Page 30 - Dan Ellsberg News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

What is this about -- i knew if any of my colleagues had ran to the pentagon, were somehow to catch word of my doing this, they would think i had gone mad. that's that impressed me on the importance of being willing to pay a cost to yourself were some young men who were going to prison by refusing to cooperate with the draft. one young man, randy keeler was giving a talk. >> within that crowd of people, i was introduced to this fellow from a background that didn't quite fit with the others. and that was dan. >> and he talked very personally, about what had led him to leave stanford. >> if you ...

There was this person who had been in north vietnam and was describing the effects of our bombing. it was a -- just welling up of a kind of visceral disgust. >> we left the party, patricia had something to drink during it said -- >> how can you be part of this? because in some ways, he was more part of it than i think he realized? i was thinking i'm against the bombing, i'm trying to stop all the bombing in south vietnam. trying to do the best i can to moderate the killing, and i'm not getting any credit for that. and she's holding me responsible for the whole war. >> my accusation of dan, and...

Atrocities by the vietcong he hoped this would launch a bombing campaign against vietnam. i voiced my opposition for bombing the north. but an order from mcnamara for fast action was like an order from god. i had a whole staff in vietnam collecting data for me. i told the colonel on the other end of the hotline, that it all had to be in for the president by 7:00 the next morning. i needed details of the atrocities of the vietcong anywhere in vietnam. above all, i wanted goree details of any injuries to americans. i told the colonel, i need bl d blood. >> in the early '60s, dan

Very much about the stalemate in vietnam. and the fact that things weren't improving. toward the end of the flight, he called me to the rear of the plane. dan, i'm having an argument here. he says that things are improving, and we're making progress, and i say things are worse, worse than they were a year ago, you'rehene who knows. what do you say the answer is? i said, well, mr. secretary, i'm impressed with how much the same things are from a year ago. he said, see, see, that's what i'm saying, we put another 100,000 troops in there, things are not better. that means they're really worse. we...

>> today the 11 night newspapers and the los angeles times joined the procession. >> the ball game was over. any effort at suppressing the pentagon papers was going to fail. dan and his network had distributed portions of the pentagon papers to 17 different organizations. >> they couldn't stop them. as one of the lawyers said, it was like hurting bees. >> the press said, we can look at this, we can make a valid judgment about what serves national security, and we can be and will be independent from our government. >> the pentagon papers story was on the nightly news every night for two weeks. ...