Leaker of Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, passes away at 92 due to pancreatic cancer, confirms family

Anti-war activist and whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has died at the age of 92. He passed away at his home in Kensington, California, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February. Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite until the early 1970s when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the US role in Indochina. Until that point, he had risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances, and was trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations. However, he had turned against the yearslong war in Vietnam, the government’s claims that the battle was winnable, and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the US-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region.

Ellsberg was a seeker of truth and a patriotic truth-teller, an anti-war activist, a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, a dear friend to many, and an inspiration to countless more. His son, Robert Ellsberg, tweeted a tribute to his father in which he recalled how his father once said he would want his gravestone to say, “He became a part of the anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear movement.”

As much as anyone, Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience, who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious, and profoundly sensitive, a born proselytizer who “saw political events in terms of moral absolutes” and demanded consequences for abuses of power. As much as anyone, Ellsberg also embodied the fall of American idealism in foreign policy in the 1960s and ’70s and the upending of the post-World War II consensus that communism, real or suspected, should be opposed worldwide.

The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the US and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after. The papers covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and ’50s to the growing involvement of the US, including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.

First published in The New York Times in June 1971, with The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and more than a dozen others following, the classified papers documented that the US had defied a 1954 settlement barring a foreign military presence in Vietnam, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries, and had plotted to send American soldiers even as Johnson vowed he wouldn’t. The Johnson administration had dramatically and covertly escalated the war despite the “judgment of the Government’s intelligence community that the measures would not” weaken the North Vietnamese.

Ellsberg became a hero to the anti-war movement and a traitor to the war’s supporters, labeled the “most dangerous man in America” by national security adviser Henry Kissinger, with whom Ellsberg had once been friendly. The papers themselves were seen by many as an indictment not just of a given president or party but of a generation of political leadership. The Nixon administration quickly tried to block further publication on the grounds that the papers would compromise national security, but the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the newspapers on June 30, 1971, a major First Amendment ruling rejecting prior restraint.

Ellsberg faced trials in Boston and Los Angeles on federal charges for espionage and theft, with a possible sentence of more than 100 years. He had expected to go to jail but was spared, in part, by Nixon’s rage and the excesses of those around him. The Boston case ended in a mistrial because the government wiretapped 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 burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, California. Byrne ruled that “the bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”

Original Story at www.cbsnews.com – 2023-06-16 23:54:00