Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

And so on, and so on - no historic 1971 Supreme Court First Amendment case, no politicizing of the nation’s press for better and worse - and all because one stiff-backed ex-Marine refused to ignore his conscience. “The Most Dangerous Man in America’’ - the epithet comes from Henry Kissinger - is hardly evenhanded: It views Ellsberg as a hero and a genuine patriot and allows him, at a grey and dignified 78, to narrate his own story. But evenhanded is one thing and fair is another, and directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith make their case that if you or I had known what Ellsberg did - the secret story of US involvement in Southeast Asia and the cynical misleading of the American public by five presidential administrations - we would have, or should have, done the same.

The movie has been nominated for a 2010 Oscar for best feature documentary, but it plays like a solid suspense thriller when it’s not stooping to cheesy touches: doomy atmospheric music and a pair of embarrassingly crude animated “reenactments’’ are the worst offenders. We learn that Ellsberg was there at the Pentagon when President Lyndon B. Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf non-incident as a pretext for escalation in 1964; that two years working in Vietnam for the State Department opened Ellsberg’s eyes to the unwinnability of the war; that a subsequent stint at the RAND Corporation think tank included contributing to a landmark CIA study of the conflict that frankly exposed machinations and manipulations from President Truman on. Of course we were never supposed to see it: It was an in-house confession.