The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting.
Daniel EllsbergPresident Johnson put destroyers in harm's way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.
Daniel EllsbergIn my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material โ and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.
Daniel Ellsberg