AGI – Daniel Ellsberg, the economist and activist who made the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971He died at the age of 92. The family members made it known.
Ellsberg passed this on to US media secret US defense studies about the Vietnam War. Later he also spoke out against military intervention in Iraq and most recently against support for Ukraine, which had been invaded by the Russians.
It was Ellsberg, who disappeared at his home in Kensington, California ill for some time: He had pancreatic cancer. In March, he announced his illness in an email and said his doctors had given him three to six months to live.
For everyone, Ellsberg will remain the man of the Pentagon Papers, the deep throat which provided journalists with 7,000 pages of revelations exposing the failures of US Presidents and Congressmen who lied to Americans and thousands of soldiers who left for Vietnam.
No one in Washington believed the war would be won, however No one had lifted a finger to stop them. The scandal left deep rifts in a country already divided over the war and provoked a response from the White House, which sought to discredit Ellsberg, laying the groundwork for a scandal that would have been even more sensational shortly thereafter: the Watergate Scandal, derived from the name of the building where then-US President Richard Nixon’s staff had set up devices to spy on meetings of the rival party, the Democrats.
Ellsberg at that time was charged with espionagefor conspiracy against the United States, in addition to a series of felonies that would have been tried in federal court in Los Angeles.
But just before the jury ruled, the judge had dismissed the case, citing government misconduct, including a plan to illegally spy on Ellsberg by wiretapping his former psychiatrist’s practice. “The demystification of the President – commented Ellsberg – has only just begun.”
Its history in many ways it was a reflection of the American experience in Vietnamwhich began in the 1950s as an attempt to counter communism in Indochina and ended in 1973 with the humiliating defeat of a grueling war in which more than 58,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians had died.
But the real story, with all the hypocrisy of war, would not have come to light were it not for a Detroit Marine born April 7, 1931, the son of an engineer who left Michigan, a boy who died at 15 he had lost his mother and sister in a car accidentcaused by the father who fell asleep at the wheel.
Ellsberg would live his life as a champion of the Resistance: he had graduated with honors, studied at Harvard and then Cambridge, England, and graduated among the best.
He had enlisted as a soldier in 1954 and was one assigned to the Marine Battalion to the Middle East after the Suez Crisis of 1956. He had not served in the war, but his titles earned him respect within the Army, eventually becoming a military analyst and then, in 1964, an adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. This new role introduced him to the mysteries of the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was selected as a military expert alongside General Edward Lansdale and attended for eighteen months Missions and Patrolsall situations that gave him first-hand insight into the American situation at the front.
What he saw, like the massacres of innocent civilians, the deaths of American soldiers, triggered a change in him that would lead him to collect classified documents and government communications that revealed hypocrisy, as Washington and the Pentagon had done Confidentiality was deliberately maintained about the risks and certain failure that the United States would have faced. Still, they hadn’t stopped the war.
Back from Vietnam, Ellsberg had changed completely: he had attended pacifist conferences. At one of those events, he had heard the words of a man named Randy Kehler, who had proclaimed how proud he was to have a son who was willing to go to prison instead of going to Vietnam. “I left the auditorium,” says Ellsberg in the book The Right Words at the Right Time, “I went into the men’s room, sat on the floor and cried for an hour.”
The Analyst started writing letters to newspapers, joined anti-war protests, wrote articles and testified at draft evaders’ trials. But the most important action was when he photocopied a study conducted by the Pentagon and gave the pages to Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and other congressional officials. But all refused to act.
Then, frustrated by the lack of response, Ellsberg contacted Neil Sheehan, an old reporter for the New York Times, well-known in Vietnam. She gave him the keys to an apartment where the 47 volumes of the Pentagon were kept. The reporter, he said, had enough time to look at the documents but didn’t take them with him. Sheehan didn’t respect the agreements: He considered them “the property of the people,” copied each of the 7,000 pages, and took them to New York, where teams of journalists worked in a hotel suite for weeks.
Ellsberg only learned of the journalist’s move when the New York Times published the first of the magazine’s announced nine episodes on June 13, 1971. After the third The Ministry of Justice obtained a publication ban, but the scandal was now thunderous. In the meantime, the analyst had also sent documents to the Washington Post. The government sued him.
The Pentagon Papers revealed the cynicism of military and political leaders. Attempting to spy on the Deep Throat will then lead to the arrest of a number of individuals who will also be responsible for Watergate, the espionage case that would have led to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
Ellsberg is charged with espionage but then acquitted. Since then he has remained the icon of active pacifism, the Pentagon’s deep throat and a critical voice of all wars.
He had attacked President George W. Bush over the decision to invade Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. And he always had he had criticized the White House for the war in Iraq.
Amid tensions between the US and China, the former analyst had spoken of another secret report, which he copied himself, that suggested the United States had planned a nuclear attack on China in 1958 after Mao attacked the islands of Taipei in the Taiwan Strait controlled. The crisis was overcome when China stopped the attacks.
Since then, Ellsberg had retired to private life in California, where he was awaiting the end of his days. The mother had always done it hoped he would become a pianist and so she had led him to a rigorous musical education, consisting of hours of piano practice. An experience that was abruptly interrupted by the accident in which Ellsberg’s mother and sister lost their lives. It was 1946, a day symbolic of the existence of America’s future deep sea: July 4th, Independence Day, the most patriotic of them all.
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