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Summary: The Pentagon Papers are the headwaters of today's politics
Review: This book adds greatly to the vastly inadequate body of literature about the Pentagon Papers Affair. It asks Who is Daniel Ellsberg ? Ellsberg is the one most associated with the Pentagon Papers but others played roles just as important or moreso. Wells interviews 237 friends , family, colleagues, government officials, scholars and Watergate characters to draw his immensely detailed portrait of Ellsberg. In no way is this overkill because the Ellsberg personality is so inflated it needs to be brought to earth. Wells does this artfully in this psychiatric tour de force, a fascinating must-read for all who seek the truth about this critically important piece of history.
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Summary: This is a complete hatchet job
Review: This book is a poorly written hatchet job. It consists mostly of hundreds of pages of repetitive re-making of the point that Ellsberg is a disorganized, attention-seeking, narcissistic guy. For example: a downstairs neighbor's complaints that Ellsberg and his wife made too much noise walking around and used the wrong mailbox are dealt with at length. The biographer seems completely consumed by a pathological hatred of his subject. He needs to see a psychiatrist.
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Summary: Page-turner
Review: This book is captivating, even spellbinding at times, and marvelously insightful. It offers a fascinating portrait of the man who released the Pentagon Papers and his complex personality and personal life. On a political level, it is a broadly thought-provoking and engaging work that promises to be of interest to readers for years to come.
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Summary: An Apt Title for a Complex Biographee
Review: Tom Wells has done a thorough and insightful job. Having known Ellsberg and many of the people Wells interviewed, I was impressed by his fairness and thoroughness. This is a great book for anyone interested in the Vietnam experience. I heartily disagree with the less-connected reviewers who think it is too detailed. The detail makes it both fair and easier to understand the comples issues. All in all, a great job by Wells!
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Summary: Fascinating Biography On A Controversial Anti-War Activist!
Review: While I found this absorbing and thoughtfully written biography of Vietnam anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg to be a bit overblown and pretentious at times, it is a masterfully written exploration of a complex and puzzling man, and provides the reader with a far-reaching biographical portrait that both neatly complements as well as providing a foil for Ellsberg's own recent autobiographical efforts in the best-selling work "Secrets". While "Secrets" concentrates first and foremost on the period of his life leading up to and including the debacle over the illicit release of the top-secret Pentagon papers to the press, Well's biography, "Wild Man" gives us a much more fully developed, balanced, and for the most part more objective look at the mercurial, narcissistic, and stunningly brilliant Ellsberg's life. Ellsberg's direction in life was aggressively forged in the crucible of his aggressive and domineering mother's ambitions for him, such that he rose by dint of ability and hard effort to the heights of academic success early, graduating with a PhD in Economics from Harvard in the pre-Vietnam war era. Yet Ellsberg often did the unexpected, especially given his pedigree as an ambitious young Jewish-American intellectual; after college he volunteered for the Marine Corps, and served as an officer before going on to graduate school. After graduating from Harvard, he soon found himself recruited for the Rand Corporation, an elite Defense-Department funded think-tank and private preserve for intellectuals useful for the DOD bureaucracy. Sure enough, Ellsberg's controversial ideas and thoughtful repose gained him notice and a post within the government working for a highly placed Pentagon undersecretary. This position placed him in the catbird seat in terms of his access to the opening sequences and related bureaucratic responses to the expanding conflict in Vietnam. Even as he lent his support to the Pentagon, Ellsberg became concerned about the use of body counts and other quantitative measures being employed as key indicators of our military situation and progress being made. Criticisms of the methodology fell on deaf ears however, and Ellsberg found himself more isolated and less influential than he had hoped he would be. Instead, he argued for a long and detailed survey "on the ground" in Vietnam, which he would volunteer to accomplish for himself, and which he felt confident would give a better, more accurate and realistic appraisal of American forces in the region. Over a eighteen month period, Ellsberg became convinced the war was being conducted all wrong, that the employment of such metrics as body counts, bomb tonnage, and areas secured were catastrophically misleading at best and profoundly delusional at worst. The rest, as they say, was history, and it is useful to have both Ellsberg's recollections as well as those of an independent biographer in detailing just how and why all that cam e to transpire did so, for the devil is in the details of the historical record. At the same time, I was a bit offended by Well's recurring tale-spinning in terms of providing the reader with salacious material about Ellsberg's peripatetic and admittedly insistent womanizing. While there is no doubt that Ellsberg is no saint, I still fail to see why Wells felt it was so important to stress Ellsberg's ego excesses, his romantic escapades, or his apparent inability to stay the course on any particular intellectual path long enough to make a career of it has to do with his heart-wrenching decision to expose himself to a possible life behind bars in order to provide the American people with what he felt was critical information they had a right to know. Still, this is fascinating material, and any self-respecting sidewalk psychoanalyst like you and I are likely to enjoy a lot of his thoughtful ruminations about Ellsberg even as we know they are largely irrelevant to what happened and why. This is a worthwhile if somewhat flawed book. Enjoy!
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Summary: An impressive undertaking
Review: Wild Man seems to me to be a very well researched book, and fair to Daniel Ellsberg. Wells has obviously done his homework. It's well written, and a real contribution to studies on this time period.
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