Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and teh Pentagon Papers

New York: Viking Press, 2002. Second printing. Hardcover. Fine/fine. Octavo, 498pp., illustrated. A fine, crisp copy, with a tiny smudge on the fore-edge. In a fine dust jacket. This copy SIGNED and warmly INSCRIBED by Ellsberg on the title page: "To Shirley [Feigenbaum?] and Everett Lewis - it was a great pleasure meeting you both - and thank you for your amazing gift of hospitality! Dan Ellsberg 5-13-05." A laid-in sheet of notebook paper contains lengthy thank-you notes from both Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, expressing gratitude to the couple of the inscription for their hospitality. Patricia leaves some money for some phone calls she had made on their landline, and Daniel describes how he attempted to launder the linens. Clearly the Ellsbergs had stayed at their apartment in New York for some time, though we've been unable to identify the couple. Though the letter doesn't shed much light on Ellsberg's heroic career, it does illustrate how a man of wisdom and foresight, who helped reveal the government's inept and immoral handling of the Vietnam fiasco, could end up more or less where he started - a middle-class writer and thinker, who was to some extent reliant on the favors of friends and acquaintances. This retrospective memoir, written more than three decades after the events, is uncommon signed.