I thought I was pretty much familiar with the story about how the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press in 1971. I knew that Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level analyst at the Pentagon and the RAND Corp., had Xeroxed the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War and leaked it to the press, notably the New York Times.

What I never realized was what a high-ranking employee really Ellsberg was and how secret the Pentagon Papers really were. "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers," a documentary by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, explains all this. Locked in safes, the papers' existence was a secret even from President Lyndon B. Johnson, who, it was believed, would have been infuriated by such a history. Ellsberg didn't merely leak the papers, he played a key role in contributing to them.

Ellsberg, in short, could not be dismissed as merely a sneak and a snitch, but a man who had direct knowledge of how the American public had been misled. He saw himself not as a peacenik war protester, but as a government servant exercising a higher moral duty. "The Most Dangerous Man in America" traces Ellsberg's doubts about authority back to a childhood tragedy and forward to the influence of young men who went to prison for their convictions.

It is a skillful, well-made film, although, since Ellsberg is the narrator, it doesn't probe him very deeply. We see his version of himself. A great deal of relevant footage has been assembled and is intercut with stage re-creations, animations and the White House tapes of Richard Nixon, who fully advocated the nuclear bombing of Hanoi. Kissinger was apparently a voice of restraint.