Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War

Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War (2015) is a nonfiction book by Steve Sheinkin for young readers. The book is critically acclaimed for its fast-paced and engaging account of Daniel Ellsberg’s role in releasing the top-secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which contributed to ending the Vietnam War. Most Dangerous was awarded the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, and it was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in the Young People’s Literature category.

This guide uses the 2015 Roaring Brook Press Kindle edition of the text.

Plot Summary

Daniel Ellsberg began his career in the United States government by working as an analyst at the Pentagon. He was an intelligent young man with a PhD from Harvard and a bright career ahead of him. Seeing his promise, the assistant secretary of defense, John T. McNaughton, hired Ellsberg to help him work on the growing conflict in Vietnam. As a teenager, the development of the Cold War had “riveted” Ellsberg, and he felt that by being involved in the budding conflict with communist North Vietnam, he could become a true “cold warrior.”

On Ellsberg’s first day working for McNaughton, two US destroyers in the waters off the coast of North Vietnam believed they were under attack. Although the attacks couldn’t be verified, President Johnson responded with force, attacking North Vietnam in retaliation. Although President Johnson continued to tell the American public he sought “no wider war” (24), he and his advisors began planning military support for South Vietnam. Over the next four years, Johnson sent hundreds of thousands of American troops to Vietnam and began sustained bombing campaigns of the North. However, the North Vietnamese were highly motivated and knew the terrain better than American forces. No matter how many troops President Johnson sent, the war remained a stalemate. Desperate not to become the first US president to lose a war, Johnson continued to escalate the war while assuring the American public that the war was going well and victory was close.

Initially, Ellsberg believed that the war in Vietnam was a “noble struggle” in the fight against communism. To learn more about the conflict, he spent nearly two years in Vietnam, driving around the countryside, speaking with villagers, and observing combat. He saw the devastation the war was inflicting on the Vietnamese people and landscape, as well as the complete lack of noticeable progress, and he began to doubt the war effort.

Back in the US, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had concluded that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. He decided to commission a study of US policy and decision-making throughout the war so that future scholars could study what went wrong. The result was a classified, 7,000-word document called the Pentagon Papers.

When Ellsberg returned to the US, he accessed a copy of the top-secret study through his job at the Rand Corporation. The study revealed the “pattern of deception” behind the war (156), as various presidential administrations lied to the American public and continued escalating the expensive and deadly war even though they knew a military victory was impossible. They wanted to “save face” and avoid being responsible for the United States’ first wartime defeat.

Richard Nixon was elected as the new president, and he was continuing the pattern of promising the public a quick end to the war while secretly escalating the conflict. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the war in Vietnam “had been wrong from the start” (159), and Ellsberg knew the public needed to know the truth. Despite knowing that he could face serious ramifications for the crime of leaking classified documents, Ellsberg worked through the night for weeks, making copies of the 7,000-page document. He first tried to give the study to outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War in Congress. However, the senators he shared the documents with were unwilling to take the personal and professional risk of exposing the top-secret study.

Finally, Ellsberg contacted Neil Sheehan, a reporter he knew at the New York Times. The Times’s lawyers advised the paper against publishing classified documents, warning that the government could prosecute them under the Espionage Act. However, the Times felt the story was worth the risk and decided to publish it. President Nixon was furious with the leak and filed a legal order forcing the Times to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Times went to court to contest this, but Ellsberg slipped a copy of the study to the Washington Post, which took up the story in the Times’s stead. The government filed another injunction against the Post, and the two papers’ cases were fast-tracked to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Ellsberg had distributed copies of the study to several newspapers nationwide, and they all began to publish it; the story was unstoppable.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times and the Post, arguing that the Pentagon Papers did not compromise national security and that the First Amendment protected the newspapers’ right to publish. However, Ellsberg faced up to 115 years in prison for leaking the classified documents. President Nixon was very angry with Ellsberg and assembled a special operations team to dig up dirt on Ellsberg and “destroy him in the press” (252). The team engaged in many illegal activities and was finally caught while bugging the Democratic Party’s campaign offices in the Watergate office complex. The investigation into the Watergate scandal revealed the White House’s involvement and attempts to influence Ellsberg’s trial. Due to these “bizarre events,” the judge felt that the case was too compromised to proceed with a fair trial and dismissed the case, allowing Ellsberg to go free.