Truth and consequence Reflections on catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope

The late activist and Pentagon Paper leaker Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine), who died in 2023, muses in this roving collection on what motivates bureaucrats to comply with or resist corrupt directives. The book opens with essays on his fraught relationship with his mother, Adele ("We were lovers," he writes, but "not physically"), who insisted that he train as a pianist. After she died in a car accident when his father, Harry, fell asleep at the wheel, the 15-year-old Ellsberg felt relieved at not having to practice anymore, leading to guilt and neurosis. In later passages drawn from his notebooks, he reflects on his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers, which contradicted official optimism about the Vietnam War, as well as the apparent lack of conscience of the national-security functionaries who hid the truth about the conflict at the president's behest. Here, Ellsberg draws connections between Vietnam and his boyhood trauma, likening Adele, who demanded that the sleep-deprived Harry keep driving, to a domineering president, and Harry to a passive RAND flunky who follows dangerous directives. Other selections cover Ellsberg's later activism, including on climate change. Ellsberg's ruminations map an emotional, at times almost spiritual journey from Cold War liberalism to New Left progressivism and today's lefty politics. It makes for a fascinating window into the inner life of a whistleblower and the psychological turmoil behind a sweeping societal shift. (Mar.)

A life examined through conscience and catastrophe. In this posthumous collection of unpublished writings by political activist and former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (1931--2023), best remembered for releasing the top-secret Pentagon Papers that exposed the U.S. government's hidden motives in the Vietnam War and ultimately contributed both to the war's end and to the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, Ellsberg's son, Michael, and longtime assistant Thomas have assembled decades of material: personal essays, handwritten notes, and ruminations that reveal Ellsberg's moral clarity, intellectual rigor, and prescient warnings about the dangers of unchecked power and collective denial. Part I gathers three autobiographical essays written later in Ellsberg's life that differ markedly in tone and content from the rest of the book. In these deeply personal pieces, he revisits his unusual and often unsettling childhood. His parents were devout Christian Scientists who rejected medical treatment of any kind, and his mother was determined that he become a concert pianist, insisting on hours of daily practice from early childhood until a tragic car accident claimed her life and that of his younger sister when he was 15--an event that, though devastating, also marked his first experience of personal freedom. Ellsberg's restless moral and intellectual inquiry dominates the book's largest section, Part II, drawn from a vast compilation of his handwritten notebooks spanning five decades. These pages trace his evolving meditations on conscience, obedience, war, and humanity's capacity for self-destruction, interwoven with historical and psychological insights and flashes of daily life. Many of these ideas find fuller articulation in Part III, which gathers eight substantial essays written between the 1980s and early 2000s on subjects ranging from terrorism and genocide to nuclear deterrence and the moral dimensions of evil. A resonant volume that affirms Ellsberg's rare moral conviction and his unwavering belief in truth as a force for change. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.