In All the President’s Men, the classic film on the downfall of President Richard Nixon, the name “Daniel Ellsberg” is not uttered once. And what a shame that is. Because for all the journalistic heroics of Woodward and Bernstein, it’s possible that there was no one more responsible for the only resignation of a president in American history than Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, the legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower, passionate anti-nuclear activist and staunch press freedom advocate, passed away at the age of 92 on Friday. History should remember him as one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures. But we should also be reminded that his own story is also so cinematic, it’s almost hard to believe.
For those too young to remember (or like me, not born yet), Ellsberg was a brilliant Vietnam analyst who had worked for the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. A graduate of Harvard, he was in the upper echelon of the Washington DC elite, when he volunteered to go to Vietnam and slowly came to the realization he must do everything he can to stop the war – even if it meant going to prison. He would first help write, and then leak to the New York Times, what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page top secret government report that detailed two decades of lies about the Vietnam war.
His goal was to stop the war, but – at least at first – Ellsberg thought the leak of the Pentagon Papers was a failure. It was the summer of 1971, and the war initially continued on, unabated. Yet little did he know at the time, he had driven Nixon mad with rage and would ultimately lead to the president’s undoing.
You see, contrary to popular belief, the “Plumbers”, the criminal unit set up in the basement of the White House and currently the subject of an HBO miniseries, was not formed to break into the vaunted Watergate Hotel.
No, it was created to discredit Daniel Ellsberg.
Before the Democratic National Committee was even on the Plumbers’ radar, they were tasked with breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt on him, a blatant crime that would surface at Ellsberg’s trial. As the history professor Christian Appy recently wrote, it’s just one of many seeds involving Ellsberg that sowed Nixon’s demise. Ellsberg’s impact can be even found in the draft impeachment articles against Nixon. The articles were never voted on by the full House of Representatives, because Nixon accepted the inevitable, and resigned. Article 2, section 2 of the charges read:
“[Nixon] has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.”
Every word of that refers to Daniel Ellsberg. To this day, there’s no evidence Nixon directly ordered the Watergate break-in, but there is direct evidence the White House tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg through multiple illegal means. The psychiatrist’s office was just the tip of the iceberg in the government’s criminal scheme. Nixon’s aide would later try to bribe Ellsberg’s trial judge with the FBI director job, the CIA would illegally create psychological profiles of him, and the justice department had to admit it had overheard Ellsberg on warrantless wiretaps that they had lost or destroyed. They were crimes that would make even Donald Trump blush.
Ellsberg was not acquitted because a jury found him not guilty; his trial was thrown out for extreme government misconduct.
Ellsberg’s memoir about his foreign policy career, his personal transformation, and the Pentagon Papers saga, aptly titled Secrets, details this incredible story and so much more – including the nationwide manhunt for him that lasted almost two weeks, where the FBI could not catch him. He infuriated the feds by continuing to distribute more of the classified Pentagon Papers to newspapers around the country and appearing on national television with Walter Cronkite. (The Pentagon Papers also led to the most important press freedom decision in American history, and paved the way for the Guardian and others to be able to publish the Snowden disclosures.)
Secrets is absolutely engrossing and it was released to universal rave reviews – yet it flopped. It happened to be published in the fall of 2003, a few months after the start of the Iraq war, at the peak of this country’s unhinged patriotic fervor. He would later lament that none of the networks would invite him on television to talk about it.
Apparently, no one wanted to hear about a dissenter attempting to stop a war built on lies in George W Bush’s post-9/11 America.
The documentary about his journey, The Most Dangerous Man in America, was thankfully more successful, nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2010. Yet shamefully, only 13 years later, it is almost impossible to watch. None of the major streaming services carry it, and you can’t even purchase it on Amazon or Google. (Tech executives if you’re reading: Fix this!)
In 2012, I was fortunate to co-found Freedom of the Press Foundation with Ellsberg and several other prominent press freedom advocates. He has been our stalwart board member and our inspiration ever since. Along the way, we became good friends. I got to set up his first encrypted conversation with Edward Snowden, discussed with him for hours about how to stop the abuse of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, gave him feedback on his book about his days as a nuclear war planner, and even provided a little help when he decided to leak some additional still-classified information 50 years after the Pentagon Papers.
But what I may remember most about him now is not the principles by which he lived his life, but how he faced death. When I first heard from a mutual friend that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer, I was depressed – and I assumed he would be too. But when I got on a Zoom call with him the following night, I was shocked. He was in the best mood I’d ever seen him in – and he was not someone I would describe as normally downtrodden or brusque.
He greeted me with a giant grin, talking a mile a minute. He was hopped up on the caffeine from a hot chocolate, which he normally swore off because it kept him up all night. He talked about how lucky he was, at 92, to be feeling so well; how he did not fear death, as he had decades ago expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for the Pentagon Papers leak. Every day he had left, to him, was a blessing. And the entire time we were talking – and I mean the entire time, more than two hours – he was eating. First, it was a bagel with lox and cream cheese he was scarfing down between sentences. Then he asked me to hold on for a minute while he got a bacon sandwich from the fridge.
He explained that for the past decade or so he had been on a no-salt diet due to a heart condition, and it was excruciating. Earlier that day, his cardiologist, upon hearing of the terminal diagnosis, gave him permission to throw caution to the wind. And boy, was he going to take advantage. (I can neither confirm nor deny that he may have also told me that he dabbled in a certain mind-altering substance synonymous with the 1960s and 70s a couple days prior.)
He was, he said, very much looking forward to spending his last three to six months with his family, and especially his wonderful wife and inspiration, Patricia. But he was also adamant: he was going to work as hard as he could on the issues he cared about – nuclear proliferation, peace, reforming the secrecy system, the plight of whistleblowers – until his very last day. I got off the call feeling inspired. A few days later, he echoed the same sentiments in a touching public letter to his friends and supporters.
And he would certainly keep his vow. He spoke to the New York Times editorial board. He was on one of the Times’ podcasts. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed him for her entire show. He went on MSNBC with Mehdi Hasan. He was the lead guest on one of his favorite programs, Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. He did several podcasts with his longtime friend Noam Chomsky. I was lucky enough to be on a conference panel with him and the whistleblower Reality Winner just six weeks ago. And many more.
As he told Amanpour: “People say to live one day at a time, as though it were your last. I think that’s pretty hard to do – you have appointments to keep, people to say goodbye to. But, actually, one month at a time works very well … I’m having a very good time here.”
Like everyone who knew him, I’m sad he’s no longer with us, but I will try to take a page out of his book, and appreciate how much extra time he got on this earth. May we all one day have as much courage – in life and in death – as Daniel Ellsberg.
Trevor Timm is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation
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