The “despicable,” “vile” Daniel Ellsberg, “the most dangerous man in America,” the “son of a bitch”, the “traitor” is dead. He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 92.
The scathing descriptions date back to the 1970s, when Ellsberg, an ex-Defense analyst, passed on a voluminous classified report on the Vietnam War to several newspapers. The quotes include from incumbent President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who found this act inexcusable—both from official Ellsberg and from the newspapers that published the staggering truth about the American war effort. The government tried to bring down the newspapers legally and Ellsberg legally and with covert operations, but that did not work.
Daniel Ellsberg (Chicago, 1931) graduated from Harvard as an economist, became an officer in the Marines and then went to work for the RAND Corporation, a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon and the defense industry.
Also read this 2019 interview with Ellsberg: ‘Every warhead is a launchable Auschwitz’
In 1964 Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War, brought Ellsberg to the Defense Department. He was sent to South Vietnam, the country supported by the US against communist North Vietnam. There he served as an officer (“best platoon commander I’ve had”, said his commander about Ellsberg). But his most important assignment came from the minister: investigate how the war is going.
Ellsberg returned disillusioned and co-wrote the report that would later become known as the Pentagon Papers. He had already tried to open the eyes of journalists in Vietnam. After Commander-in-Chief Westmoreland argued in Congress that there was “light at the end of the tunnel,” Ellsberg pressed the war correspondent of The New York Times at heart: “You are being duped”, journalist Rick Perlstein quotes him in his book Nixonland (2008).
In late 1968, Ellsberg became clear that his suggestions—unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam—were not seriously considered by Kissinger, the man on the verge of becoming President Nixon’s chief geopolitical adviser. The following year, Ellsberg was present at an anti-war demonstration, where a conscript told that he would soon have to go to prison because he did not want to serve in Vietnam. It impressed Ellsberg so much (“I cried for an hour in the bathroom”) that he decided that the contents of the Pentagon Papers, of which he owned one of fifteen copies, should be made public. Cautious attempts to get political leaders to release the nearly 7,000-page document (3,000 pages of analysis, 4,000 documents) came to naught.
On June 13, 1971, the report was on the front page of The New York Times: ‘Vietnam archive: Pentagon study examines three decades of growing US involvement’. In the days that followed, the paper continued to publish the report, exposing all of the government’s lies—including those of Democratic President Johnson—about Vietnam.
With wig and glasses
What happened next became entwined in later years with the series of illegal activities that Nixon commissioned as president and his subsequent downfall.
The president’s fury toward Ellsberg was formal—”he had exposed state secrets about our wartime foreign policy,” Nixon wrote in his memoir—but there was also a personal side to it, fueled by Nixon’s envy of of intellectuals and by his permanent irritability about criticism. The president and all his men wanted to destroy Ellsberg.
The rawest account of their efforts is in the book Will from G. Gordon Liddy, one of President Nixon’s “plumbers”—so called because they had to stop leaks to the media. Liddy writes that exposing and defusing Ellsberg “was the top priority” because he was “the symbol for all who leak to the press.”
Through a CIA wiretap, the “plumbers” knew that Ellsberg was in close contact with his psychiatrist in California. Would Ellsberg also have spoken to him about the Pentagon Papers? And about any accomplices? Russians, maybe? Liddy went to California with fellow plumber Howard Hunt, got a new identity fitted, including library card, wig and glasses. So they went to the psychiatrist’s office and photographed whatever they could find. Turned out the photos were too dark.
A second attempt was launched, this time with Cuban accomplices, who also returned empty-handed: there was no patient file on Ellsberg. Later they came up with another plan to put LSD in Ellsberg’s soup so the White House could say he was a drug addict. Everything failed or was called off.
Acquittal
In court, the case turned out equally badly for the Nixon administration. A majority of the Supreme Court ruled in late June 1971 that the newspapers had had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. Two days before that verdict, Ellsberg reported himself to the police. “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer participate in keeping this information secret. I have done this at the risk of my own safety and I am prepared to suffer the consequences of my decision.”
I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer participate in keeping this information secret
Daniel Elsberg when he turned himself in to the police
By the time Ellsberg went to trial, in 1973, the Watergate affair was at its hottest. The same plumbers and Cubans who had been chasing Ellsberg had broken into Democratic Party headquarters with the knowledge of Nixon and his closest advisers and had been caught. One of Nixon’s closest advisers testified against the president, including about the attempted break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The court acquitted Ellsberg for the government’s abuse of power against him.
WikiLeaks
After his acquittal, Ellsberg remained a peace activist and sought-after speaker. When Julian Assange made his first revelations through WikiLeaks, he gave Ellsberg a copy of the classified documents on US military operations in Iraq, the latter later revealed to the BBC. He has always defended Assange, who is now in a British cell.
In 2021, Ellsberg released documents about a US plan to hit China with a nuclear attack. The plan dated back to 1958, and Ellsberg said he copied it back when he made copies of the Pentagon Papers. By 1958, Chinese aggression toward Taiwan had run high and the US defense leadership was considering several options, including a first strike nuclear bombs against China. At the time, he had not made these documents public, but now the time had come, Ellsberg told again The New York Times, because tensions around Taiwan rose so high again. For example, at the age of 90, Ellsberg still remained a whistleblower.