Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime military analyst who carried out one of the most consequential media leaks in history when he revealed the US government’s duplicity during the Vietnam War, has died. He was 92.
(Bloomberg) — Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime military analyst who carried out one of the most consequential media leaks in history when he revealed the US government’s duplicity during the Vietnam War, has died. He was 92.
He died Friday at his home in Kensington, California, and the cause was pancreatic cancer, according to the New York Times, which cited a statement from his wife and children.
Ellsberg helped write, then surreptitiously released, what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department account of US involvement in Vietnam. In thousands of pages spread across 47 volumes, the report documented the failure of American leaders to admit the full history and extent of the conflict, including the US bombings of neighboring Laos and Cambodia.
The study showed that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress” about the progress of the war, according to a 1996 retrospective in the New York Times, which broke the story by publishing excerpts in 1971.
The leak stoked the anti-war movement and — after the government tried to enjoin the Times from publishing further excerpts — led to an important Supreme Court ruling backing freedom of the press under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Ellsberg and a former colleague, Anthony Russo, were put on trial for espionage and theft, facing a potential prison sentence of 115 years. In May 1973, the judge overseeing the trial dismissed the case before it went to the jury, citing “improper government conduct” in its pursuit of Ellsberg.
Psychiatric Records
That conduct included the decision by President Richard Nixon’s administration to assign a team to steal records from Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in an attempt to discredit him. Some members of the team, called the White House Plumbers, later were involved in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, leading to the Watergate scandal that triggered Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
The Pentagon Papers saga made Ellsberg — whom Secretary of State Henry Kissinger labeled “the most dangerous man in America” — a role model for future whistleblowers.
The papers “didn’t reveal a single compelling or even remotely realistic basis for continuing the war,” Ellsberg said in a 2010 interview with the Christian Science Monitor. “Nor did they answer the question of, Why are we there?”
The war lasted until 1975, when South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon (today’s Ho Chi Minh City), fell to North Vietnamese forces.
Ellsberg had been recruited from the California-based think tank Rand Corp. in 1964 to help work on the classified study ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. While at Rand, he had modeled nuclear-war strategies, describing himself as a “dedicated cold warrior” in his 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
‘Bloody Stalemate’
In the early 1960s, he had consulted with President John F. Kennedy on Vietnam and urged military action to prevent the spread of communism. After working as a liaison officer in the US Embassy in Saigon, Ellsberg changed his views.
“The war was an endless, hopeless bloody stalemate,” he wrote.
Back in the US, Ellsberg was assigned to help write the secret history. With access to all 7,000 pages of the report, Ellsberg furtively made photocopies and began distributing parts to sympathetic politicians in the hope that they would make the content public and help bring an end to the war.
When he failed to get traction in Congress, Ellsberg distributed the report to the media — first to Neil Sheehan at the Times, then to the Washington Post.
Ellsberg was portrayed by actor Matthew Rhys in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, about the Washington paper’s race to catch up to the Times’ coverage in the face of pressure from the Nixon White House to halt publication.
One Regret
Ellsberg’s only regret, he told the Guardian newspaper in 2021, was not releasing the papers “much earlier, when I think they would have been much more effective.”
“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, don’t do what I did, don’t wait years ’til the bombs are falling and people have been dying,” he said.
Ellsberg was born on April 7, 1931, in Chicago, the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia who had converted to Christian Science. His father, Harry, was an engineer, and his mother, the former Adele Charsky, was a homemaker. She forced her son to practice piano four to six hours a day into his mid-teens, a regimen that ended only with her death in an automobile accident, Ellsberg later wrote.
Ellsberg received a scholarship to study economics at Harvard University. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1952 and a master’s the following year, he studied game theory at the University of Cambridge in England. His doctoral thesis at Harvard was on what has become known as the Ellsberg paradox, about how people make decisions based on ambiguous information.
After enlisting and serving in the US Marine Corps, Ellsberg became a defense analyst at Rand.
Changed Views
In a 1971 interview in Esquire magazine, he described his early politics as “a liberal on domestic matters and, on foreign policy, a tough guy.” His views changed as the 1960s, and the Vietnam War, unfolded.
After escaping prosecution over his leak, Ellsberg worked as a lecturer, speaking to college audiences about Vietnam, Watergate and his personal odyssey.
He became a left-leaning political activist, protesting at nuclear sites in the US and also in the Soviet Union.
In more recent years, Ellsberg noted his approval of other leakers of government secrets, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
“I’m glad to see that new technology being exploited here,” Ellsberg said in 2010, according to the Christian Science Monitor, speaking of Julian Assange and his online site WikiLeaks. “I couldn’t have done what I did do without Xerox at that time.”
Ellsberg had two children, Robert and Mary, with his first wife, Carol Cummings. He had a son, Michael, with his second wife, Patricia Marx.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.