WASHINGTON, June 16 (Portal) – Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst whose change of heart on the Vietnam War led him to leak the secret “Pentagon Papers” that exposed the US government’s deception about the war and caused a great deprivation of liberty. The press fight died on Friday at the age of 92, his family said in a statement.
Ellsberg, who was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February, died at his home in Kensington, California, the family said.
Long before Edward Snowden and Wikileaks leaked government secrets in the name of transparency, Ellsberg was letting Americans know their government was capable of misleading and even lying to them. In his later years, Ellsberg became an advocate for whistleblowers and leakers, and his leak to the Pentagon Papers was depicted in the 2017 film The Post.
Ellsberg in Vietnam, 1966. Courtesy of Daniel Ellsberg Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.
Ellsberg secretly approached the media in 1971, hoping to hasten the end of the Vietnam War. This made him the target of a Nixon White House smear campaign. Henry Kissinger, then the President’s National Security Adviser, called him “the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs”.
When he went to Saigon for the State Department in the mid-1960s, Ellsberg had an impressive resume. He earned three degrees from Harvard, served in the Marine Corps, and worked at the Pentagon and at RAND Corporation, the influential policy research think tank.
At the time, he was a dedicated Cold War warrior and a combatant for Vietnam. But Ellsberg, in his 2003 book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, said he arrived in Saigon a week into his two-year deployment when he realized the United States was at war, that they would not lead win.
Temporary identity card of the Ellsberg Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1965. Courtesy Daniel Ellsberg Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials, commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had secretly compiled a 7,000-page report on US engagement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. When he was finished in 1969, two of the 15 copies released went to the RAND Corporation, where Ellsberg worked again.
anti-war rallies
With his new perspective on the war, Ellsberg began attending peace rallies. He said he was inspired to copy the Pentagon Papers after hearing an anti-war protester say he looked forward to going to jail for resisting conscription.
Ellsberg began secretly smuggling the top-secret study out of the RAND office and copying it at night on a rented Xerox machine – using his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter as helpers. He took the documents with him when he moved to Boston for a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ended up sitting on them for a year and a half before leaking them to the New York Times.
On June 13, 1971, the Times published its first issue of the Pentagon Papers, and President Richard Nixon’s administration quickly moved to get a judge to halt further publication. Nixon’s claim to executive power and invocation of the Espionage Act sparked a press freedom struggle over the extreme censorship of previous reticence.
Ellsberg shaking hands with Lyndon Baines Johnson, ca. 1964. Courtesy Daniel Ellsberg Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries
[1/2] Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg attends a news conference held by whistleblower group ExposeFacts.org at the National Press Club in Washington April 27, 2015. Portal/Jonathan Ernst
Ellsberg’s next step was to turn over the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and more than a dozen other newspapers. In New York Times v. USA, less than three weeks after the first publication, the Supreme Court ruled that the press had the right to publish the articles, and the Times resumed doing so.
The study said US officials concluded that the war was unlikely to be won and that President John F. Kennedy approved plans for a coup to overthrow the South Vietnamese leader. It also said Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, had plans to escalate the war, including bombing North Vietnam, although he had said during the 1964 campaign that he would not do so. The newspapers also revealed the secret US bombings in Cambodia and Laos and that the death toll was higher than reported.
ON THE RUN
The Times never said who leaked the papers, but the FBI found out quickly. Ellsberg remained underground for about two weeks before surrendering in Boston.
“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer help hide this information from the American public,” Ellsberg said at the time. “I have clearly done so at my own risk and I am prepared to face any consequences of this decision.”
He would say he regrets not disclosing the papers sooner.
Although the Pentagon Papers did not report on Nixon’s dealings with Vietnam, the White House “plumber” unit, which later performed the Watergate break-in that led to Nixon’s downfall, was ordered to stop further leaks and discredit Ellsberg .
Two and a half months after it was first published, two men who would go on to star in Watergate – G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt – broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to look for incriminating evidence.
Ellsberg and a RAND colleague were eventually charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy. However, at her trial in 1973, the case was dismissed on grounds of government misconduct when the burglary was exposed.
Ellsberg in Uniform, 1954. Courtesy Daniel Ellsberg Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries
In his later years, Ellsberg, who was born on April 7, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, became a writer and lecturer in the Campaign for Government Transparency and Against Nuclear Proliferation.
He said Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor who gave journalists thousands of classified documents about the government’s intelligence gathering before fleeing the country, had done nothing wrong. He also said he considers Corporal Chelsea Manning a hero for turning over a plethora of government files to WikiLeaks.
His books include The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner in 2017 and Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers in 2002.
The once top secret papers that Ellsberg released can be read online at http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/.
Ellsberg was married twice, first to Carol Cummings, with whom he had two children. This marriage ended in divorce. In his second marriage he married Patricia Marx, with whom he had a son.
writing and reporting by Bill Trott; Additional reporting by Kanishka Singh; Edited by Dan Grebler and Diane Craft
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