Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg

by Tom Wells

In 3/1971, Daniel Ellsberg gave The NY Times access to a classified government report revealing the secret history of the Vietnam War. A former Marine, he said he violated national security to protest an illegal war. The release of the Pentagon Papers exploded in controversy. He was indicted for espionage. Charges were dropped when it was revealed that Nixon operatives burglarized his psychiatrist in order to discredit him. Wild Man is the 1st biography of the man at center stage in one of the more remarkable periods in US history. What drove this cold war intellectual to break the law? A detailed tale of the times, this portrait of the hawk-turned-dove who tried single-handedly to end the war is a great American story.
Prologue: Break-in
Loner
Outsider
Liberated
Soldier & Theorist
Supergenius
Rejection
Damaged Goods
Death Wish
Wild Man
Friend or Country?
"We're All War Criminals"
Battle Mode
Boomerang
On Stage
Outcast

656 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2001

Reviews

[Bill]

It is a peculiar feeling to read a painstakingly detailed, fully-indexed 604-page biography and get the feeling that the author has simultaneously a pathological aversion to his subject and an irresistible fascination with him. Tom Wells chronicles in depth Daniel Ellsberg's strained relationship with his mother, who died young in a tragic family car crash. He dwells on examples of Ellsberg's self-centeredness, his lasciviousness, his womanizing, his vanity, his procrastination, his social alienation, and the spiraling irrelevance of his later years. Wells even repeatedly seeks to downplay the significance of Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, the ultra-secret Rand Corporation study of government deception of the public during the Vietnam War that made Ellsberg a household word when he released it to the New York Times.

While I am not one to assume that whistleblowers, much less perhaps the greatest whistleblower of all time, are plaster saints, I am a little put off by the degree of Tom Wells' antipathy toward his subject. To be fair, I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. I do think Ellsberg was tormented by the war, and possibly by his complicity in it. I would not be surprised if he had some personal demons or made some reckless choices. Nevertheless, he remains a man whom I admire intensely, because he did have the courage to stand up and expose the lies of the most powerful government on earth.

Moreover, for all the flaws in this long book, the writing is crisp and there are many moments of intense drama, my favorites being the antics of the Chuck Colson and the White House plumbers on behalf of the troglodytic Richard Nixon and Ellsberg's mad cross country campaign to elude the FBI. In a national game of whack-a-mole, the Department of Justice would secure an injunction against one paper seeking to publish the papers, only to have two more copies pop up in different papers across the country. Among his other accomplishments, Ellsberg's act led directly to the decision in New York Times v. Sullivan that the government could not under the First Amendment impose prior restraints on the press to prevent publication of material, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the release of which it objected.

The final word on this book is that it is a critical biography in a good sense. It thoroughly examines its subject, stripping away myths, scrutinizing flaws. It is hard to believe that there is a wart on its subject that is not put under the magnifying glass. And yet, it also attempts to give us the measure of Ellsberg the man, and I think it succeeds in spite of itself. By that I mean that despite the author's professed low opinion of Ellsberg, and studious attempts at documenting it, I find it hard not to think of Ellsberg as a (flawed) giant of our times. More than can be said, perhaps, of his nemesis, Richard Nixon.

[Erik Graff]

The Nixon White House illegally ordered the CIA to compose two psychological profiles of Daniel Ellsberg upon the discovery of his release of the 'top secret' 7000-page Pentagon Papers about US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt and the others weren't satisfied with what the agency psychologists reluctantly produced. This detailed psychobiography might have satisfied them.

Although author Wells probes deeply into his subject's past and the probable grounds for his conversion from an extreme hawk to an anti-war, anti-nuke activist, he does not provide much of the background of the times. For someone familiar with the war, with the Nixon administration and with Watergate, this would be no problem. For someone unfamiliar with the politics of the sixties and early seventies this might be a problem.

[Thomas]

Daniel Ellsberg was a terrible guy. He was brilliant, for sure, but also a narcissist, unfocused, adulterer, and mythomaniac. He liked to fuck, a lot. At least that what Tom Wells thought was important for the reader to know about Dan Ellsberg. Particularly the latter. The book goes in great details about Dan Ellsberg's sex life at different times of his life. Why do we need to know about it? Well, apparently because it was something he himself talked about a lot, and therefore something that probably came up a lot in interviews, leading Wells to talk about it a lot. But, objectively, we do not really care about it. Get ready, however, for a lot of useless details which, altogether, draw the portrait of a rather detestable person who also happened to be smart and, by the way, to have been causal in one of the biggest freedom of information case in the United States, leading to sweeping changes in Freedom of information law and culture surrounding state secrecy.
The book has a wealth of details, and it is remarkable for this. Like its main character, it is also very unfocused and not sparce enough in detailing. Sometimes, we do not need to know everything. Good historical narratives are the ones that provide clarity, not infinite numbers of details. This wealth of details, in fact, hurts Wells' narrative more than once, as his seeming inability to decide what historical truth was - or seemed to have been - lead him to accumulate contradictory quotes from various interviewees, or sometimes coming from the same interviewee (eg. Fred Hoffman, who both says that Ellsberg was not a briefer and could not write short papers, and some page later says that he was really good at concise idea). In the same vein, we learn that Ellsberg's academic contribution to game theory applied to economics were not exceptionally innovative, but rather really good as concise critiques and succeeded thanks to stylistic as much as scientific criteria, and later on that Ellsberg was actually almost incomprehensible as an author. Both hardly can coexist. Yet, in this book, both do. To be fair, it seems clear that Ellsberg was a widely disorganized man. If someone ever tells you that ADHD is just a Gen Z invention, just give them this book. It's pretty clear that ADHD medication would probably not have hurt that man - and yet, it is striking that the author keeps depicting Ellbserg's inability to connect with others, to focus, to maintain a tidy rythm, in fact to live a normal life, as a moral flaw and not as an object of pity and empathy.
Overall, this is not a really bad book, one learns a lot, and notably about how one should be wary about Ellsberg's version of any events. But as a biography, it is somewhat disappointing. Ok, we understand that the guy likes to self-agrandize and is super annoying, and wants to fuck everything. Is that really the most interesting thing to say about a nuclear strategist, Vietnam war analyst, then disarmament activist? It is as if the author met Ellsberg, got super disappointed, and decided to burn the icon he himself created. That's not super interesting, as a scholarly project.
I learned a lot about Ellbserg's trial, though

[Hugh Simonich]

Very juicy read. Wells main focus wasn’t about the release of the pentagon papers, but about the man himself - Daniel Ellsberg. You learn about both and much more, but it’s an analysis of Ellsberg through hundreds of interviews, which included Ellsberg himself. What a treat this was. I had no idea! Ellsberg was such an interesting character in our recent world history. There is a question of how much he actually contributed to ending the Vietnam War, Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, and the calming of nuclear tensions around the world. I think Ellsberg would probably say that he was the lynchpin in all of these events. He wanted the spotlight, the attention, the adulation and the respect that he believed he deserved and craved. He had narcissistic traits and was very difficult to be around for durations at a time. He had to dominate the conversation, show how smart and experienced he was, but the response he expected and wanted so bad to validate himself that he was worthy, often did not come. Everyone respected the hell out of his intelligence. He was no doubt a brilliant man - genius level. But - the man could not produce when needed! He would not stick to anyone’s schedule but his own frenetic one. He was restless and could not sit still long enough to focus on writing. Writing and meeting deadlines was painful to him.
I could go on. I found him so interesting and asked myself how I would respond if I knew Daniel Ellsberg. I don’t know. Wells portrays him as overly sensitive, self-centered, condescending, patronizing, womanizing, disrespectful asshole of a jerk at times, but also a man who was compassionate, inspired, courageous, brilliant (with a capital “B”), passionate, and inspirational (at least to some). He was a mix for sure. Patricia Ellsberg who loved him for a long time, even though he drove her up the wall sometimes, as she chose to see all the great qualities about Dan. Or, conversely, she chose to overlook many of his very poor qualities. I don’t know. I think if I got to know Ellsberg personally, I would do what a lot of his friends and admirers would do - take him in small doses. He’s intense and attempts to dominate the room. I remember reading the part when Ellsberg attended a small dinner party in the late 70s and Bill Clinton was there. The hosts’ 10-yo boy asked to be excused and Clinton walked outside with him. Clinton turned to the boy and said something like, “Yeah, I don’t like him either.” I thought that so funny. That was Ellsberg to many - someone they couldn’t stand to be around. But, there were plenty who adored and respected him.
I gave this 5 stars because I learned an incredible amount about a person that I can relate to in many respects. He is relatable in all his flaws. I love that.

[David Corleto-Bales]

I'm not sure why anyone would think that Daniel Ellsberg rates a thousand page biography, (in contrast, Dean Rusk, who was secretary of state for eight years under two presidents has no such biography that I know of) but when you cut through all the boring stuff about his upbringing, marriages and philandering, you get about 200 pages of interesting material. Ellsberg was a private school educated Harvard Ph.D. who was hired by the Rand Corporation after service in the Marines to "analyze systems." Lent out to the Pentagon in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Ellsberg was one of the "whiz kids" who believed that the Vietnam War could be won by simply analyzing data and adjusting tactics to it. After his marriage fell apart, (and the realization that he could score women at will--did this not make him a security risk?--) he, experiencing a fatalistic sense of mission, went to Vietnam in 1965 and spent the next two years risking his life by attaching himself (and often making himself a nuisance with) army and marine units while in search of the Viet Cong. By the end of 1967, estranged from his new fiancee, he returns to the U.S., disillusioned, to Rand. And in 1971, becoming aware of Rand's possession of Robert McNamara's "secret report" on how the U.S. got into the war over several decades, he uses his young children to help him, (again, pretty sus) copy thousands of pages of the report and leaks it to the New York Times. Far from being an "anonymous source", pretty much everyone in the government knew it was Ellsberg, by this time well-known as being against the war and someone who had generally lost his marbles. The last half of the book is about how the Nixon Administration tried to stop the publication of what became known as the "Pentagon Papers" and their campaign to discredit Ellsberg by burglarizing his psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills. They would have been better off just talking to anyone who knew the guy and making some simple notes. Ellsberg's prosecution was later halted because of all of the Nixon men's extracurricular activities.

Ellsberg is a deeply flawed person who is often touted as a hero. I'm not sure I see that.

[Christopher Saunders]

Tom Wells, author of the definitive history of the antiwar movement (The War Within), provides an in-depth look at its most unlikely hero. Daniel Ellsberg was a Harvard professor, RAND analyst, Marine and Pentagon official who began as a hardened Cold Warrior, grew steadily disillusioned with American handling of the Vietnam War, then decided to leak a top-secret study chronicling the history of government deceit (the so-called Pentagon Papers) to the press, at very real risk of prosecution and bodily harm. Wells' picture of Ellsberg (who grudgingly cooperated with him) is surprisingly negative, often scathing, viewing him as an ambitious egomaniac who craved attention, bragged about, and exaggerated his exploits, and whose compulsive womanizing destroyed one marriage, strained another and made him alternately the envy and laughingstock of his peers. It's often hard to balance this with Ellsberg's most famous action; whether you view the leak as treason or heroism, it was undoubtedly a courageous act of principle. Still, compared to the deceit the Papers chroncile and the devious, hamfisted efforts of Richard Nixon's Plumbers to entrap and discredit him, even such a checkered personage as Ellsberg comes off smelling like roses.

[Chad Montabon]

Lots of talk about the many psychosis of Ellsberg. It gets bogged down at times, but overall a good read if you are willing to spend the time.

It is long and drags on extensively about the personal life and sexual peccadilloes of the title character.