jeopardize electronic surveillance and sensitive sources of information.

Daniel Ellsberg grew increasingly pessimistic about the chances of anything resembling a U.S. victory in Vietnam. The options, as he saw them, presented a choice between bad and worse. Shortly after the election of Richard Nixon as president in November 1968, Ellsberg was tapped to prepare a study of Vietnam "options" for Henry Kissinger, Nixon's newly-appointed national security adviser. In presenting his evaluation of options, Ellsberg found that Kissinger shared his negative assessment of the odds of a military victory. Ellsberg felt cautiously optimistic that Kissinger would help push Nixon to a policy of an early exit from the morass of Vietnam.

After meeting with Kissinger, Ellsberg returned to his work at the Santa Monica office of Rand, where he began readingthe Pentagon Papers. As he read through the secret history of U.S. support for French efforts to crush independence movements in Indochina in the 1950s, Ellsberg came to see the continuation of the war in Vietnam as not just bad policy, but as immoral.

By mid-summer 1969, it became clear to Ellsberg that Nixon had no intention of simply declaring victory and pulling out of Vietnam. The president did not want to see the flag of the Vietcong fly over the city of Saigon. Faced with the prospect of a war without end, costing thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, Ellsberg pondered what he might do to bring about a change in U.S. policy. After attending an emotional conference of War Resisters at Haverford College in August, Ellsberg suddenly