Secrets, by Daniel Ellsberg
The founder of Buddhism, born Prince Gautama Siddharta in India in 563 b.c., began his journey toward becoming a Buddha, an Enlightened One, when he ventured out of his palace and witnessed the sufferings of the old, the sick, the poor and the dying. Daniel Ellsberg, now 73, one of the best and the brightest of the American elite, started on his path toward enlightenment as a result of what he saw during the two years he worked in Vietnam for the U.S. State Department in the 1960s.
As a Harvard graduate, a Marine Corps commander, a Rand Corporation analyst and a Defense Department official under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Ellsberg was well trained to be a successful cold-war warrior in the 1960s and '70s. But what he observed in Vietnam was later reinforced by his access to a top-secret 7,000-page archive on U.S. involvement in that southeast Asian country.
The archive later known as the "Pentagon Papers" revealed his government's lies, fabricated to justify its failures and the military escalation in Vietnam. As a citizen of the most open society in the world, a country which has not only a Constitution but a Bill of Rights which even Congress cannot change, Ellsberg had faith in the traditional common sense of his people. He used the facilities of his workplace (the Rand Corporation) to make copies of the "Pentagon Papers," which he then leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971.
