Daniel Ellsberg

N,
I saw this documentary a month or so back on DOX, a series on SVT1 that i totally recommend checking out, about a guy whose life was governed by a total mind trip of a metaphor from his own life. It was the kind of thing that makes Jonh Irving's characters tick. This Daniel Ellsberg was a pentagon think-tank whiz-kid during the sixties who eventually sees the evils of the war he was helping to sustain...So..he goes rogue and starts copying top secret files to leak to the press. Why the change of heart?

 Well let me tell you; when he was a teenager his father fell asleep at the wheel of their family car, careened off the road and into a concrete drain culvert sheering the car in two, Father and son survived while the mother and sister didn't, The experience became a lesson and metaphor that would dictate Ellsberg's later life;
   those with control, authority and responsibility over others can fall asleep at the wheel and, this being the case, they need to be watched.
no shit.

(he did also have the hots for a braless & sexually liberated flower child so that probably clouded his judgement some... stinking hippies)