The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
In a first for the Santa Cruz Film Festival, we are thrilled to present an Academy Award-nominee for Best Documentary: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.
In the film, we are catapulted back to 1971 where we find the US in the grip of what has since become a familiar scenario: a dirty war based on lies. Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the nation’s leading war planners, has the documents to prove it. Faced with a crisis of conscience, and armed with 7,000 pages of Top Secret documents, he leaks the truth about the Vietnam War to The New York Times and risks life in prison to end the war he helped plan. It is a story that held the world in its grip, with daily headlines, the top story on the nightly news for weeks on end.
What makes a dedicated Cold Warrior throw away his high-level access, his career, his friends, and risk life in prison for a mere CHANCE at helping to end the war? The Daniel Ellsberg in the first part of the film is a brilliant, complex man wrestling with his conscience over his role in a war he sees first as a problem to be solved, then as a hopeless stalemate, finally as a crime to be stopped at any costs.
Our tale is told by Ellsberg, as narrator, in current interviews and riveting archival footage. He is joined by a cast of supporting characters who “lived” the Pentagon Papers episode including Ellsberg’s wife and son, “co-conspirator” Tony Russo, historian/activist Howard Zinn, journalists Hedrick Smith and Max Frankel, attorneys Lenny Weinglass and James Goodale, Watergate principals Egil “Bud” Krogh and John Dean, and, in a rarely seen interview and through his own secret White house tapes, “Tricky Dick” Nixon himself.
The film speaks directly to the world today, as national security and the people’s right-to-know are in constant tension. It raises questions about civil courage, following conscience, taking risks, and speaking truth to power. It challenges people everywhere who are looking to better understand the world of power and who search their own hearts for ways to take a stand and make a difference.
