The military analyst who exposed US governments’ lies about the Vietnam War has died at the age of 92. Daniel Ellsberg, who was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February, died at his home in Kensington, California, the family said in a statement.
Long before Edward Snowden and Wikileaks exposed government secrets in the name of transparency, Ellsberg informed Americans that their government was capable of deceiving and even lying them. He did so in 1971 by leaking 7,000 pages of classified information about US involvement in Vietnam to newspapers. The American hoped this would put an end to the conflict.
The leaked documents stated, among other things, that US officials had concluded that the war was probably unwinnable. It also turned out that there were more victims than officially reported, and bombings had been kept secret.
The leaks led to a major court case in the U.S. Supreme Court over press freedom. An enraged President Richard Nixon ordered his aides to smear Ellsberg’s reputation, the paper recalls The Washington Post. The abuse of power led to the Watergate scandal and the fall of Nixon. Henry Kissinger, the president’s national security adviser at the time, called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs.”
Thinktank
Ellsberg, who served in Vietnam for two years as a Marine, got his hands on the explosive information in 1969 while working for the Rand Corporation, an influential American policy research think tank. Pentagon officials had secretly compiled a report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 at the behest of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Ellsberg copied the contents of the report on a rented copier overnight with the help of his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter. He took the documents with him when he moved to Boston for a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and ended up sitting on the information for a year and a half before turning the pages over to the New York Timesand later also to other American newspapers.
Coup
According to the report, US officials had concluded that the war was unlikely to be won and that President John F. Kennedy approved plans for a coup d’état to overthrow the South Vietnamese leader. It also stated that Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson had plans to expand the war, including bombing North Vietnam, despite saying during the 1964 campaign that he would not. The newspapers also revealed the secret US bombings in Cambodia and Laos and that the number of casualties was higher than reported.
Ellsberg hid in Boston for two weeks but then surrendered to the FBI, who were looking for him. “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer participate in hiding this information from the American public,” he said at the time. “I clearly did this at my own risk and I am prepared to bear all the consequences of this decision.” He would say he regretted not leaking the papers sooner.
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