Kick-Back Friday: #128

In 1971, Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg leaked a top-secret study, aka the Pentagon Papers, to the press. The mammoth document demonstrated the high-level, systematic deceit of multiple administrations to escalate the war in Vietnam, and the press predictably gobbled it up. Ellsberg's treacherous act and its aftermath were chronicled on film in last year's Academy Award-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America, which is now on DVD.

And while the documentary isn't particularly original in its execution or perspective on Ellsberg's derring-do, it does show (perhaps inadvertently) just how compromised a character must become before he can morph into a historic whistleblower. Think of the initially Koolaid-guzzling characters of Big Tobacco's Jeffrey Wigand and, to a lesser extent, ADM's Mark Whitacre, but on much more expansive stage in a much more explosive era, and you've got an idea of what Ellsberg was and is all about. The steeper the slide into moral ambiguity, the more dramatic the atonement and, god knows, the lengthier the proselytizing.

And if you want to see Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrestle with his role in the Vietnam War, watch the life-sucking The Fog of War (2004).