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No wonder Daniel Ellsberg withdrew from participation in this biography. Although the author declares himself "sympathetic politically" to the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, Tom Wells bluntly depicts a very flawed personality. Almost from his birth in 1931, according to Wells, Ellsberg was shaped by his domineering mother into a brilliant narcissist, arrogant about his unquestionable intellectual gifts but so unfocused that he never really fulfilled his early promise. At the time he passed along the top-secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam, which revealed that the government had frequently misled its citizens about a war many of its own experts felt could not be won, Ellsberg was certainly and commendably convinced that the truth must be told. But he was also frustrated by his failure to achieve the prominence he felt he deserved at the RAND Institute think tank and eager for public recognition. Wells traces the trajectory of Ellsberg's life fairly but unsparingly, drawing on the many interviews Ellsberg gave him before their break in 1995 and extensive (often directly contradictory) comments by his friends and colleagues to portray someone who habitually exaggerated his importance and overstated his role in various projects. (Wells concludes, for example, that Ellsberg's claim that he prompted Robert McNamara to order the Pentagon Papers study "is almost certainly untrue.") It's not a pretty picture, and the author doesn't gloss over Ellsberg's compulsive womanizing or his carelessness about security classifications. Nonetheless, he also paints a nuanced portrait of a man who began his career as a convinced cold-war hawk but was prompted by both research and his firsthand observations to conclude that the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Daniel Ellsberg achieved fame in 1971, at age 40, when he leaked a massive, top-secret Pentagon study about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War to the New York Times, helping to spur the Watergate scandal. Ellsberg's act of conscience, leavened as it apparently was by vainglory, deserves study. But his obscure if interesting life hardly merits a massive biography. Wells (The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam), a sometime college professor, has researched Ellsberg in all his guises: the not-very-nice-guy, the public-policy whiz kid, the macho soldier, the Vietnam War hawk-turned-dove, the nearly-convicted-traitor-to-his-country, the elder sociopolitical activist. Wells also researched Ellsberg's milieus the elite private school in suburban Detroit, Harvard University, the RAND Corporation think tank in northern California, the Pentagon, the Marine Corps, Vietnam's battlefields. Ellsberg cooperated initially, but bridled at negative assessments of his character passed along by Wells during interviews and at Wells's suggestion that Ellsberg was self-aggrandizing. Eventually, Ellsberg stopped cooperating, although his compulsion to talk about himself yielded unexpected chats. Despite insightful passages about peace and war, altruism and vanity and other polarities, this bloated book could have been a lengthy magazine article. Beyond the Pentagon papers, Ellsberg's life comes off as fairly inconsequential, and his evident mania for sexual conquest, including that of two women who married him and bore him children, gets boring after the first few dozen instances.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
