The Nation: Man with the Monkey Wrench

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By week's end, Ellsberg had not emerged from underground. He disappeared Wednesday afternoon from his house near Harvard Square. When he does come back into public view, no one is quite sure just what will happen to him. As one friend notes: "If the Government decides to prosecute him, it's going to be one helluva trial because he's really a very impressive figure. I think he'd like a platform like that."

In a sense, Ellsberg symbolizes the national torment that the brutal, seemingly interminable war has created. He grew to believe that the war would not end in the foreseeable future unless a massive monkey wrench was thrown into what, in his view, was a perpetual-motion machine. The documents were the wrench. Ellsberg had earlier offered them to Senator George McGovern, who decided not to make them public.

In a broad sense, Ellsberg is but the latest in a series of Government elitists —McNaughton, McNamara, Clark Clifford—who have turned away from the war they once so fervently supported. He himself is particularly scornful of the war's apologists, such as Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin. Ellsberg has put it this way: "My role in the war was as a participant, along with a lot of other people, in a conspiracy to commit a number of war crimes, including, I believe, aggressive war." He especially takes issue with Schlesinger's view that Viet Nam resulted from a series of small decisions and that it is unfair to seek out guilty men. "The only trouble with that account of our decision making," he said, "is that it's totally wrong for every Viet Nam decision of the last 20 years."