Daniel Ellsberg, Vietnam War whistle blower

The Most Dangerous Man in America is a film I watched recently on a BBC digital channel, BBC 4.  You can still catch it for a little while on the internet.

Daniel Ellsberg had access to top secret documents about the Vietnam War and the more he read the more he felt that the war had been sustained by lies to the citizens of the United States.  He copied thousands of pages of documents and sent them to newspapers including the New York Times and Washington Post. They became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Who was the most dangerous man in America of the title?  Surely not Daniel Ellsberg?  Audio recordings in the film suggest to me that maybe it was the president at the time, Richard Nixon.  In discussions with Henry Kissinger the president seemed not to care about massive levels of civilian casualties and to be keen on bringing in nuclear weapons.