The devil and Daniel Ellsberg: From archetype to anachronism.

• Author: Young, Michael
• Position: Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg

Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, by Tom Wells, New York: Palgrave, 692 pages, $32.50

IN 1973, AS his world began falling apart, Richard Nixon demonstrated his rhetorical prowess to his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. The topic was a break-in at the office of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was a former consultant at the RAND Corporation who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War.

Nixon wanted dirt on Ellsberg, so his men dispatched a ham-fisted outfit to Los Angeles to see what Fielding had. When the White House came under suspicion, Nixon complained to Ziegler, "The president knows a hell of a lot of things, but does he know what the Christ some dumb assholes are going to do?... Goddamn to hell, I didn't tell them to go flick up the goddamn Ellsberg place." As Tom Wells notes in Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, the president not only knew about the Fielding break-in but was probably the one who ordered it in the first place.

It was arguably Ellsberg's greatest triumph: He had roused the self-destructive impulses of a president and an administration that he felt had betrayed the American people by allowing the war in Vietnam to continue. Some would nominate Ellsberg's role in exposing the Pentagon Papers as his finest moment, but despite the furor that their release provoked they largely disappeared into the sludge of post-Vietnam skepticism in the U.S. They were a valuable confirmation of the worst fears of those opposed to the war, but they were too bulky and intricate a collection of documents to affect most of the public. Indeed, the difficulty of Wells' book is that he describes a man and an event that, while interesting, have left virtually no enduring impact on American society.

What's more, he does so in a book that goes on forever. Wells strives to emulate the epic quality of other Vietnam-period biography-cum-Zeitgeist-accounts, such as Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie or David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but Wells has neither author's talent, nor does he much care for the man at the center of his research. Besides, Ellsberg does not rate a 600-page book, particularly from an author who tends to confuse perspiration and inspiration: Wild Man is overloaded with other people's quotes, doggedly hunted down, so that one is never sure whether Wells' discomfort with Ellsberg springs from his own misgivings or from those of the myriad sources...