Word: ellsbergs
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Young Daniel Ellsberg (James Spader) is one of the Rand Corp.'s best and brightest, writing papers for the think tank that advocate brinkmanship and "the political uses of madness" in the cold war. In 1964 his work takes him to the Pentagon, where he sees madness in action. He learns that the entire war policy, in effect, is a mess swept under a carpet of inflated enemy body counts. Asked to help write a history of the war effort, he finds that the U.S. has remained hopelessly entangled because no President wanted to be the first U.S. leader...
...relevant story but told through a man who morphs from insufferably confident hawk to insufferably righteous dove. Fortunately, Spader has built a career on making creepy soullessness intriguing. Ellsberg compares the quagmire to quicksand: it's the stalest cliche imaginable, yet Spader sells it with his bitter, weary delivery. Later, after a fact-finding trip to the front line, he says he learned "we couldn't win unless ..." He trails off, and in that moment you see his brashness silently shatter. There is no "unless...
...talk about duty--hardly differs from much war news. In a way, the series is even subversive: the Bush Administration won the semantic battle to describe the struggle against terrorism as a war, but Profiles shows that the actual work looks more like policing. As with the battlefield reports Ellsberg pored over, it needs a skeptical eye--but that just makes its story that much more interesting...
...suspicion, when I heard they were looking for me in Bermuda, that they were taking some junkets,” Ellsberg said, drawing laughter from the audience...
...defense analyst at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s, Ellsberg had helped to compile the extensive study, which revealed that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—in which Congress permitted escalated U.S. military involvement in Vietnam—had been drafted months before the North Vietnamese attacked U.S. naval vessels in the gulf...