Vietnam Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg Dies At 92
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – Journalists, friends, and family have plunged into mourning after Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who became one of the most important whistleblowers of the 20th century by leaking secret documents about the Vietnam War, died over the weekend.
Ellsberg, who had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February, died at 92 at his home in Kensington, California, the family said.
Commentators said Ellsberg profoundly influenced American politics, military history, and journalism by leaking to the press the Pentagon Papers revealing doubts within the U.S. government about the Vietnam War.
The person whom former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” made the history-changing decision to leak the documents in 1971.
That was long before Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks revealed government secrets in the name of transparency.
Ellsberg said he wanted Americans to know that their government was capable of misleading and even lying to them.
In his later years, Ellsberg would become an advocate for whistleblowers and leakers, and his “Pentagon Papers” leak was portrayed in the 2017 movie “The Post.”
MANY PAGES
The Pentagon Papers were 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress, and misled the American people.
The papers added to turmoil in a nation already wounded and divided by the war and what Ellsberg viewed as a politically motivated trial against him backed by the White House.
His revelations also led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information, and attack alleged “political enemies.”
The measures and methods formed the basis of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
Ellsberg became an anti-Vietnam War warrior after he went to Saigon for the State Department in the mid-1960s.
Ellsberg had arrived there with an impressive resume. He had earned three degrees from Harvard University, served in the Marine Corps, and worked at the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, the influential policy research think tank.
He was a dedicated Cold War warrior and hawk on Vietnam at the time. But Ellsberg, in his 2003 book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” said he was only one week into a two-year tour of duty in Saigon when he realized the United States was in a war it would not win.
PEACE RALLIES
Armed with new views on the war, Ellsberg started attending peace rallies. He said he was inspired to copy the “Pentagon Papers” after hearing an anti-war protester say he was looking forward to going to prison for resisting the draft.
Ellsberg reportedly began sneaking 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 passing pages to the New York Times newspaper.
The Times ran its first installment of the “Pentagon Papers” on June 13, 1971, and the administration of President Richard Nixon moved quickly to get a judge to stop further publication.
“Nixon’s claim of executive authority and invocation of the Espionage Act set off a freedom-of-the-press fight over the extreme censorship of prior restraint,” Reuters news agency recalled.
Ellsberg’s next move was to give the “Pentagon Papers” to the Washington Post and more than a dozen other newspapers. In New York Times v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled less than three weeks after the first publication that the press had the right to publish the papers, and the Times resumed doing so.
The study said U.S. officials had concluded that the war probably could not be won and that President John F. Kennedy approved of plans for a coup to overthrow the South Vietnamese leader.
EXPANDING WAR
It also said Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, had plans to expand the war, including bombing in North Vietnam, despite saying during the 1964 campaign that he would not. Additionally, the papers revealed the secret U.S. bombing in Cambodia and Laos and that casualty figures were higher than reported.
In later years, he would write books, give lectures and encourage whistle-blowers to help change history.
Ellsberg continued his work even after saying in a March email message to “Dear friends and supporters” that he had recently been told he had inoperable pancreatic cancer.
He said his doctors had given him an estimate of three to six months to live.
However, “whatever time” he had left, he said, would be spent giving talks and interviews about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the perils of nuclear war, and the importance of First Amendment protections.
His family is now mourning Ellsberg, who had been married twice, first to Carol Cummings, with whom he had two children. That marriage ended in divorce.
His second marriage was to Patricia Marx, with whom he had a son.
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