Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg [Hardcover]

He was unusual, probably unique among defense theorists, in that he stood up from his computer terminal, turned aside from his theoretical models of the war and went to war himself, personally, with a rifle. It comes through that Ellsberg was a bit of an enthusiast -- a war lover. Strangely, the Viet Nam chapters are the only chapters in the book where the character and the story really come alive.

But Ellsberg returned from Viet Nam depressed and disgusted. He ultimately copied and released to the press The Pentagon Papers, the classified historical account of US policy in Viet Nam.

Very few people actually read the Pentagon Papers. Tom Wicker of the New York Times read into it and was struck and evidently quite shocked by the idea that a war could be discussed as though it were a rational game. He did not know, and most people still don't know, the extent to which US cold war policy, our grand strategy, had been subsumed into John von Neumann's mathematical descriptions of parlour games.

Daniel Ellsberg's biography should have had something to say about his profession, about game theory, about the awkward, perhaps ridiculous overlay of a mathematical theory on a shooting war in the jungle. Ellsberg was deeply inside this business, a RAND superstar, and in the end he became disillusioned and quite talkative about it.

The author of this biography completely missed this whole astonishing backstory. He simply left out Ellsberg's professional life, his strange and remarkable line of work as a war gamer.

What we have here instead is a relentlessly hostile, tut-tut-tutting 604-page description of Ellsberg's personal life: his childhood, his hard pushing mom, his social activities, his water cooler conversations, and his dates and his nights. What are we supposed to do with this kind of information?

If you are still wondering why we were in Viet Nam, and who isn't, there exist some much better and livelier books to read: A great introduction to the RAND era and story is "The Wizards of Armageddon," by Kaplan. It was recently re-published in paperback. Prisoner's Dilemma by Poundstone is an excellent book on Von Neumann and the Game Theory. Another book on the subject is, of course, "The Pentagon Papers." Ellsberg's autobiography, which is soon to be published, may also prove helpful.

This biography, "Wild Man" does contain, by the way, some interesting historical facts. For example, the author observes that RAND maintained a French colonial villa in Saigon. We are left to wonder what the heck went on in there - that is, what their game was. The author doesn't seem to have a clue that it mattered.

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!