Develiker terrible... so disappointed.

RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Fulke Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

IClaudius7 Daniel Ellsberg was indeed a man of conscience who did his country a great service when he told the truth about the Vietnam War. This documentary explains in great detail how his personal experience both as a Marine Corps officer and later as a Rand Corporation officer made this possible. His unique POV put him in a position that compelled him to release the information as a matter of conscience to stop the killing. I see NOW that the Wikileaks case could very well develop along similar lines. The message I got from this documentary is to trust NO POLITICIAN - they all lie and the people must be informed. Finally, the American press has become lazy. We need a Walter Cronkite for the 21st Century. Oh, and Richard Nixon was not just a crook - he was evil, too. The documentary (and Nixon's own words) will make that clear.

mvassa71 For starters, the film itself is not very artful. It is dry, plodding and unimaginative. And to Ellsberg himself, initially he comes across as a sympathetic figure, who lost half his family as a boy, was very focused and driven as a young man, and was ultimately thoughtful enough to see through the lies and want to do what he could to make things right. But the film seems more like a vehicle for him to wash his hands of his own crimes, and profess his own huge important place in American history for ratting out the Pentagon. It's not often that the subject of a documentary is also the narrator, and that was off putting as well. This was a dull, disappointing film.

Chris Knipp This documentary lets its subject (and hero) speak for himself: Ellsberg is the narrator. You may feel that it can hardly be taken in fully at one go -- that you ought to sneak back to see it more, maybe look up some of the history involved. The twists and turns of events, the turbulent full political context, are complicated indeed. But maybe what you really cannot assimilate is the complexity of the man himself, and the feeling contemplating that complexity gives you of being very small in comparison.It still seems hard to understand the Pentagon Papers story. 7,000 pages, finally published or written about at the time by a dozen or more big city papers, so it became impossible to suppress them: what are the Pentagon Papers? I was around then, but I never read them. Who did? Why did they turn the tide against the Vietnam War? Did they do that? Ultimately the Nixon administration's "dirty tricks" men, the "plumbers," brought down Nixon for their mission in California of breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. It was the last straw. And why was that? Coming after the exposure of the Watergate break-ins, this clumsy, stupid act further showed Nixon's henchmen for for the Keystone-Cop thugs they were, and the game was up for Nixon, though the war was to be pursued by Lyndon B. Johnson, and ultimately take him down, though more honorably.Ellsberg was one of those at the Rand Corporation in 1967-68 who contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents related to the conduct of the Vietnam War commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara, later known as "the Pentagon Papers." Perusing these documents, Ellsberg discovered total cynicism about the war at the highest level all along. Officials knew the war would lead to heavy casualties and not be won, and expressed an indifference to loss of human life and to the outcome of the conflict that totally shocked him. Eventually this shock led to his decision that he couldn't be silent about this, could not be a good soldier and play the game any more; that the only course was ultimately to expose what he had learned.This came, of course, in the context of a growing anti-war movement at home and abroad and of the post-1968 revolutionary spirit of the times. But Sixties hippies and anti-war activists were one thing, and Ellsberg was another. Ellsberg was an insider. His voice carried a special conviction. A year or so after his initial discovery of the import of the Papers, Ellsberg tried to get them released on the Senate floor, preferably by Senator William Fulbright or George McGovern. When this failed he turned to the New York Times. This led eventually to the Supreme Court case, and to the Nixon effort to block and discredit Ellsberg. Ellsberg, who was on the brink of going to jail for many years, needed enormous courage through all this, and he not only marshaled that courage, but has gone on tirelessly using the moral capital he he earned at the time of the Pentagon papers to oppose illegal and immoral wars in the decades since.In this documentary, Nixon White House tape excerpts are heard, Nixon with Kissinger especially, the most damning, foul, small-town mafioso voice of evil: "get the son-of-a-bitch!" Nixon cries. These voices are surprising, even now. We have heard such voices in other documentaries, but perhaps never as naked and crude as here.Ellsberg and his Rand Corporation cohort Anthony Russo, who photocopied the Papers, were absolved by a judge in California who declared a mistrial because of administration misconduct in persecuting the two men. That was nearly forty years ago and Ellsberg, as late, great liberal-left American historian Howard Zinn declares here, has lived his Iife in keeping with the principles he followed in exposing the Pentagon Papers ever since. But only a few visuals in this film cover that life of anti-war activism.Part of what may move us about him and what may make him important is that Ellsberg's is a conversion story. Elssberg was far inside the establishment in what he originally did, a researcher for the Pentagon and a man who worked for the ultra-right-wing West-Coast-based Rand Corporation. Thus his later-to-be wife of many years Patricia, an anti-war activist when they met, broke off their engagement after he went on a paid trip to Vietnam. On that trip, Ellsberg learned how the Vietcong operated by leading a military operation himself; he was a former Marine. He married another woman. But when he got his teenage son and ten-year-old daughter to help photocopy the Papers, she broke with him, and he married Patricia, after all.The most powerful sequence is between Ellsberg today and a pacifist of those days among those whose willingness to go to jail to fight the war convinced Ellsberg to become willing to do the same. This man was a turning point in Ellsberg's life, and his voice breaks with emotion sitting with him today and remembering that.What makes this story so powerful is that it's not only about a First Amendment battle that went to the top -- the resulting Supreme Court decision remains essential in protecting the press from outside pressure -- but about the total transformation of a man from a liberal establishment figure into a voice for independent activism. And the information Ellsberg brought out is a magnifying glass through which to view the post-9/11 world and American hubris as characterized by Chalmers Johnson in his 'Blowback Trilogy.' We might consider the inevitable possibility that there are other Pentagon Papers, millions of pages, about America's other wars and occupations, that similarly expose their futility, brutality, and cynicism.'The Most Dangerous Man in America' carries off the difficult task of sketching a portrait of a key figure of modern US political history without slighting either him or the complicated context in which he rose to fame._________________

James J Cremin John Lennon is probably the most famous peace activist during the Vietnam War. But it took an inside man who actually had been over there who would not only shed light on the history of the United States's involvement with Vietnam but upon whose actions actually led to the resignation of a sitting American president.Four years in the making, this got Ellsberg's participation as narrator and having the final word after publishing his best seller "Secrets" and subsequent book tour of "Secrets". Just like the book, it focuses on his career of being an outstanding Marine and researcher of nuclear energy that led to him being employed by Robert McNamara in 1961, then the Secretary of Defense under President John F. Kennedy.However, Ellsberg's story really starts getting interesting when he's assigned to uncover covert operations of the North Vietnamese against American troops stationed in South Vietnam in 1964. What had initiated this was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which in itself later proved to be an American ship misfiring upon another but at the time blamed on the Vietcong.Ellsberg said he could only find one, a minor one involving two servicemen that became an excuse for the most damaging one sided bombing of one nation towards another the world has ever seen. In 1965, he went on a fact finding tour in which he dressed in battle fatigues and came back disillusioned as to why the United States was doing there.He worked in Rand, a military think tank in Santa Monica and because of his position, traveled to Washington, D.C. where he began to make friends and meet his future wife at non violent peace rallies. He realized he had access to documents that would later be called "The Pentagon Papers" that exposes the lies of presidents going back to Truman of the American involvement after France lost its colonies at Indochina.However, 1968's peace candidate would prove he was nothing of the sort and would be Ellsberg's chief antagonist for most of the documentary, the infamous Richard M. Nixon.I have seen negative comments about the cheesy animation, admittedly unnecessary because it's well known that Ellsberg's main role was to copy the documents and have been exposed to the New York Times to Nixon's chagrin. Ellsberg comes across quite heroically in this and even he was surprised that he played no small part in giving Nixon enough rope to hang himself that led to his resignation.Very chilling is hearing Nixon considering dropping atomic bombs on Vietnam as if all to the other bombs including the infamous Christmas bombing of 1972 wasn't enough. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, comes across much better, giving words of caution and even heard early on of having a "Peace with Honor" exit strategy with Nixon within the first month Nixon was in office.Present at the screening at Beverly Hills Music Hall was Ellsberg's wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg and film maker Judith Ehrlich. Scheduled to appear but he passed away recently, Howard Zinn is among the talking heads of this important documentary. Paralels of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan were not mentioned but still very difficult to ignore.This was echoed repeatedly during the q and a. Ehrlich did try to repeatedly to get Kissinger as this documentary does show him in a positive light but all attempts were futile. It is a quote from him that gives the title of this movie.She was more successful in getting John Dean, Nixon's counsel who got fired during the Watergate trials and bestselling author of "Blind Ambition", that gave first hand accounts of Nixon's involvement of ordering the break in Ellberg's psychoanalyst's office.Patricia gave a more personal side of her husband. He's now seventy-nine and probably has been arrested seventy-nine times as he still attends peace rallies and not pleased with the most current surge in Afghanistan.If Ellsberg hadn't done what he done in 1971, it's really hard to imagine what the seventies would have looked like in the political arena. There would have been no Watergate. The Vietnam War would have been prolonged and many more innocent people would have died. However, Ellsberg sadly notes that it doesn't look like our government has really learned its lesson. 58,000 American and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives were lost during the Vietnam War. No matter how one looks at it, that remains a very disturbing fact in American history.