellsberg recommended that all the librarians in the room read “Obama’s Growing Trust in Biden Is Reflected in His Call on Troops,” a June 25 New York Times story about the president, vice president, and Afghanistan.