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When upper-echelon military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War to The New York Times and other newspapers in 1971, he was embraced as a man of conscience by many Jews - and attacked as a Jewish traitor by President Richard Nixon.
"I think everyone assumed he was Jewish, and Nixon certainly did," says Oscar-nominated documentary maker Rick Goldsmith, who listened to countless hours of Nixon tapes as part of his research for The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Elbberg and the Pentagon Papers. "It had something to do With his enmity and vindictiveness to Ellsberg," whom the president saw as sabotaging his administration.
In fact, Ellsberg was raised Christian Scientist. Not that that would have mattered to the paranoid Nixon.
Goldsmith and fellow Berkeley filmmaker Judith Ehrlich's fascinating, taut and timely film made the short list of 1...