The Nation: Man with the Monkey Wrench

If I could find the proper forum, I would be willing to risk 20 years in jail. I must expose the duplicity of the Government.

DANIEL ELLSBERG, 40, one of the authors of the documents he has made public, is a nervous, intense and brilliant man. He is seen by his associates as possessing the mind of a Niels Bohr and the soul of a tortured Dostoevsky hero. As a former Pentagon colleague put it: "Dan would have been an excellent Jesuit in another time. He has a perfect logical mind and an unbending sense of morality." Ellsberg was for a time one of those faceless bureaucrats who sit at the fulcrum of decision making and are privy to the most guarded information. Yet he has a marked capacity for excess. One friend says that his reversal from a pro-war to an unequivocal antiwar position is completely in character. "That's the kind of guy Dan is. He's sensitive and passionate, as well as being immensely intelligent. When he was a hawk, he wanted to be up along the DMZ fighting. When he became a dove, he became an active dove."

Born in Chicago, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1952. During his junior year, he was editor of the Advocate, the school's literary magazine, a rare post for an economics major. As a senior, he served on the Crimson, stayed on at Harvard to win his master's and eventually a Ph.D. His thesis on the nature of the decision-making process, titled Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, was so complicated and so incisive that he became an overnight star in the rapidly developing field of systems analysis. Ellsberg joined the Rand Corp., where he became the protégé of Henry Rowen, currently the corporation's president.

The critical step in Ellsberg's career came in 1964, when he went to the Pentagon as a special assistant to lohn McNaughton, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He landed the job because of McNaughton's role in nuclear issues, such as the test-ban treaty. As a former professor put it: "Ellsberg just got drawn into Viet Nam, the same way McNaughton did, the same way all of us did." He became so drawn in that he seriously wanted to re-enter the Marine Corps, in which he had done a stint as an officer. He once gloomily said: "If I went back into the corps, they'd never give me a company anyway. Once they learned that I wrote speeches for McNaughton and Robert McNamara, they'd have me writing speeches for some general." He consoled himself by inserting such stridently militant phrases into McNaughton's and McNamara's speeches as "The only way to think of the Viet Cong is to think of the Mafia."