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Night in the Gulf of Tonkin was morning on the east coast of the United States. Daniel Ellsberg parked his white Triumph Spitfire convertible in the sprawling parking lot of the Pentagon. He got out of his car and joined the streams of men and women walking toward the massive five-sided building. This was the first day of his new job.
 Ellsberg climbed the stairs to the third floor and walked down the hall to John McNaughton’s office. It was a large suite with windows looking out across the Potomac River to the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome. McNaughton’s secretary kept watch from a desk just outside the boss’s private room. Other assistants sat in cubicles. Ellsberg entered his tiny workspace—“a cubbyhole,” he called it—barely big enough for a desk and chair, a bookcase, and two safes for classified files. There was a little window with a view of Washington. He sat down and began reading through a pile of papers.
 He did not have long to wait for the crisis his boss had promised. “My very first day on the job,” he later said, “all hell broke loose.”