NEW YORK—Daniel Ellsberg, the landmark whistleblower who by leaking the Pentagon Papers exposed longstanding government misconceptions and deceptions about the Vietnam War and inspired retaliatory acts by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation and a Historic Supreme Court ruling on the First Amendment, is dead. He was 92 years old.
Ellsberg, who announced in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, died Friday morning, according to a letter from his family released by a spokeswoman, Julia Pacetti.
Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source of the startling media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the United States’ role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed insider. of the military and government elite. A Harvard graduate, a self-described “cold warrior” who served as a private and government consultant in Vietnam during the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances, and became of confidence for Democratic and Republican officials.
A GREAT “TALENT FOR DISCRETION”
He was especially valued, he would later point out, for his “talent for discretion”.
But like millions of other Americans, in government and out, he had turned against the years-long war in Vietnam, the government’s claims that the battle was winnable and that a North Vietnamese victory over the South backed by the US would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region. Unlike so many other opponents of the war, he was in a special position to make a difference.
“An entire generation of Vietnam-era connoisseurs had become as disillusioned as I had been with a war they considered hopeless and endless,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” “By 1968, if not before, everyone wanted, like me, to see us out of this war.”
The Pentagon Papers were commissioned in 1967 by then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a prominent public defender of the war who wanted to leave behind a complete history of the US and Vietnam and help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes that would commit The documents covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed colonization efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to increasing US involvement, including bombing raids and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s tenure. Ellsberg was one of those invited to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when newly elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.
More than anyone else, Ellsberg embodied the conscientious individual, who only responded to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. David Halberstam, the late author and Vietnam War correspondent who had known Ellsberg since they were both posted overseas, would describe him as an uncommon convert. He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious, and deeply sensitive, a born proselytizer who “viewed political events in terms of moral absolutes” and demanded consequences for abuses of power.
More than anyone else, Ellsberg also embodied the decline of American idealism in foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the overthrow of the post-World War II consensus that communism, real or suspected, should be opposed everywhere. the world.
WHEN WERE THE PENTAGON DOCUMENTS RELEASED?
The Pentagon Papers were first published in The New York Times in June 1971, followed by The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and more than a dozen others. They documented that the US defied a 1954 agreement banning foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries and planned to send US troops even when Johnson promised not to.
The Johnson administration had escalated the war dramatically and covertly despite the “judgment of the government’s intelligence community that the measures would not” weaken the North Vietnamese, wrote the Times’ Neil Sheehan, a former Vietnam correspondent who later He wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the war, “A Shining Lie That Shines.”
The leaker’s identity became a national guessing game, and Ellsberg turned out to be an obvious suspect, due to his access to the documents and his public condemnation of the war over the previous two years. With the FBI on his tail, Ellsberg turned himself in to the Boston authorities, became a hero of the anti-war movement and a traitor to war supporters, labeled the “most dangerous man in America” by security adviser national Henry Kissinger, with whom Ellsberg has once been friendly.
Many saw the documents themselves as an indictment not just of a given president or party, but of a generation of political leaders. Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt would point out that the growing mistrust of government during the Vietnam era, “the credibility gap,” had “opened into an abyss.”
“The quicksand of lying statements of all kinds, hoaxes, and self-delusions may engulf any reader who wishes to taste this material which, sadly, they must acknowledge as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of US domestic politics,” he wrote.
The Nixon administration quickly tried to block more publications on the grounds that the newspapers would compromise national security, but the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the newspapers on June 30, 1971, a major ruling by the US Supreme Court. First Amendment that rejects the previous restriction. Nixon himself, initially unconcerned that the documents predated his time in office, was determined to punish Ellsberg and assembled a renegade team of White House “plumbers”, endowed with a stash of House “hush money”. Blanca and the mission to prevent future leaks.
“You can’t quit,” Nixon told his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, privately. “You can’t let the Jew steal those things and get away with it. You understand?”
Ellsberg faced trials in Boston and Los Angeles on federal espionage and robbery charges, with a possible sentence of more than 100 years. He had expected to go to jail, but was saved, in part, by Nixon’s anger and the excesses of those around him. The Boston case ended in a mistrial because the government tapped telephone conversations between a defense witness and his attorney. Charges in the Los Angeles trial were dismissed after Judge Matthew Byrne learned that White House “plumbers” G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had robbed Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Byrne ruled that “the strange events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”
Meanwhile, the “plumbers” continued their crime spree, most notably the June 1972 raid on the Democratic Party’s national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC The Watergate scandal did not prevent Nixon from winning a landslide re-election in 1972, but expanded rapidly during his second term, culminating in his resignation in August 1974. American combat troops had already left Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese captured the southern capital, Saigon, in April 1975.
“Without Nixon’s obsession with me, I would have stayed in office,” Ellsberg told The Associated Press in 1999. “And if he hadn’t been removed from office, he would have continued to bomb (in Vietnam).”
Ellsberg’s story was outlined in the 2009 documentary “America’s Most Dangerous Man: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” The film had its West Coast premiere just a few blocks from the Rand Corp. headquarters in Santa Monica, Ellsberg’s former workplace. He sent out flyers to college students urging old colleagues to come to the screening, but none showed up.
Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931 to Jewish parents who converted to Christian Science. His father was an unemployed engineer in the early years of the Great Depression and the family later moved to suburban Detroit, where his father worked at a plant that made B-24 bombers. Daniel had vivid memories of learning that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and of reports of the Nazis bombing London and the Americans bombing Germany and Japan.
It happened in the Taiwan Strait.
In his teens, Ellsberg found himself in agreement with Harry Truman and other “Cold War liberals”, believing in civil rights and economic justice at home, and restraining the Soviet Union abroad. He, too, was deeply shaped by personal tragedy. During a car trip in 1946, his father fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a side wall, killing Ellsberg’s mother and younger sister. Ellsberg would look back with a sense of loss and mistrust: his father, the authority figure, had failed to keep his family safe.
With the idea of becoming a labor organizer, Ellsberg won a scholarship to Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude. He served in the Marine Corps as an act of defiance against his Ivy League past, but eventually returned to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in economics. In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the Rand Corp., a Santa Monica, California-based think tank on global politics, advising the Department of Defense and the White House on nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and decision-making. decisions in crisis situations. Ellsberg spent two years in the mid-1960s with the State Department in Vietnam, where he learned firsthand how casually lied by military and political officials and became convinced that the conflict was unwinnable, in part through the firefights with the North Vietnamese that he survived.
At the encouragement of a close friend of Rand’s, researcher Anthony J. Russo, Ellsberg had decided in the fall of 1969 that the Nixon government would continue the policies of other Presidents and that McNamara’s study needed to be seen. His life would soon seem like a spy thriller.
Ellsberg removed some of the classified and bound volumes from his safe at the Rand offices, placed them in his briefcase, and walked past security guards and a sign reading “Loose Lips Sink.”
