Daniel Ellsberg spent years inside the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation helping plan the Vietnam War before he decided the public deserved to see the classified history proving successive presidents had lied about it. The film follows him from Marine officer and war planner to the man who photocopied 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers night after night and leaked them to the New York Times in 1971. Interviews with Ellsberg himself, journalists, and former colleagues sit alongside archival footage of Nixon's White House tapes, in which the president and his aides debate how to destroy him, first through the courts, then through the break-in at his psychiatrist's office that eventually collapsed the government's case. The Supreme Court fight over prior restraint and freedom of the press runs through the middle of the story. What emerges is a portrait of a Cold Warrior who reversed course in public, at the cost of a possible life sentence, and the film treats that reversal as the whole point.