WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25 AT 5:00PM | GENERAL ADMISSION: $10 • LOFT MEMBERS: $8 • WITH POST-SCREENING RECEPTION, INCLUDING LIGHT HORS D’OEUVRES: $25
If you want to go, you can buy tickets at The Loft Cinema or online.
At this very special event, Daniel Ellsberg and The Loft Cinema’s Executive Director Peggy Johnson, a political journalist with Arizona Public Media for 25 years, will discuss the Pentagon Papers and how that event, and Ellsberg himself, have been portrayed in films and how those films inform public knowledge and opinion.
About Daniel Ellsberg
In 1959, Daniel Ellsberg, who earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two working groups reporting to the executive committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. His trial was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him.
His recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, a book with his recollections and analysis of a second cache of secret documents related to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The book stated that US governments documents revealed that President Eisenhower empowered a few top military officers to be able to use nuclear weapons without presidential authorization in case there was incapacitation or no way to contact the president. Ellsberg believes that similar procedures remain in place today – in sharp contrast to what the American public is told about who holds the keys to launch a nuclear attack.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era. He is a senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Here is how to get tickets. It will likely sell out.
Daniel Ellsberg is quoted saying: “keeping secrets was my career...I didn’t lose the aptitude for that when I put out the Pentagon Papers.” It is amazing to me to hear from a man who is known for keeping secrets, but also publicizing such important information. For me, my first instinct is to wonder about his personal conflict. He is so committed his beliefs and comes across incredibly pessimistic, and, he puts himself in a very public, and potentially dangerous situation.
ReplyDeleteHis book, The Doomsday Machine, provides a very interesting and important point. In today's day and age, technology is so far advanced that it does not matter if countries have 100 or 1,500 nuclear weapons. The diasterous impact each weapon can have is plenty to destroy parts of the world.
I personally believe it must be hard to live a life where you constantly believe it is a miracle the world is functioning and alive. The negative outlook can wear you down as a human being and absolutely affects his outlook on other topics. But the outlook is also important because it provides one side of opinions that every smart person should consider, especially in macro-economic and geopolitical events.