Papers on the War.

ELLSBERG, Daniel.

Item Number: 100926

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

First edition of the signal work that further established Ellsberg “as one of our most refined analysts of that awful war.”  Octavo, original cloth. Signed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For peace! Dan Ellsberg.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Barbara Shapokas.

Ellsberg, a one-time analyst for the Rand Corporation who spent 2 years in Vietnam, "set in motion a chain of events that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that government efforts to halt publication of the Pentagon Papers represented a prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment freedom of the press" (First Amendment Encyclopedia). When, on leaving Rand, Ellsberg photocopied his 1967 Report for Rand, known as the Pentagon Papers, he tried to persuade the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings. Failing that, he gave it to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, and on June 13, 1971 it published the first installment of a projected series. The writings collected here secured "Ellsberg's reputation as one of our most refined analysts of that awful war, just as his deus ex machina role in making the Pentagon Papers available established him as a passionate dissenter. The principal essay, 'The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine,' published originally in Public Policy (Spring 1971) but now considerably revised and updated, is a trenchant dissection of the executive policy-making process through the Truman-Nixon administrations… Other equally exacting pieces—all written prior to publication of the Pentagon Papers, some also revised—include on-the-scene reports from Vietnam when Ellsberg was a State Department adviser, Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony while a Rand think-tanker, a Washington Post review of Shaplen's Road From War, a 1971 New York Review of Books article on Nixon in Laos, and a thoughtful lecture on 'The Responsibility of Officials in a Criminal War,' delivered at the Boston Community Church less than a month before the Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers" (Kirkus).