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Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg

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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.

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!

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.

This biography of Daniel Ellsberg, while purported to be balanced, is in fact anything but. It is a relentless, unending and petty portrayal of a man who risked a life in prison for reasons that are complex and possibly not altogether selfless, but to the author his actions cannot have been motivated by anything other than egocentrism and the need for attention.

When I started this book, I was inclined to be sympathetic towards Ellsberg, having recently read his autobiography, and I was willing to hear an alternative point of view that was maybe not as favorable, knowing that he and his ex-partner in crime, Anthony Russo, had never spoken again after the Pentagon Paper trial. However, this portrait was so incredibly one sided that I couldn't take it seriously. It reads like nothing so much as the tirade of a girl whose boyfriend broke up with her, and now is on a mission to make all her ex's friends hate him.

The author goes to great lengths to give a platform to anything that Ellsberg's acquaintances have to say about him - as long as it's uniformly negative and depicts Ellsberg as wholly without any redeeming characteristics other than his brilliance. His decision to postpone his graduate studies to join the Marines is portrayed as motivated by a need to fulfill a childish macho fantasy. His disillusionment with the war and subsequent leftward turn is discounted as probably not authentic because friends recall that he wasn't interested in politics as a college student (and his claims to the contrary are taken as evidence that he's a liar). Ellsberg's recounting of his involvement in many important conversations and analyses of America's situation in Vietnam are dismissed by the author as "probably not true" based on his interviews with people who clearly don't like Ellsberg. His decision to go public with top secret information in an attempt to do something to end the war is not to be taken seriously, based on, among other sources, two ex-neighbors who didn't know Ellsberg and didn't really like him, but who felt that "he did it because he thought... he could make a big splash with it" and who "recall hearing 'criticisms having to do with self centeredness'". When Ellsberg prepares himself mentally to go to jail, he is grandstanding, but when he tries to figure out how to avoid going to jail, he is portrayed as inconsistent and trying to weasel out of something.

Other examples of the author's gratuitous hostility towards his subject abound. Wells talks at great lengths about Ellsberg's sex life during the early 70's. In the telling of an incident in which he and a girlfriend had sex upon waking up from a nap, he snidely editorializes that Ellsberg took two naps in a day not because he was recovering from a debilitating case of hepatitis, but because "it was a way to get onto the bed". Wells relates a story in which Ellsberg jokes with the author (apparently before Ellsberg stopped cooperating with him) that Hitler was the only other cover subject of Time magazine without an interview, and how that puts him in historic company. Wells takes this joke seriously and uses it as an opportunity to comment that "this is a prime example of how Ellsberg's ego can lead him to be his own worst enemy." I couldn't help wondering what Ellsberg had done to the author to provoke such animosity.

All in all, I was very happy that Ellsberg's autobiography was published after this biography; nobody deserves to be immortalized this way.

Rarely have I read a biography that gave me so much insight into the life and personality of a major public figure. Wells is to be commended for a searching portrait of an amazingly complex personality. He clearly did his homework, conducting numerous interviews of Ellsberg himself and many of the living sources on him, including his family, friends, and colleagues.

No one can leave this book without a better appreciation of the complex influences that caused Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers; this was clearly an act of personal courage, but perhaps also motivated by some element of self-aggrandizement. (Then again, unless one takes an extremely simplistic view of history, whose motives are ever pure and unadulterated?) Wells would have us wonder if Ellsberg's career had continued on its upwards trajectory as a "supergenius" and insider at RAND, he would ever have released the Papers; I believe that diminishes Ellsberg's anti-war motivation far too much, however.

And the book does seem, if anything, rather personally biased against Ellsberg, whom the author seems to delight in describing at great length in not terribly attractive terms. Indeed, whenever Wells faces any ambiguity about his subject, he seems to consciously choose not to give Ellsberg the benefit of the doubt. Wells also does a great deal of overtly interjecting his own biases and parenthetical observations into the narrative, which is more than a little disconcerting. Finally, the choice of the title seems both unfortunate and somewhat sensationalistic.

But this is probably the fullest picture we will ever have of this man. Perhaps most useful of all is the book's detailed narrative of the copying and release of the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon Administration's almost comic attempt--comic if it weren't so frightening--to stop Ellsberg and his comrades at any cost. The ultimate irony, one can infer from Wells, is that while Ellsberg's release of the Papers had far less impact on ending the Vietnam War than he had hoped, the Nixon Administration's attempt to wreak vengeance on him and stop his antiwar activities probably led to Nixon's demise in the Watergate mess.

Daniel Ellsberg risked 125 years in prison for leaking the Pentagon papers. As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that narcissists never put themselves in that much risk.

Wells(W) has written a biography that places an undo emphasis on certain minor aspects of Ellsberg's life,including unwarranted moral judgments that appear to be hypocritical, while completely ignoring certain major accomplishments of Ellsberg for which he has never received his just acclaim(and has never sought acclaim)First,W appears to be fixated on the fact that Ellsberg had sexual relationships with a number of different women.For just a few examples,George Washington,Benjamin Franklin,Thomas Jefferson,Napoleon,Douglas MacArthur,Dwight D.Eisenhower,and Martin Luther King also had sexual relationships with a number of different women.The emphasis that W places on this fact is incredibly overblown.Am I supposed to stop reading J M Keynes's General Theory and A Treatise on Probability because Keynes's sexual orientation before 1922 was primarily Gay?The conclusion I draw is that W either sought to embarrass Ellsberg and/or wanted to add irrelevant material that might sell more copies of his book.Second,the discussions of Ellsberg's contributions to decision making do not recognize that Ellsberg is the Father of modern decision theory.It is a practical certainty that had Ellsberg's 1962 dissertation been published in the 1960's, instead of in 2001,he would have already received a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.Chapter 7 of"Risk,Ambiguity,and Decision"(2001;Garland Publishing Com.)supplies a complete modern decision theoretic foundation for Keynes's major General Theory analysis that uncertainty(Ellsberg's ambiguity)is THE cause of involuntary unemployment and insufficient long run investment.The problem here is that Ellsberg has remained far too quite for over 40 years on what he accomplished.One can only hope that Ellsberg will decide to "toot his own horn" a lot more vigorously in the future.Any reader of W's book should automatically buy a copy of Ellsberg's "Secrets" book if one desires an accurate biography that concentrates on the important things.

Having been interviewed for this book I can testify to the trueness of the part that dealt with the overlap between Dan Ellsberg and myself. Tom Wells gives an absolutely remarkable picture of that time, the time I knew Ellsberg. Presumably Wells's skill at interweaving the stories given by the many people he interviewed are accurate throughout the book. Fascinating book. I couldn't put it down. Interesting to see this picture of the muddle and deceit of our government about that war. I recommend the book to those too young to remember some of Ellsberg's times as well as to those of us who are old enough to remember part of the history of his times. Wells has done a terrific job.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg did a very brave and daring thing. The release of the Pentagon Papers was seen by others in my generation as one of the greatest acts of heroism imaginable. It is not surprising that Ellsberg -- the man -- is not the shining star that I thought he was in the summer of '71. Wells' book presents the man in amazing detail and we see him for the complex and perplexing person he is. Wells has done a great deal of research to write this book and it explodes off the page. Some may say that Ellsberg is a man for whom a biography is not deserved, but reading even the first chapter makes you realize just how central he is to the last 30 years of American history. After that, the book reads like a good novel.

I couldn't stop reading this book. The life of Ellsburg parallels what so many of us went through in the sixties that with every page I found myself transported back to the time of napalm, Nixon and night burglars. Overall, I found the portrait of this seminal sixties figure to be meticulously researched and balanced. Wells does not demonize Ellsburg like critics from the right havedone, nor does he sanitize his life as the popular media has done over theyears. What you get here is a behind the scenes look at Washington with as much inside dope as the best Woodward books. Don't believe the Ellsburg-orchestrated attacks on this book. It is a must read!