Douglas Caddy Posted October 7, 2017 Share Posted October 7, 2017 From the article: Coming up: a movie drama on the Papers directed by Steven Spielberg. But, for me, the name Ellsberg does not immediately evoke “Vietnam” but rather “anti-nuclear.” And now he has written a book titled The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, to be published by Bloomsbury in December. In it he reveals that the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers that he copied from his office at the Rand Corporation in 1969-70 were only “a fraction” of what he had borrowed from office safes. Much of the rest amounted to the “other” Pentagon papers — secret documents on US nuclear war plans and capabilities. https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/pentagon-papers-reporter-daniel-ellsburg-warns-of-nuclear-dangers-in-trump-era/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Karl Kinaski Posted October 8, 2017 Share Posted October 8, 2017 Ellsberg was a scholar of Ed Lansdale ... which makes his Pentagon Papers performance highly suspicious to me ... it was the Pentagon Papers which made Nixons men going out of control ... (Howard Hunt inserting false telegrams etc. into this bunch of papers which by itself are misleading and confusing ...) Here is some Ellsberg bull ( quote wiki Lansdale): "According to Daniel Ellsberg, who was at one time a subordinate to Lansdale, Lansdale claimed that he was fired by President Kennedy's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after he declined Kennedy's offer to play a role in the overthrow of the Diem regime." IMO Ellsberg is an Establishment Insider smuggled into the US-left ... like Noam Chomsky ... if Spielberg is going to make a hero out of him, he is dead wrong, like Stephen King with his novel 11/22/63 ... Ellsberg had his 15 minutes ... and they were staged ... KK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Brancato Posted October 8, 2017 Share Posted October 8, 2017 6 hours ago, Karl Kinaski said: Ellsberg was a scholar of Ed Lansdale ... which makes his Pentagon Papers performance highly suspicious to me ... it was the Pentagon Papers which made Nixons men going out of control ... (Howard Hunt inserting false telegrams etc. into this bunch of papers which by itself are misleading and confusing ...) Here is some Ellsberg bull ( quote wiki Lansdale): "According to Daniel Ellsberg, who was at one time a subordinate to Lansdale, Lansdale claimed that he was fired by President Kennedy's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after he declined Kennedy's offer to play a role in the overthrow of the Diem regime." IMO Ellsberg is an Establishment Insider smuggled into the US-left ... like Noam Chomsky ... if Spielberg is going to make a hero out of him, he is dead wrong, like Stephen King with his novel 11/22/63 ... Ellsberg had his 15 minutes ... and they were staged ... KK Karl - that's a very interesting supposition. I can certainly see it in the case of Chomsky. I'm always on guard for these kinds of covert shenanigans. For instance, I came to my own conclusion that Eldridge Cleaver was planted into the Black Panthers. I've never considered the case of Ellsberg. I'm curious what Doug thinks of this. Is Ellsberg saying that he has kept thousands of pages secret all these years? Considering that Lansdale is on some researchers short list for who might have organized the JFK assassination, I'd like to look closer at what Ellsberg has kept hidden Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted November 9, 2017 Share Posted November 9, 2017 The trailer is released, Kay Graham is deified: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/08/the-post-watch-the-first-trailer-steven-spielberg-pentagon-papers-meryl-streep-tom-hanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James DiEugenio Posted November 9, 2017 Share Posted November 9, 2017 (edited) See, this is not about Ellsberg. And its not based on his book Secrets. And its not really a Spielberg film. Its really a Hanks film, and Spielberg came to it late. If you can believe it, they are going to say that the Post was the protagonist in this story, and that Katherine Graham was the heroine. Yet, it was not even the Post that broke the story. It was the Times. And they had been working with Ellsberg for months as he was hidden away in some hotel room in New England trying to convince Sheehan that the documents were for real. There are reports that Ellsberg had offered the story to the Post previously but that Kissinger had smeared Ellsberg to Graham. When the Times started to publish and beat the others to the story, that is when Bradlee decided hey, maybe we should follow this too. That is when Nixon decided to sue the Times. So Bradlee got a few days of a free ride at the Times expense before the Post was also joined in the lawsuit. The really incredible thing about this topsy turvy universe is that both the Times and the Post supported the war, and in fact Graham was good buds with LBJ all the way through his wacky escalations in Vietnam.. And both papers completely ignored what LBJ had done with NSAM 263, even though, for example, Newsweek had printed two stories about Kennedy's plan to withdraw in December of 1963. Whatever I wrote about Tom Hanks in Reclaiming Parkland is further justified by this. Only someone who could make a hero out of the late Charlie Wilson, could do something like this. Edited November 9, 2017 by James DiEugenio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James DiEugenio Posted November 9, 2017 Share Posted November 9, 2017 (edited) Two more points. McNamara commissioned the Pentagon Papers because this is what Kennedy was going to do before he was killed. Kennedy was quite disturbed that his advisors were not on board with him to get out of Vietnam. So before he left for Dallas, he told Mike Forrestal that there was going to be a complete review of American foreign policy in Indochina when he returned. In other words, he was going to educate these guys to where he was at. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 239) Secondly, the Pentagon Papers were much longer than even the Gravel or Ellsberg edition. They are now available on a CD version that is at least twice as long as either one. Edited November 9, 2017 by James DiEugenio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted November 9, 2017 Author Share Posted November 9, 2017 https://www.thedailybeast.com/first-trailer-for-steven-spielbergs-the-post-premieres Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted November 27, 2017 Share Posted November 27, 2017 (edited) More chunky-gooey-nutty press on the movie: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/27/spielberg-the-post-pentagon-papers-trump Edited November 28, 2017 by David Andrews Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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