Richard Nixon’s aides thought Daniel Ellsberg was crazy. Ellsberg’s fellow soldiers also thought he was crazy when he served in Vietnam. That’s not surprising considering a soldier was frequently threatened with ambushes or booby traps and sniper fire in the dense jungles of Southeast Asia. Those who thought Ellsberg was crazy were probably a little off balance due to the madness of the war.

Or maybe you saw a psychiatrist because of your divorce. That’s also not surprising given such an upheaval in a young man’s life.

But Nixon, who did not even know Ellsberg, was on board: he is “crazy”, he is “brilliant” and he is “dangerous”, writes Steve Sheinkin in his book “Most Dangerous, Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War “. .”

Sheinkin, with his use of examples like these, touches on the psychological aspect of Ellsberg and how he was perceived by the most powerful people in the world.

But the book also shows how people in power behave when threatened.

To Nixon and his advisers, Ellsberg was such a threat, the most dangerous man in America, that Nixon said of the plumbers, the men who carried out the raid on Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office that started the Watergate scandal. , “What those weren’t a crime. They should get a medal for going after Ellsberg.

Daniel Ellsberg posed a serious threat to the US government: he threatened to delegitimize the continued prosecution of the war, because Ellsberg, himself a previously war-aggressive member of the government, was now one of his staunchest opponents.

He had been aggressive enough to engage in a vile technique that used horrific battlefield tales to sway authorities toward a particular course of action. Readers will be surprised at how this played out under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Sheinkin tells Ellsberg that the night he spent gathering the information “was the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

One wonders if anyone higher in government than Ellsberg was capable of a similar self-assessment. If readers of “Most Dangerous” didn’t know the history of Vietnam or that Daniel Ellsberg ever existed, they might suspect they were reading fiction. It is surprising that top officials consider the success of a war to depend on “death rates”; or that they would consider an option to understate US troop-level commitments so as not to alarm the public; or that they would consider it responsible behavior to keep secret documents of high government officials, including the president, under penalty of ending his career, documents that showed that the president and his closest aides had no solution to the war.

The world from which Ellsberg emerged was one in which the conscience of an individual was subservient to the morality of the state, albeit distorted. Running like a thread through Sheinkin’s book is the conflict of conscience that takes place between those at the highest levels of government. The men who knew that what they supported was immoral lied first to themselves and second to the American people. Sheinkin’s account of Robert MacNamara’s return flight from Vietnam and what he had to say upon his arrival at his home illustrates that point.

MacNamara, his colleagues, and future administration officials were faced with a choice: hide behind bogus reasons to continue the war, or face the American public and acknowledge the futility of war. There was a lot at stake. The consequences were enormous. On one side was Ellsberg with his personal problems: his divorce, his wartime service and subsequent antiwar convictions, and his becoming the face of the antiwar movement in America; On the other side are the men in power: Lyndon Johnson, Robert MacNamara, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and a host of other military men and civilians, who were in survival mode, cornered by the widening war and the corresponding growth of the anti -war movement. And emanating from the secret meetings of hate and threatening language from those in power, particularly in the Nixon administration, much of it directed at Daniel Ellsberg, were his own confused and murky notions of right and wrong.

“Most Dangerous” is a powerful book for adults and young adults interested in the Vietnam War and the key men and women involved in it.