Daniel Ellsberg was at once the Vietnam War’s greatest hero and its greatest turncoat villain, and it all probably depends upon who you ask. Ellsberg is the man that released The Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, after diligently for a year copying the some 7,000 pages of reports from his employer, the Rand Corporation, that outlined in vivid detail just how much the U.S. Government was responsible for creating its own quagmire in Southeast Asia. Further, their constant reassurances that war effort was going well were not only untrue, but down right facetious. All this came to light with Ellsberg courageous act of defiance that might have landed him 115 year in Federal prison, a fitting sentence for the man dubbed by Henry Kissinger as “The Most Dangerous” in America.

A sort of clinical dissection of the war is tempered by coverage of Ellsberg life. A former Marine, Ellsberg went to work at the Pentagon in 1959 and was privy and participant in a lot of the long term planning of the war. Over time, Ellsberg’s faith wavered. He’d journey to Vietnam and see more and more of the nation’s treasure in men and material being dumped into a stalemate without end. He also began to see a great immorality in the unprecedented air campaign against Vietnamese civilians. And slowly, the man that used to plumb reports looking for VietCong atrocities to justify escalation, began looking for a way to do his part to end the conflict.

The Most Dangerous Man in America is set up more as story of one man’s struggle as opposed to a Mission: Impossible style caper or man vs. country debate kind of conflict. There’s also no modern allegory to America’s most recent foreign war quagmire although God knows that the subtext is thick. This is really more about one man’s struggle within his own inner conscience: what is just, and what is fair? No matter the way Ellsberg is painted it seems a portrayal that’s cut and dry, but of course the truth is so much deeper and nuanced. Ellsberg narrates his own story and archival footage comes pretty close to putting us in his mind frame. New interviews with friends, relatives, politicians, reports and historians augment the story and bring it into a broader context.

What the movie will mean to a person will depend in the audience. The older you are the more you probably revelled in White House tapes of a flustered Richard Nixon talking like a super-villain that’s been foiled and reliving one of the key triumphs in ending the war. I hope that the younger members of the audience might recognize the factor in how history repeats itself, and note the fervour by which seemingly a whole generate rose up against war. For people like me though, born somewhere between the two, I carry both points of view. I think the lessons of Vietnam are far too important to be lost, and as evidenced by the stuff that keeps coming out about Iraq it seems more important than ever. In a world where so much was risked and lost for so little, and continues to be, the story of the one guy that didn’t go along with the tide takes even a stronger precedent. We should all be so brave and so bold, and dare I say, so dangerous.