Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg [Hardcover]

Tom Wells (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312177194 | ISBN-13: 978-0312177195 | Publication Date: June 9, 2001 | Edition: 1st

In March 1971, Daniel Ellsberg gave The New York Times access to a classified government report revealing the secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg, a former Vietnam Marine, said he violated national security to protest an illegal war. The release of the Pentagon Papers exploded in controversy. Ellsberg was indicted for espionage; charges were dropped when it was revealed that Nixon operatives burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in order to discredit him. Wild Man is the first biography of the man at center stage in one of the most remarkable periods in American history. What drove this cold war intellectual to break the law? A richly detailed tale of the times, this indelible portrait of the hawk-turned-dove who tried single-handedly to end the war will stand as one of the great American stories.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition (June 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312177194
• ISBN-13: 978-0312177195
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,016,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Half a life. The personal half., September 1, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (Hardcover)

Daniel Ellsberg's profession at RAND in Santa Monica was the creation of mathematical models of conflict situations - wars, face-offs, threats of war, crises - the daily business of the cold war. He is said to have done this work brilliantly. He was expert at game theory.

He was unusual, probably unique among defense theorists, in that he stood up from his computer terminal, turned aside from his theoretical models of the war and went to war himself, personally, with a rifle. It comes through that Ellsberg was a bit of an enthusiast -- a war lover. Strangely, the Viet Nam chapters are the only chapters in the book where the character and the story really come alive.

But Ellsberg returned from Viet Nam depressed and disgusted. He ultimately copied and released to the press The Pentagon Papers, the classified historical account of US policy in Viet Nam.

Very few people actually read the Pentagon Papers. Tom Wicker of the New York Times read into it and was struck and evidently quite shocked by the idea that a war could be discussed as though it were a rational game. He did not know, and most people still don't know, the extent to which US cold war policy, our grand strategy, had been subsumed into John von Neumann's mathematical descriptions of parlour games.

Daniel Ellsberg's biography should have had something to say about his profession, about game theory, about the awkward, perhaps ridiculous overlay of a mathematical theory on a shooting war in the jungle. Ellsberg was deeply inside this business, a RAND superstar, and in the end he became disillusioned and quite talkative about it.

The author of this biography completely missed this whole astonishing backstory. He simply left out Ellsberg's professional life, his strange and remarkable line of work as a war gamer.

What we have here instead is a relentlessly hostile, tut-tut-tutting 604-page description of Ellsberg's personal life: his childhood, his hard pushing mom, his social activities, his water cooler conversations, and his dates and his nights. What are we supposed to do with this kind of information?

If you are still wondering why we were in Viet Nam, and who isn't, there exist some much better and livelier books to read: A great introduction to the RAND era and story is "The Wizards of Armageddon," by Kaplan. It was recently re-published in paperback. Prisoner's Dilemma by Poundstone is an excellent book on Von Neumann and the Game Theory. Another book on the subject is, of course, "The Pentagon Papers." Ellsberg's autobiography, which is soon to be published, may also prove helpful.

This biography, "Wild Man" does contain, by the way, some interesting historical facts. For example, the author observes that RAND maintained a French colonial villa in Saigon. We are left to wonder what the heck went on in there - that is, what their game was. The author doesn't seem to have a clue that it mattered.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Biography On A Controversial Anti-War Activist!, May 23, 2003

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (Hardcover)

While I found this absorbing and thoughtfully written biography of Vietnam anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg to be a bit overblown and pretentious at times, it is a masterfully written exploration of a complex and puzzling man, and provides the reader with a far-reaching biographical portrait that both neatly complements as well as providing a foil for Ellsberg's own recent autobiographical efforts in the best-selling work "Secrets". While "Secrets" concentrates first and foremost on the period of his life leading up to and including the debacle over the illicit release of the top-secret Pentagon papers to the press, Well's biography, "Wild Man" gives us a much more fully developed, balanced, and for the most part more objective look at the mercurial, narcissistic, and stunningly brilliant Ellsberg's life.

Ellsberg's direction in life was aggressively forged in the crucible of his aggressive and domineering mother's ambitions for him, such that he rose by dint of ability and hard effort to the heights of academic success early, graduating with a PhD in Economics from Harvard in the pre-Vietnam war era. Yet Ellsberg often did the unexpected, especially given his pedigree as an ambitious young Jewish-American intellectual; after college he volunteered for the Marine Corps, and served as an officer before going on to graduate school. After graduating from Harvard, he soon found himself recruited for the Rand Corporation, an elite Defense-Department funded think-tank and private preserve for intellectuals useful for the DOD bureaucracy. Sure enough, Ellsberg's controversial ideas and thoughtful repose gained him notice and a post within the government working for a highly placed Pentagon undersecretary.

This position placed him in the catbird seat in terms of his access to the opening sequences and related bureaucratic responses to the expanding conflict in Vietnam. Even as he lent his support to the Pentagon, Ellsberg became concerned about the use of body counts and other quantitative measures being employed as key indicators of our military situation and progress being made. Criticisms of the methodology fell on deaf ears however, and Ellsberg found himself more isolated and less influential than he had hoped he would be. Instead, he argued for a long and detailed survey "on the ground" in Vietnam, which he would volunteer to accomplish for himself, and which he felt confident would give a better, more accurate and realistic appraisal of American forces in the region. Over a eighteen month period, Ellsberg became convinced the war was being conducted all wrong, that the employment of such metrics as body counts, bomb tonnage, and areas secured were catastrophically misleading at best and profoundly delusional at worst.

The rest, as they say, was history, and it is useful to have both Ellsberg's recollections as well as those of an independent biographer in detailing just how and why all that cam e to transpire did so, for the devil is in the details of the historical record. At the same time, I was a bit offended by Well's recurring tale-spinning in terms of providing the reader with salacious material about Ellsberg's peripatetic and admittedly insistent womanizing. While there is no doubt that Ellsberg is no saint, I still fail to see why Wells felt it was so important to stress Ellsberg's ego excesses, his romantic escapades, or his apparent inability to stay the course on any particular intellectual path long enough to make a career of it has to do with his heart-wrenching decision to expose himself to a possible life behind bars in order to provide the American people with what he felt was critical information they had a right to know. Still, this is fascinating material, and any self-respecting sidewalk psychoanalyst like you and I are likely to enjoy a lot of his thoughtful ruminations about Ellsberg even as we know they are largely irrelevant to what happened and why. This is a worthwhile if somewhat flawed book. Enjoy!

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liked the book, liked the Ellsberg, June 20, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (Hardcover)

It is long, but it struck me as effectively structured and altogether clear, with brief repetitions that helped pull together the data and interpretations, the drama and the conflicts. Yes, the author pulls no punches in critically putting Ellsberg into a larger context beyond the releasing of those Papers, but I judge this to be relevant to a rounded, analytical, and probing biography. The idea that the Papers' release had an indirect impact on bringing down Nixon was new and plausible to me. Wells avoids the more extreme debunking of Ellsberg (such as those who hold that his act caused millions of Cambodians and Vietnamese to be killed). My reading is that Wells has also been courageous, ambitious, super-patient, and fair, appreciating Ellsberg's soaring great acts and texts as well as grasping his humanity -- virtues, faults, elegancies, suavities, passions, and all. It did not strike me as a hatchet job, but as insightful and often sympathetic to the one who dared -- and the sheer guts of Ellsberg in his historic defiance of the establishment awes me still. Sure, it's always tricky to impute motives to others (and maybe there is a very lot more yet to Dr. Wild Man), but I can relate to Wells's claim that he has captured much of a complex, significant, and anguished character. Finally, I see some of Ellsberg now in certain bright but difficult people I work with, and in that way too Wells has increased my general understandings of them, me, and my times.