History and Deceit: "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident" (August, 1964) and American Leaders Betray Public Trust Over Iraq

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was the largely fallacious "casus belli" used by President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk to begin unlimited military operations against North Vietnam and Vietcong forces in the southern regions of that divided nation.

Wikipedia, the helpful reference guide for the Internet , provides some background to the events that occurred this very week 48 years ago:

********************"The Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the USS Maddox incident, are the names given to two separate confrontations, one actual and one now recognized as intentionally fabricated, involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, engaged three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1] A sea battle resulted, in which the Maddox expended over two hundred eighty 3-inch and 5-inch shells, and in which four USN F-8 Crusader jet fighter bombers strafed the torpedo boats. One US aircraft was damaged, one 14.5 mm round hit the destroyer, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed and six were wounded; there were no U.S. casualties.
The second Tonkin Gulf incident was originally claimed by the U.S. National Security Agency to have occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead may have involved "Tonkin Ghosts"[6] (false radar images) and not actual NVN torpedo boat attacks."*********************http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident


We now know that President Johnson and his officials lied about the August fourth incident and lied again about the mission of the ships, and in stating that the position of the destroyers "Maddox" and "Turner Joy" were simply patrolling in international waters. (A dubious claim, in light of later revaluations. )

Some suspected this at the time but it wasn't until several years later in a 1970 documentary by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that reality began to catch up to the chicanery in Washington. The release of the classified "Pentagon Papers" by former US Marine and intelligence analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, also played a major part in opening the eyes of Americans to the deceit.

Many officials after the fact--even Bobby McNamara himself admitted a few years before his death in the Errol Morris documentary "The Fog of War" (2007) that the second and most politically significant attack on August 4 th never occurred.

This was either a "false flag" operation or a mistake that LBJ seized on to thrust America into direct combat operations and ramp up a war that had been previously touted as a war between North and South Vietnam with the Americans in an "advisory" role. The term "advisory" must be considered loosely in light of the fact that there were 15,000 US forces in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson assumed office at the time of John Kennedy's assassination. It is also clear that, unlike Kennedy, Johnson had zero ability to say "no" to the Pentagon until his own Presidency was at risk in 1968 and the US largely conscript forces has sustained high casualties. With no end in sight and General William Westmoreland braying for 150,000 more troops on top of the over half-million already there, AND that public opinion in his own Democratic Party turning away from him, Johnson chose not to run for re-election.

By the time Lyndon Johnson left office 550,000 American troops were engaged in the war and 20,000 had died. While never officially declared as a war by Congress, as per the Constitutional requirement spelled out directly in the document, a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President wide powers to wage war was approved on August 9th, 1964. It passed by a wide margin in the Senate. Only two Senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, voted against this measure.

Another 38,000 thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese would die before this most destructive part of the Vietnam War would finally end almost eleven years after the "USS Maddox Incident".





(below) From the 2007 documentary, "War Made Easy", narrated by Sean Penn: here is a segment devoted to the Maddox incident. It also covers what would happen 39 years later in the run-up to the next major "war of choice" by the US Pentagon chiefs, a willing President, and a gullible major media, against Iraq in 2003. Think we'll get a retraction from the media on that one, ever?

The Philipine-American War (1899-1902); America's Last 'Frontier Outpost' And First Asian War

"There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”---Mark Twain (founding member of The Anti-Imperialist League) from a letter in "The New York World", circa 1900.)

Starting in 1898, the United States, under President William McKinley, annexed the islands of Hawaii as a United States territory.  (There had been a coup backed by US business interests there in 1893.) It was the first stirrings of American power beyond the continental frontier that stopped at the West Coast.

 

In February ,1898, after years of hyperbolic anti-Spanish "yellow journalism" in the big city papers of William Randolph Hearst and other publishers of "the yellow press",  war broke out two months after the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, with the loss of 200 sailors. 

Soon ,despite attempts to placate the US government,  Spain was locked in a war with the young nation over the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the little island of Guam in the remote central Pacific and the large archipelago of the Philippines in Southeast Asia.   

The United States intelligentsia, government and business officials paid very little attention to the Philippines in the decades before the war, according to Professor Richard Sibley in his 2007 book, "A War For Frontier and Empire".  Indeed only a few dozen articles about the enormous chain of islands had even been published in American periodicals for the decades prior to the conquest. 

   By the Summer of 1898, the Spanish forces--which faced defeat from Filipino Independence fighters in all but its capital of Manila--were suddenly faced with defeat at sea.  This came fromm American Admiral George Dewey's Pacific Fleet in Manila Bay itself.  Spainish forces surrendered to the Americans after a one-sided sea battle.  The "Battle for Manila" that shortly followed the loss of the Spanish fleet was more of a hand-over between high officials of two governments than an actual fight.  

The point of the battle was to prevent the imposition of forces from The First Philippine Republic, led by President Emilio Aquinaldo, into the city.  The new president was suffering under the impression that the Americans had no interest in an empire in his country--or so he had been led to believe reportedly by US officials in Hong Kong before the firing started.

But now he was frustrated from taking control of the capital city---the main conduit of commerce and information to the outside world.  By early 1899--shortly before the US Senate in Washington was ready to vote to accept the annexation of the islands from Spain---a shooting incident on a bridge on the outskirts of Manila, started by one American soldier, precipitated an exchange of volleys between Alquinaldo's forces and the Yankees.

 

 The second phase of the war, called "The Philippine Insurrection" by some historians, had begun. 

The US Army and Marines drove the often lightly-armed Philippinos back in conventional attacks on the main island of Luzon.  One of the American commanders was General Arthur MacArthur, the father of the more famous "American Caesar" of World War II and Korea, Douglas.          

     A bloody war became bloodier when the local forces broke into guerrilla groups later in 1899 to try and fight back against the Americans.  To counter the "hit-and-run" strategy and the casualties brought on by unconventional warfare, the Americans became more aggressive. Torture techniques such as "the water cure" were introduced to get suspicious men to talk.  This was like the water-boarding methods of today, only you put a man on the ground and force-filled him with water until his stomach was extended.  If he didn't talk, as happened often according to reports, the torture was repeated.   

Word of these techniques (as well as mass shootings in villages by soldiers and Marines ) were leaked out of the war zone by American soldiers and newspapermen from  the USA, Britain, France, et al.  Soldiers themselves risked court-martials by writing about what was taking place in their units to family members back home.   They told of the "water cure" tactics and regular firing squad reprisals against villagers suspected of harboring "rebels". Then there were the camps: 

 

From Wikipedia:          

Filipino villagers were forced into concentration camps called reconcentrados which were surrounded by free-fire zones, or in other words “dead zones.” Furthermore, these camps were overcrowded and filled with disease, causing the death rate to be extremely high. Conditions in these “reconcentrados” are generally acknowledged to have been inhumane. Between January and April 1902, 8,350 prisoners of approximately 298,000 died. Some camps incurred death rates as high as 20 percent."

 

 "One camp was two miles by one mile (3.2 by 1.6 km) in area and 'home' to some 8,000 Filipinos. Men were rounded up for questioning, tortured, and summarily executed"

"In Batangas Province, where General Franklin Bell was responsible for setting up a concentration camp, a correspondent described the operation as “relentless.” General Bell ordered that by December 25, 1901, the entire population of both Batangas Province and Laguna Province had to gather into small areas within the “poblacion” of their respective towns. Barrio families had to bring everything they could carry because anything left behind—including houses, gardens, carts, poultry and animals—was to be burned by the U.S. Army. Anyone found outside the concentration camps was shot. General Bell insisted that he had built these camps to "protect friendly natives from the insurgents, assure them an adequate food supply" while teaching them "proper sanitary standards." The commandant of one of the camps referred to them as the "suburbs of Hell."

Estimates vary over how many Philippine civilians died, but the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands.  Most of them died from cholera and typhus outbreaks in the camps.  As in all wars, atrocities were committed on both sides, but the suffering fell harder on least trained and out-fitted forces. 

 

The US military lost 4,200 men in the war and 20,000 Philipinos combatants fell officially in action.   By the end of the main part of the war (July, 1902) General Alquinaldo had been captured and the islands were on their way to becoming Americanized--with English-language schools, an American style court system and a lower house of elected representatives to bring a measure of democracy to the whole affair of American conquest.  The Upper House remained in the hands of the American Commissioners, acting much as the viceroys and district commissioners of another empire.  

The Philippine-American war is not much discussed in American schools, and is low on the radar of major US  conflicts.  But in it contains all the seeds of the modern wars in American history from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.  It's not surprise that this is so, given that the "frontier attitude" of many Americans combined well with the colonial aspirations of any emerging industrial nation of the time.    

 

 There seems little in this chapter of imperialism of just over a century ago that is becoming of a republic.   And the words of Mark Twain above could have been said of Iraq and Vietnam and our extended time in other areas as well.

America's War in Vietnam: Personal Reminiscence from a Kid Stateside

'America lost the Vietnam War because we never cared to understand the Vietnamese people or our own motives for fighting the war.  Our national myth convinced us we were morally superior. Our technology made us feel invincible. Our bureaucracy gave us standard operating procedure. It was not a winning combination."--Loren Baltz, author of "Backfire: The Myths That Made Us Fight, The Illusions That Helped Us Lose... " (1985, Ballentine Books)

   It found it off-putting one day about a decade ago when the business I was working at received boxes of salable goods marked "Made in Vietnam".  This was hardly noticed by anyone or worth commenting about.

 It was for me a realization that a great deal of time had passed and, like many of America's wars, what seemed a desperate and intractable struggle of earlier days was now old news. 

The picture to the right here is of myself (the little brat in the green Army uniform) posing with my older brother Robert--in blue--in 1967 or 68 at my aunt's house in South San Francisco.

 Bob was home from Vietnam, "in country" after a tour with the Air Force as a helicopter air/sea rescue gunner.  He brought home some gifts for the family,  including the uniform I'm wearing--long lost--and a black-cloth map of Southeast Asia I wish I still had which showed all the places that the USA had bases in South Vietnam as well as the flags of the other nations (Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, et al.) in the longest war in American history.

 

Until the one in Afghanistan.  

  He would go back to Asia, specifically Clark Field in the Philippines for a couple more year-end tours before returning stateside with a Filipino wife and a new baby.  I have never talked to Robert much about the war.  I'm sure I asked him, but he would change the subject. How could a kid raised in a suburb in California know what it was like to fire a "50 Cal" machine gun at enemy soldiers from the door of a Huey helicopter?

 

    I remember my father, an ex-Marine, adamant against the war, angry at how Lyndon Johnson--a man he voted for in 1964 for President---couldn't or wouldn't start bringing home troops from a war he regarded as a civil war we had no business being directly involved in for his stepson--or any other American--to be involved in risking his life over.  

When a neighbor--an older World War II vet who had liberated many a wine cellar in Normandy and might have taken a shot or two at the odd German-- once asked my father how we could possibly get troops out of  South Vietnam, to turn our backs, I heard my father  reply "Same way they got in, Joe. Get some ships and planes, and get them out!" 

 

Joe--a next-door neighbor whose kids I played with--- voted for Richard  Nixon in 1968. My dad and mom supported the first anti-war Democratic candidate, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota--he had the guts to challenge Lyndon Johnson for his re-election and his good results in a early primary in New Hampshire drove Johnson from the race. Later Robert Kennedy, smelling blood as only a Kennedy could, entered the race. 

 McCarthy was no Bobby Kennedy.  Nobody was.  

 

 RFK  had changed his mind about the sense of fighting a land war in southeast Asia, or at least stopped supporting a war he didn't believe in.  This was about the same time--1966--that Secretary of Defense Bob MacNamara decided the war was un-winnable.  The difference was that the Secretary of Defense under John Kennedy and Johnson didn't  make his change of mind known until he wrote a book in 1993.  Too late, Secretary McNamara, too bad you didn't tell the American people your doubts back then.    

RFK's assassination--the night he won the California Primary in June 1968, after my parents had a house party for those who supported the winner and after I went to bed thinking Kennedy was going to win the nomination and woke up to hear he was near death--ended that dream.

 

 This brought my parents and millions of other anti-war voters and activists back to supporting McCarthy.  But it was too late --LBJ's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, had the delegates and the Democratic big shots behind him.  The Chicago convention was a terrible event--a flat-out "police riot" and the beatings and cracking of heads of demonstrators made it clear this was like no war in 20th century American history, maybe ever.  

 

Humphrey, The "Happy Warrior" who stood up for Civil Rights for blacks in the 40's before it was popular in his  party but was still hostage to the Cold War hysteria of the 1950's ,  couldn't or wouldn't separate himself from President Johnson's policies in the campaign. 

  Enough anti-war voters stayed home that November and Richard Nixon was elected.   This began the "Vietmanization Program" of Nixon and Kissinger and the long, slow "peace with honor" with-drawl of American troops.   This was punctuated by stepped-up bombing campaigns over civilian targets in North Vietnam, an invasion of Cambodia and more bombing, all part of the American strategy of a "peace  process" that moved like a snail in Paris. 

What did a kid my age think about all this?  Mostly I thought like my parents did, this was th wrong war i nthe wrong place at the wrong time,  but I also wondered if  the war would still be going on after I turned eighteen?  Would the kids in my class be scambling around a jungle playing an endless game of death on another people's turf?  It would give pause to any partriotic young rascal to at least wonder "why?"

 

    In the meantime much of what I learned about the war came from magazines, the local newspaper, stray remarks at school like a  teacher of mine who broke down in anger unexpectedly when she was trying to explain top a combined fifth grade class at a school assembly why the Paris Peace Talks were taking so long.

"How can so many people die while these old men fight over what shape the negotiating table should be?" I remember Mrs. Carrington, a stork-like woman with a pile of reddish-brown hair on her head, suddenly said.  It was a bold thing to say for a public school teacher at an assembly with lots of little "Nixon kids" to go home to their parents and tell about it. So far as I know though nothing came of it.  It was 1971-72 by then and a lot of parents,  like my friends' dad, old Joe O'Leary, --were coming,  too late-- to their senses.   

"This ain't World War Two, George," my dad said Joe told him at some restaurant the O'Learys  and the Noakes' parents went to after the political and personal rift between the male heads of household were healed by the wives and by current events.  We were all Americans after all, and this was a a long, long war and how many more kids were going to be fled into the maw of mechanized war?  How many more scenes of Vietnamese mothers crying over kids killed in bombing raids were people supposed to see on television?   How many protesters needed to be arrested? How many times would Congress refuse to support Nixon's war anymore, even though some of these same Congressmen and Senators had voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964? 

It's estimated that 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War from 1959--1973, mostly after 1965.  Another 9,000 ex-soldiers committed suicide within five years after the war.      

 

 Casualties for Vietnamese people, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the DMZ, killed by all combatants, are  estimated by a French news agency at 4 million.        

We are doing business with Vietnam now the same way we did business with Germany and Japan and ,a bit later on , our national nemesis, "Red" China.  When I held that box of clothes I knew then the war conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Nixon said  we couldn't lose was just a dead letter. American business was doing business again.    

PS:   There are two brief video clips in the first two comments boxes here, showing in part how the war  in Vietnam was presented to Americans at home.  I think anyone interested in that sort of thing--propaganda and journalism in war-- should take a look at the stark contrasts between these two presentations.

Bay Area News Pioneer Belva Davis--"Never In My Wildest Dreams"

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60's-70's and early 80's, I used to watch Belva Davis on television. She was  a television news anchor first on CBS Channel 5 (KPIX) and later on the main Public Broadcasting station in the Bay Area, KQED, which she hosted a nightly news program called "A Closer Look" and later a show called "This Week in Northern California."   She and the erudite Rollin Post were my favorite news people on the tube.    

I realized she was unique in being an African-American Woman on the television, but I didn't know  she was the only African American female anchor west of the Mississippi.   Or that her life was so interesting and so remote from the past I imagined.  Thanks to her fortitude and inner power to overcome the racism endemic in a high-profile business she did excellent work in documentaries and interviews and captured a lot of those times--which included riots in Berkeley over the Vietnam War, the rise and violence swirling and surrounding  the Black Panther movement, the Zebra and  Zodiac mass murders of the early 70's, the firing of radical UCLA Professor Angela Davis by the then-Governor Ronald Reagan,  the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974, the mass killings of 900 people in Guyana in November 1978 by the demonic Jim Jones and his People's Temple followers and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and America's first openly-Gay supervisor,  Harvey Milk, at the San Francisco City Hall that  very same month. 

Her memoir tells these stories as well as her own---a child raised by her aunt in Monroe, Louisiana--the same town that Black Panther Huey Newton came from--and her coming to California with her family when jobs in military plants opened up in World War II.  I know a lot of people have never heard of this lady, but I think at least the broad outlines of her life is worth hearing about.   And she's still working.

 Here is a introduction to Ms. Davis from the PBS News Hour .    

M*A*S*H (1970) Director: Robert Altman/Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Classics

In 1970, in the face of the longest and likely craziest war in American history, a major studio in Hollywood bankrolled a movie where anarchy reigned and good guys blew the whistle on the whole charade of blind patriotism and the little turf wars of some generals and back-home politicians who saw war-making as a football game.

M*A*S*H* was perhaps not the first movie to let this mangy cat out of the bag, but it was the most successful and the first to totally hit home with a shell-shocked public tired of being lied to about Vietnam. The film grossed 80 million dollars, made more money then the standard World War II films of that same year ("Patton" and "Tora, Tora, Tora") and, along with "Easy Rider" and "The Graduate" , changed the way movies were made in America.
This period wouldn't last long before the space cowboys from far, far away and the Rambo movies would wave the flag without question again. But it left a mark we still see in movies now and again.
It's pretty funny too.



The film was episodic-television and B-feature film director Robert Altman's breakout movie. In this case, to say this is the director's film is literally more true than usual. Although he had a very good script by a former black-listed writer, Ring Lardner, Jr., from a novel by a couple Korean War vets, Altman also had his own ideas about war. He had flown 53 bombing missions as a co-pilot in the South Pacific during World War II and had his share of disillusionment about the costs of war. "M*A*S*H* is movie about insanity," he was quoted as saying. He essentially redesigned Lardner's script so much the writer thought the film was ruined. The studio heads at 20th Century Fox were scared too, until the movie was premiered in San Francisco early in 1970 and they discovered the audience totally got it. They were ahead of the honchos. The film opened in New York, won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year and so on.

Although Robert Altman is famous with cinemaphiles for going against traditional three-act narrative story-telling, the film has some precedent I believe in the Marx Brothers movies of the 1930's. In films like "Duck Soup" (1933), Groucho Marx is some how made President or a country or in "Horse Feathers" he is a college president.


Because of this "happy idea", going back to the plays of Aristophanes, authority is essentially suspended; protocol goes by the wayside; men of high station and stuffed shirts are brought down to size by witty insults they have no comebacks to; grand women of great pretense are shown they are silly people who need to smarten up, leaders in institutions grown moss-backed by their undisputed deference by others are given the boot. Anarchy reigns. The big shots have made a hash of the world through war and depressions; its time to let the competent smart alacks. the Lords of Misrule, in to being human behavior back down to earth. Wine and beer is spilled; merriment is had between the sexes, fools are no longer suffered, people sing into the night and all is merry again

Again, as in those funny films from the dark days of The Great Depression we are presented with a character(s) in a position of authority through some happenstance, like being drafted.

In this case, the "big idea" is that two top-flight surgeons are drafted into the Army Medical Corps. Since the business of "meatball" surgery", patching up soldiers and Marines from ghastly wounds, is booming business, they are nearly indispensable. They do not let this leverage go untested.

The film has its flaws in my view. The famous "naked woman surprised in the shower" scene with Sally Kellerman plays like a misogynist fantasy. The character of "Hot Lips" isn't just put down; she has to be humiliated. Some critics see this as the director commenting on the bad behavior of men in a war zone. Perhaps, but it's a scene that says more to me about the director than any war, Korea or Vietnam, he might be commenting on.

In any case the merriment always ends when the wounded men come from the front lines to be patched up to fight on or go home, half-alive or in a coffin. In that way the film is of a darker hue than anything the Brothers Marx were allowed to get away with. "M*A*S*H* does an excellent job balancing the true cost of war with the facade of bull that tries to cover up those costs in colorful bunting and empty words. War is human folly, and sometimes the only way to show it clearly to "the folks back home" is to make it as zany and as bloody as possible at the same time.

For Veterans Day--Eagle Point National Cemetary

This site, twenty miles northeast of Medford, Oregon, in the southern part of the state, contains the remains of 12,049 men amd women who served their country in the Armed Forces. I took a few pictures here a couple weeks back when I was up visiting my parents' grave markers.

"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" - Trailer

In the early 1960's Daniel Ellsberg started out as a "hawk" who believed in the Vietnam War.

He first served on active duty as a Marine rifle company officer in the 1950's, later a scholar and professor, and by 1959 a senior analyst at the defense-based think-tank, The Rand Institute near Los Angeles.

By 1964, he had become an important intellectual conduit for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when he and President Lyndon Johnson launched a major American-led escalation of The Vietnam War in 1964 (using a misleading report about attacks on an American warship in The Gulf of Tonkin.)

Risking twenty years in jail for espionage, Ellsberg snuck out a copy of a top secret report about the lies and half-truths and cover-ups that led the American public into endorsing the Vietnam war, a war that cost 58,000 American lives and also killed up to two million Vietnamese. In 1971, he turned these copies over to "The New York Times" and selected Congressmen, and in so doing became a highly controversial figure and a target for the Nixon White House.

The massive tome of papers, that Ellsberg released to the New York Times and selected members of Congress became known as "The Pentagon Papers". This recent documentary explores Ellsberg change of mind and heart about the war he not only analyzed but led a Marine company into battle in. It keenly explores his motivations and those around him, including his wife and his colleagues who also changed their minds on the war.

I found this a riveting documentary. If you're interested in how America went into this war and how leaders don't trust their citizens with the whole truth, or any truth at all at times, its is worth seeing.


http://firstrunfeatures.com/mostdangerousman.html

**2010 Academy Award Nominee!**

Co-winner of this years Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review (and one of their Five Best Documentaries of the Year), Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and in contention for the years Best Documentary Oscar, The Most Dangerous Man in America tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, who in 1971 concluded that the war is based on decades of lies and leaks 7,000 pages of top secret documents to The New York Times, making headlines around the world. A riveting story of how this one mans profound change of heart created a landmark struggle involving Americas newspapers, its president and Supreme Court. With Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Tony Russo, Howard Zinn, Hedrick Smith, John Dean, and, from the secret White House tapes, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg the most dangerous man in America.