A couple nights ago I was re-watching "The Most Dangerous Man In America" the story of American patriot Daniel Ellsberg, and the "Pentagon Papers." It is a brief 41 minute documentary that was being re-shown in preparation for the release of the new film "The Post" which is built around the story of the release of the Pentagon Papers.
For those unfamiliar with the story, In 1967 Daniel Ellsberg a military analyst with a PhD. from Harvard in Economics, was hired by the Rand Corporation to write a historical piece on the history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War for the Rand think tank, and others involved in the war.
It was a top secret document, and when he finished it, it was so top secret they did not even want the President of the United States to read it. Simply put, America could never win the Vietnam War, and no one had ever won a war in Vietnam. Being the beneficiaries of millions of dollars from the military industrial complex, they could not let this information out to anyone.
In 1969 Daniel became aware that he was part of the problem, not the solution. This was expedited through a series of chance meetings with Buddhists, Vietnam War protestors, and others including his wife. Finally in the early 70s Daniel had taken the stance with a couple friends, that this information had to be leaked to the public. He could no longer sit silently by allowing tens of thousands of Americans, and hundred of thousands Vietnamese be killed in an unjust war, started through fraudulent means.
So over the course of 1971 he released documents to politicians he thought were sympathetic to ending the war, and at first The Washington Post, realizing there were more documents than one paper could handle. As the news grew he also released them to the Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and others. Immediately other papers started to pick up and republish the stories as the "Pentagon Papers" had caught the interest of America. Still the war which had been proven a complete lie and fraud, only benefiting large military corporations raged on. Getting little or no traction in the House or the Senate, and little with the American people, outside of their never ending curiosity over the unbelievable facts being released. By a couple people.
During this time, Ellsberg and friends were called crackpots, on acid, peaceniks, everything and anything to belittle and marginalize the facts coming from top secret documents. Behind the scenes, two presidents, Johnson and Nixon referred to him as the most dangerous man in America. The person that could bring it all down around them. In the end it took a brave US Senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel, to break this part of the story wide open. Calling a special session of the Senate, he sat alone for three days, reading all 7,000 pages into the Senate Record, thereby making the entire pile of documents public. Which the press finally seized on and published all over America.
Why am I telling this story in the "Lakewood General Discussion" area of the Deck? Here is why.
Looking back on the time of the release, the copying, the sifting through, and finally the publishing of the documents he was sure each and every page would open the eyes of the public and cause outrage, yet with every page of amazing facts most of America remained silent. Now years later he understand why. The general public could not believe that their elected officials could be guilty of such terrible misdeeds, skullduggery, and even profiteering. How could anyone lie, misrepresent, and cover-up something so wrong as a war, just to make a dollar or stay in office?
Though I try not to see farther than our boundaries when looking at Lakewood's debacles over the past decade-and-a-half, it is nearly impossible not to see similarities of the work of Daniel Ellsberg on a national/international scale, and Brian Essi on a local/regional scale.
Is Brian Essi, the most dangerous man in Lakewood, well at least to City Hall? No person has worked harder to uncover documents. Documents declared “public” by the courts, but documents City Hall refuses to make public. Why? That will be in a follow up story of what has been proven so far.
Brian Essi, the man that spent hundreds thousands of hours and dollars looking for the truth.
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