Review of The Pentagon Papers

I agree completely with jmuckian (above). I've just finished reading "Secrets", the memoir that this movie is based on. Did they do an okay job for a TV movie? Yes. Does it *begin* to convey the flavour of the book, and the creeping disenchantment that Ellsberg experiences over the course of his years spent at the Pentagon, in the Marines, and at Rand? No, and that's what makes the book an absolutely riveting page-turner. I think the most glaring error in the movie is the reduction of his time in-country to a gunfight or two and the surveying of a decimated village in the middle of a monsoon. In reality, his time on the ground and insistence on really seeing what was going on in villages that others only saw from the air made for the best parts of the story. So in balance, I think that if you were willing to sit through this movie, and find the story at all compelling, you really owe it to yourself to read the book.