Volume 20, Number 4 · March 22, 1973
Heresy in Los Angeles
By Peter Schrag
Since it began, the Pentagon Papers trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo, Jr., has seemed to those of us who have been watching it partly a trial for heresy, partly an obscenity trial—an inquisition into the meaning, use, and control of a sacred, unspeakable text, represented in this instance by a plain brown carton that often sits on a table in front of the government prosecutor, David R. Nissen: twenty Xeroxed volumes of the forty-seven-volume history of the Vietnam war. Both the government and the defendants are obsessed with that carton, which has become a kind of a totem of the age of information.
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