Rock ‘n’ roll and politics make strange bedfellows. Never was that more the case than in 1972, when Bloodrock, a Texas-based hard rock band from Fort Worth, wrote a song dedicated to one of America’s most important political whistleblowers: Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers. The story begins in 1967 when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a top-secret study examining US involvement in Vietnam. Officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force”, the document examined the government’s role in Vietnam starting with the end of World War II.
In short, the report revealed the willingness of the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson (and soon-to-be Nixon) administrations to maintain the country’s commitment to the Vietnam War despite the realization that no amount of military force would topple communist-backed North Vietnam. The US government continued to send troops and sustain its bombing campaigns in what it knew to be a losing effort. The government never shared this information with the American public.
A former military officer (he served in the Marine Corps as a first lieutenant from 1954 to 1957), Daniel Ellsberg was a military analyst for the RAND Corp., a Santa Monica, California-based nonprofit global policy think tank and research institute. He was hawkish early in his career — Ellsberg actively supported and advised on US strategy in the Vietnam War in the early to mid-1960s — but changed his thinking after learning of the deception found in the report.
That’s when he and a colleague, Anthony Russo, decided to release a copy of the 47-volume, 7,000-page classified document and historical narrative kept at RAND headquarters. The pair secretly photocopied the documents over several months.
Ellsberg first tried to share the papers with anti-war senators, hoping they would make the study public. Finding no takers, he approached journalist Neil Sheehan of The New York Times. Sheehan accepted the documents, and the newspaper published its first article on the subject on June 13, 1971.
Regarded as a hero by many — some 150 people gathered to show their support when he turned himself in to authorities at the federal courthouse in Boston — Ellsberg (at this point “the most dangerous man in America”, according to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger) also had his detractors. His RAND colleagues felt betrayed, while the White House was predictably furious.
“Just because some guy’s going to be a martyr, we can’t be in a position of allowing the fellow to get away with this kind of wholesale thievery or otherwise it’s going to happen all over the government,” said President Nixon. “I just say that we’ve got to keep our eye on the main ball. The main ball is Ellsberg. We’ve got to get this son of a bitch.”
Nixon’s Justice Department got a federal judge to order the Times to cease publishing the stories (although The Boston Globe and The Washington Post soon followed with their own reports). In the end, more than two dozen newspapers published articles and excerpts based on the Pentagon Papers.
Daniel Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for sharing national defense information and faced more than 100 years in prison. In May 1973, however, his charges were dismissed because of gross misconduct (including the September 1971 government break-in of the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist at the time). From there began the slow crumbling of both the Nixon administration and the country’s involvement in Vietnam.
In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against Nixon for the Watergate scandal; the president announced his resignation less than a month later. The Fall of Saigon — the final military and political act of the Vietnam War — occurred on April 30, 1975.
Musicians quickly paid tribute to the whistleblower. “The Ballad of Daniel Ellsberg” by Rulie Garcia appeared in 1971 on the small Doré label, while an obscure singer-songwriter named James Stein released a track called “Written in the Mind of Man (Song for Daniel Ellsberg).” Musical accolades also arrived via a bruising hard rock band from the Lone Star State.
Bloodrock Out-Schemed the Schemers
Bloodrock — previously known as Crowd + 1 — signed with Capitol Records and released its first album in February 1970. The nine-song LP followed the blueprint established by several of the era’s hard rock heavyweights, including Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad: strong lead vocals buttressed by lots of electric guitars and plenty of Hammond organ.
With song titles such as “American Burn”, “Don’t Eat the Children”, “Gimme Your Head”, “Melvin Laid an Egg”, and “Rock & Roll Candy Man”, Bloodrock was the last band anyone thought would land a hit — until they did. “D.O.A., ,the first single from 1970’s Bloodrock 2, a plodding, nearly nine-minute first-person account of a fatally injured airplane passenger describing his last moments, scraped the lower reaches of the Top 40 in early 1971 (it peaked at #36).
The lyrics are about as grim as its title suggests: “Life is flowing out my body / Pain is flowing out with my blood / The sheets are red and moist where I’m lying / God in heaven, teach me how to die”. (Incidentally, “D.O.A.” wasn’t the group’s only song about death; the cleverly titled “Abracadaver” appears on Bloodrock U.S.A., the band’s fourth album from October 1971).
Two original members—guitarist Lee Pickens and drummer/vocalist Jim Rutledge—split in 1972. A new lineup brought a new sound. Eschewing its hard rock roots, the group cultivated a more jazz-inspired progressive rock approach (think woodwinds and song titles like “Parallax” and “Stilled by Whirlwind Tongues”). New, too, was a brief foray into politics. Bloodrock’s first album with its revamped roster, Passage (1972), included an ode to one of the era’s most famous whistleblowers; “Thank You Daniel Ellsberg”, the B-side to the album’s lead single, “Help Is on the Way”, was written as a tribute to the suddenly famous military analyst.
Both the music and the lyrics are simple — Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen this is not — but it’s hard to overlook the song’s importance given the political climate of the time. The two-verse track, a slow blues number, is a tip of the cap to Ellsberg and his controversial decision to leak the Pentagon Papers,
The song curiously mentions a Louis Packwood. Although it’s not clear who the band is referencing — there is no record of anyone by that name related to the Pentagon Papers — it’s possible they are referring to a former special agent in the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal conspiracy unit who testified in a court appearance that his last assignment was the assassination of George Jackson, a member of the Black Panther Party. Jackson was shot and killed by prison guards at San Quentin State Prison on August 21, 1971, during an alleged escape attempt. However, Packwood didn’t testify until 1976 — four years after the release of Passage. Perhaps the band knew something no one else did.
Rock ‘n‘ Roll Meltdown
Bloodrock’s story ended not long after “Thank You Daniel Ellsberg”. The band released its final album in 1974; Whirlwind Tongues was the group’s only record that failed to chart.
Time has not been kind to the group. Critics have retrospectively savaged the band’s music. The 1979 edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide awarded zero stars to all the group’s albums, for example, while Robert Christgau, in his Rock Albums of the ‘70s: A Critical Guide (1981), included Bloodrock in an appendix called “Meltdown” (which features the likes of similarly reviled bands such as Angel, Cactus, Starz and Uriah Heep).
Although critical success was elusive, the band had a cult following; six of the group’s records — including a live album — charted, and two of those hit the Top 30. Bloodrock 2 earned gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America.
Daniel Ellsberg was subsequently honored with numerous international peace awards, including the Gandhi Peace Award (1978), the Right Livelihood Award (2006), the Dresden Peace Prize (2016) and the Olof Palme Prize (2018). He earned an American Book Award for his 2002 memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Fifty-five years after he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the public, Ellsberg’s role as a political whistleblower continues to resonate. His words are as relevant today as they were in 1971.
“The courage we need is not the courage, the fortitude, to be obedient in the service of an unjust war to help conceal lies, to do our job by a boss who has usurped power and is acting as an outlaw government,” he says in archival footage that serves as the final scene of Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s 2009 Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. “It is the courage at last to face honestly the truth and the reality of what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it.”
Daniel Ellsberg died at his home in California on June 16, 2023. He was 92 years old.
Resources
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Penguin. 2002.
Garrett Graff, Watergate: A New History. Simon & Schuster Inc.. 2022.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith. First Run Features. 2009.