Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

At the height of a spectacular career that spanned four administrations, Daniel Ellsberg chose a new course he believed would land him in prison for the rest of his life. He smuggled out of his office a 7,000 page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam from 1945-1968, and leaked it to The New York Times . How did the coldest of warriors come to turn against his own government? In Secrets , Ellsberg finally tells the full story.

Ellsberg provides a vivid eyewitness account of the two years he spent behind the lines in Vietnam as a State Department observer, an experience that profoundly altered his own political thinking. And he tells how the release of the Pentagon Papers set in motion a train of events that ultimately toppled a president and helped to end an unjust war.

Infused with the political passion and turmoil of the Vietnam era, Secrets is the memoir of a daring man, a story about what it takes to make a dramatic life-change in the context of moral challenge, an expose of Washington power politics, and a searing portrait of America at a perilous modern crossroads.