A Peculiar Specimen
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Writers & Writing A Peculiar Specimen By Richard C. Hottelet Tom Wells' Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (Palgrave, 692 pp., $32.50) begins with Nixon White House operatives...
...He looked up the redoubtable John Paul Vann, a former Army officer who was an Agency for International Development pacification specialist...
...To investigate the leak the White House mobilized the "Plumbers," a motley crew of Cubans who worked under the command of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy...
...He continues to want to make a big difference, but is happy when someone recognizes his name...
...The importance of the case lay, above all, in the Nixon Administration's frantic efforts to prevent publication...
...He was commissioned, won high praise at Camp Lejeune as a first lieutenant of a rifle company, and outdid his men in the roughest combat training...
...It made his reputation in intellectual circles...
...nuclear war planning...
...The process was slow, the Xerox machine being in its Model ? stage, and at times approached low comedy...
...The best—however odd the subject, as in The Professor and the Madman—deals with some accomplishment, even if modest, that is worthy of note...
...And the story of a strange life can be moving...
...It wasn't very long, of course, before the adulation tapered off...
...As someone with firsthand experience of the fighting, he was invited to contribute to the Pentagon Papers, but some of his superiors developed strong doubts about his discretion and he was eventually "nudged out" of the study...
...Wells sketches a solipsist, egomaniac, womanizer—a fantasizer who could wildly exaggerate his importance...
...Asked if he was playing soldier, he replied angrily, "I am here to kill Communists...
...Daniel Ellsberg is portrayed as a peculiar specimen...
...He further urged re-equipping the South Vietnamese Army and greater U.S...
...In October he joined the big antiwar rally at the Pentagon, then went up to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's office "to get a better view...
...The Supreme Court in a landmark First Amendment decision ruled that such highly classified documents could be published unless they would "surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation and its people...
...Ellsberg had been sending batches of the Papers to other news organizations, and lobbying Congress to give him legal cover by making them public in committee hearings or the Congressional Record...
...Hoping to retain the spotlight, he promised even greater revelations, apparently having in mind what he knew about U.S...
...intervention in the South's affairs...
...He never quite made it," one former colleague reflected in 1995, "because he could never quite get over that last hump, producing the great work, whatever it was...
...While proud of his 25 or so arrests, he was unable to find another academic position...
...He was appalled by the South Vietnamese Army's reluctance to engage the Vietcong and advocated stronger U.S...
...Richard C. Hottelet, who covered the world for CBS News, later served as Press Counselor at the U.S...
...He seemed desperate to stand out in a heroic role...
...The opportunity came a year later when a full set of the Pentagon Papers—some 7,000 pages in 47 volumes—was transferred to RAND, where Ellsberg had again found a perch...
...When a friend encountered him in March 1966 on a street in Saigon, he had a gun slung over his shoulder, bandoliers across his chest, two .45s, and was wearing a combat uniform and a helmet...
...And that's not making love—that's proving you can do it...
...Utterly fearless, Vann drove Ellsberg around on roads that had suicide written all over them...
...Indignant at the U.S...
...Or it elaborates some human quality that transcends time and place...
...He thought it his duty, he said, having been deferred from military service when he was in college...
...He claims he did not resent this, but when his mother was killed while the family was driving to Denver, his first reaction was, "Now I don't have to play the piano anymore...
...and, at the climax, a Herostratos...
...This resulted in Ellsberg writing what was deemed his best field report from Vietnam...
...Once he saw how a story leaked to the Times in March 1966 killed the military's demand for 206,000 more troops, he thought, "I've been a fool, I should have been affecting policy this way...
...President Richard M. Nixon and his closest advisers were furious at this breach of security, the most sensational ever...
...HAVING WADED throughthecloseto 700 pages of Wild Man—some of them very interesting, too many larded with trivia or highly repetitive—you find yourself wondering almost as much about the biographer as about his subject...
...He was invited to join the RAND Corporation in California, a top think tank on international conflicts and nuclear weapons supported by the U.S...
...More and more Ellsberg spent his time as a celebrity protester against nuclear weapons and in intellectual discussion groups...
...He began to secretly copy them...
...But the conspicuous imbalance of this prodigious labor and the essentially insignificant life it describes is a matter of wonderment...
...That was clearly not the case...
...When the Times published the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, the source was instantly apparent...
...Mack Sennett could not have dreamed up the preposterous scenario, complete with CIA "pocket litter" (false identification), a small experimental camera concealed in a tobacco pouch, wigs, thick glasses, two sets of false teeth, and a limp-producing shoe insert...
...The climax, of course, was his release of the Pentagon Papers...
...Air Force...
...Weekends he was at the keyboard from eight to eight (though he never learned to read music...
...meanwhile, in Washington and at RAND, the impression grew that he was inflating his importance without doing the work expected of him...
...Mission to the UN...
...involvement in Vietnam...
...There he rattled around at several jobs, focusing largely on Vietnam as a consultant to the Defense Department, where he was known as an ultrahawk...
...After the Vietcong's Tet Offensive in February 1968, he declared the war would never be won...
...government's deceptively optimistic propaganda about the war, Ellsberg kept leaking corrections to reporters...
...Highly intelligent, Ellsberg was the product of a dysfunctional family, oversexed and somewhat unstable...
...After his two years were up, he returned to Harvard as a Fellow, and published an article on decision-making under uncertainty that was considered seminal...
...He began having affairs, started seeing a psychiatrist, was divorced, and moved to Washington...
...Ellsberg discovered LSD in the early 1960s—and, says Wells, he enjoyed it later in life...
...There is no indication that this aspect of the affair ever entered Ellsberg's mind...
...Access to classified information and consultation trips to Washington gave him a feeling of power...
...Most of the story was already well known and virtually without exception, the war's chief opponents ignored the Papers despite Ellsberg's sustained insistence...
...He never wept...
...As a child in Highland Park, Michigan, he had been a loner bound to his mother, of whom he says, "All meaning in my life, all value, came from my mother...
...Ellsberg was an odd man...
...The whole thing was a fiasco, but it also was the first time the White House had ordered a criminal act, a burglary, in the United States, and the same people would give us Watergate...
...Knowing secrets, he could not resist passing some of them on—with drama, to impress: "Here's something I never told anyone before...
...A star at a high school for gifted children, Ellsberg is remembered by one of his teachers as restless, failing to see things through to the end, and tending to be late and rather disorganized—traits that marked his later decades...
...But he came to be viewed as a nuisance and was shipped off to Vietnam as a civilian consultant...
...One friend remarked of Ellsberg and Carol Cummings, who was to be his first wife, "This man for some reason has to demonstrate at all moments that he is totally virile...
...Not that they were worth all that much...
...After a year in England he enlisted in the Marine Corps' Officer Candidate School...
...I imagine he was after her three times a day...
...intervention as well as the development of a new South Vietnamese leadership...
...Practicing deprived me of a social life," he notes...
...He feared conviction and a prison sentence...
...Writers & Writing A Peculiar Specimen By Richard C. Hottelet Tom Wells' Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (Palgrave, 692 pp., $32.50) begins with Nixon White House operatives breaking into a Los Angeles psychiatrist's office in September 1971 to secure information about its subject...
...Little of that here...
...She wanted her son to be a concert pianist...
...Ellsberg remained a hawk after his return to Washington in the summer of 1967, although he did not talk about the morality of the war...
...He was feted across the country, including at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion with naked girls swimming in an aquarium pool...
...quiet drama can be beautifully effective...
...Several months earlier Ellsberg had given the New York Times the Pentagon Papers, an enormous official, top secret history of U.S...
...It is hard to say what the psychiatrist's records might have revealed...
...Still, he advocated saturation military operations outside populated areas, supported by increased bombing...
...It need not be heroic...
...It was at this time that his marriage really hit the rocks...
...A friend described him as an "obnoxious" husband, totally self-centered and inconsiderate...
...By December he was bemoaning the suffering of the Vietnamese people...
...Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers was an ego trip, thinly disguised as an effort to pull the United States out of Vietnam...
...A major impulse was sex...
...Tom Wells devoted some six years to this work, and his detailed Notes testify to his seriousness...
...By the time he graduated from Harvard Ellsberg had become a Cold Warrior, appalled by the Alger Hiss affair, the Berlin blockade and the rape of Czechoslovakia...
...Now Ellsberg came into his own: The women were plentiful, he could do what he wanted, and his high Civil Service rank afforded him status...
...Herostratos wanted to live in history as the man who burned down the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world...
...He is seen as a pornographer as well as a poseur...
...Exhilarated by the danger, he took part in combat operations...
...Nevertheless, he easily won a scholarship to Harvard where he struck one classmate as having tremendous energy and curiosity without having any sort of moral or intellectual center...
...There is no formula for biography...
...He thus acquired a reputation for loose lips...
...As it was, however, the court dismissed the case and Ellsberg became what he always dreamed of being: the center of the nation's attention...
Vol. 84 • July 2001 • No. 4
