A man for all seasons

The publication of Daniel Ellsberg's memoir, "Secrets," at this particular moment is undoubtedly coincidental, but there is an eerie timeliness about it. Rumors of war abound, this time perhaps for a unilateral preemptive full-scale attack unprecedented in American history. Decisions are being made on the basis of secret information that will be divulged, in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's words, "only if and when the president decides that he thinks it's appropriate." It is this arrogance and secretiveness that are at the heart of the events in Ellsberg's book and that, he believes, pose a grave threat to the democratic process.

"Isn't it after all only history? Does it really matter?" With these dismissive words, Ellsberg recalls, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) in 1970 refused to make public the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret internal history of America's early involvement in Vietnam commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1967.

It was only history, perhaps, but it was this history that finally persuaded an already deeply skeptical Ellsberg that the war in Vietnam had no basis in legitimacy and that led him to do something he believed would land him in jail. He purloined the report from the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, where he worked, and released it to the New York Times, an action that caused a furor in the country and in the White House and set into motion events that led to Watergate, the fall of Richard Nixon's presidency and the end of the Vietnam War.

The story has been told before, most recently in Tom Wells' gossipy and critical biography, "Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg," but "Secrets" gives Ellsberg's version of these dramatic events. It provides a personal account of his conversion from gung-ho Marine and Cold War defense intellectual and bureaucrat to antiwar zealot prepared to go to prison to stop a war he had come to despise. The book also offers a valuable glimpse into the workings of the national security bureaucracy in the heyday of the Cold War and a searching analysis of the government secrecy that helped sustain it.