Here is the full transcript of American activist and former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s talk: The Doomsday Machine @ Talks at Google conference.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Is this mic working? Can you hear me in the back?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK. I feel overdressed. Usually I only wear all this when I get arrested. I always tell people, if you’re about to get arrested, if you have a suit and tie, wear it, showing that that doesn’t exempt you from the obligations of citizenship, and that people like you can get and should get arrested at times. It’s funny. Being here, you always hear speakers say, it’s an honor to be here.
It’s not actually a formula I use, particularly I don’t go into it. And yet it’s occurring to me here, people who stand here, of course, know they’re at the center of the universe exactly, and speaking to — This is, by the way, a much younger audience than I’m used to speaking to. Generally, they’re all gray hair or — I see one here OK, the scroll overhead is a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Except that in the “Star Wars” movie, the galaxy we’re in, the same bullshit is going on as in far, far away. It’s been going on all along.
I was just talking to people from the bookstore. They tell me they actually have– I was surprised– copies of my earlier book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” Good book. I encourage you to read it. It should be coming out now. It would explain how we got into Afghanistan, why we stayed in Afghanistan, why we’re not getting out of Afghanistan.
The movie, “The Post,” which is coming out shortly– and I’ve seen it a couple times– is set in 1971. And that was at a time when America thought it had been going on for a very long time in war, in Vietnam, six years. That was longer than any American war prior to that. People then, your age and twice your age and three times your age, had not experienced a war that had gone on 16 years that was likely to go on another 10 or 16. That wasn’t in our experience.
And yet the question was just as sharp then, of course, as now: What’s going on? Why are we here? What is this? The movie, a documentary that was made from “Secrets” is called “The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” It got an Academy Award for the longest title, actually.
But really, the movie, “The Post”, now, in which I figure, played by somebody who looks a lot better than I did then, Matthew Rhys of “The Americans–” so it’s a good movie, in other words– really doesn’t give a clue as to answering the question, why was Daniel Ellsberg dangerous to anybody, to Kissinger, to Nixon?
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