Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst whose unauthorized release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers triggered court battles over freedom of the press and led to calamity for the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, has died.
One of America’s most famous whistleblowers, Ellsberg died Friday at his home in Kensington, California, his family said in a statement to the New York Times. He was 92. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife and children said in the statement.
Ellsberg became both a public enemy and a folk hero in 1971 when he gave the New York Times copies of the highly classified history of American involvement in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The massive leak of government documents was unprecedented at the time, an extraordinary act of whistleblowing that drew back the curtain on the largely hidden world of U.S. policymaking and earned Ellsberg a spot on Nixon’s “enemies list,” as well as a prominent role in the story of that tumultuous era.
