Ignorance is bliss.
Regardless of how the war started, it was a war that needed to be fought, all Ellesberg did was ultimately to lead to the Khmer Rouge killing two million in the Cambodian Killing Fields.
What I learned from the Pentagon Papers: we went into Vietnam with a mission that was at best vaguely described (and, for the most part, wasn't described at all), with no strategy at all, or even a concept of what would be a winning strategy, and no idea of how to tell if we were winning or not. Left with that sort of political non-guidance, the military set themselves up to fight the kind of war they preferred--logistically massive conventional forces--without any real regard for whether those forces would be strategically relevant. Once there, we attempted to improvise ad hoc solutions to strategic problems without considering any factors beside our own convenience--and sought to impose them by force on a population and a country that we were supposedly trying to keep free and develop into a self-governing democracy. I think it's fair to describe those conditions as a gross miscarriage of statecraft.
War is far too important to be left to the generals--which, in turn, means that the politicians had better have SOME idea of what they want done, and how it should be done, before they tell the generals "don't just stand there, do something!"
Yes, that war needed to be fought. But it needed to be fought competently. We were competent at the tactical level--but so was the enemy. We won battles because of superior firepower--but because that firepower turned out to be strategically irrelevant, victory at the tactical level didn't turn into war-winning objectives being met, and thus did not lead to strategic victory.
And by the time of the Pentagon Papers getting published, there was no popular support for continuing the war. That had been exhausted by Johnson's mishandling of the war and public opinion about the war from 1965 to 1969. Ellsberg didn't cause the killing fields in 1971--Johnson and MacNamara did in 1964.
I respect your opinion and agree on many points, but that being said, Ellesberg should not be looked upon as a hero by anyone, he is still a traitor.
As Clemenceau said, "War is a series of calamaties that result in victory."
And yes Vietnam was a battle lost in a larger scope war that we ultimately did win, precisely because we showed the Soviets that they were not going to be able to expand their influence without paying a heavy price, a price in the end, they were not willing to pay. All that in spite of the cluster f--k LBJ and McNamara made out of the war.