Wild man

It is a peculiar feeling to read a painstakingly detailed, fully-indexed 604-page biography and get the feeling that the author has simultaneously a pathological aversion to his subject and an irresistible fascination with him. Tom Wells chronicles in depth Daniel Ellsberg's strained relationship with his mother, who died young in a tragic family car crash. He dwells on examples of Ellsberg's self-centeredness, his lasciviousness, his womanizing, his vanity, his procrastination, his social alienation, and the spiraling irrelevance of his later years. Wells even repeatedly seeks to downplay the significance of Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, the ultra-secret Rand Corporation study of government deception of the public during the Vietnam War that made Ellsberg a household word when he released it to the New York Times.

While I am not one to assume that whistleblowers, much less perhaps the greatest whistleblower of all time, are plaster saints, I am a little put off by the degree of Tom Wells' antipathy toward his subject. To be fair, I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. I do think Ellsberg was tormented by the war, and possibly by his complicity in it. I would not be surprised if he had some personal demons or made some reckless choices. Nevertheless, he remains a man whom I admire intensely, because he did have the courage to stand up and expose the lies of the most powerful government on earth.

Moreover, for all the flaws in this long book, the writing is crisp and there are many moments of intense drama, my favorites being the antics of the Chuck Colson and the White House plumbers on behalf of the troglodytic Richard Nixon and Ellsberg's mad cross country campaign to elude the FBI. In a national game of whack-a-mole, the Department of Justice would secure an injunction against one paper seeking to publish the papers, only to have two more copies pop up in different papers across the country. Among his other accomplishments, Ellsberg's act led directly to the decision in New York Times v. Sullivan that the government could not under the First Amendment impose prior restraints on the press to prevent publication of material, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the release of which it objected.

The final word on this book is that it is a critical biography in a good sense. It thoroughly examines its subject, stripping away myths, scrutinizing flaws. It is hard to believe that there is a wart on its subject that is not put under the magnifying glass. And yet, it also attempts to give us the measure of Ellsberg the man, and I think it succeeds in spite of itself. By that I mean that despite the author's professed low opinion of Ellsberg, and studious attempts at documenting it, I find it hard not to think of Ellsberg as a (flawed) giant of our times. More than can be said, perhaps, of his nemesis, Richard Nixon.