Daniel Ellsberg, whose troubled conscience led him to leak papers revealing America’s involvement in the Vietnam War arose from a deliberate and calculated lie, has died at 92.
Publication of the highly classified Pentagon Papers by the New York Times ignited a major freedom-of-the-press battle and led indirectly but ultimately to the downfall of Richard Nixon after it emerged White House operatives had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Ellsberg, who had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February, died at his home in Kensington, California, the family said.
Long before Edward Snowden and Wikileaks were revealing government secrets in the name of transparency, Ellsberg let the US public know that their government had no reservations about lying to them.
In his later years Ellsberg would become an advocate for whistleblowers and leakers and his Pentagon Papers leak was portrayed in the 2017 movie The Post.
Ellsberg secretly went to the media in 1971 in hopes of expediting the end of the Vietnam War, making him an immediate target of Richard Nixon’s White House.
‘Most dangerous man in America’
Henry Kissinger, who was then the president’s national security adviser, referred to him as “the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs”.
When he went to Saigon for the US State Department in the mid-1960s, Ellsberg was a dedicated Cold War warrior and hawk on Vietnam at the time.
But Ellsberg said he was only one week into a two-year tour of duty in Saigon when he realised the United States was in a war it would not win.
Meanwhile at the behest of defense secretary Robert McNamara, Pentagon officials had secretly been putting together a 7000-page report covering US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 through 1967.
When it was finished in 1969, two of the 15 published copies went to the RAND Corporation where Ellsberg worked.
With his new perspective on the war, Ellsberg started attending peace rallies.
He said he was inspired to copy the Pentagon Papers after hearing an anti-war protester say he was looking forward to going to prison for resisting the draft.
Ellsberg began sneaking the top-secret study out of the RAND office and copying it at night on a rented Xerox machine – using his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter as helpers.
He took the documents with him when he moved to Boston for a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ended up sitting on them for a year and a half before passing pages to the New York Times.
The NYT ran its first instalment of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, and Nixon’s administration moved quickly to get a judge to stop further publication.
Nixon’s claim of executive authority and invocation of the Espionage Act set off a freedom-of-the-press fight over the extreme censorship of prior restraint.
Ellsberg’s next move was to give the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and more than a dozen other newspapers.
Landmark ruling
In New York Times v US, the Supreme Court ruled less than three weeks after first publication that the press had the right to publish the papers and the NYT resumed doing so.
The study said the US officials had concluded the war probably could not be won and that president John F Kennedy approved plans for a coup that overthrew the South Vietnamese leader.
It also said 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 papers also revealed the secret US bombing in Cambodia and Laos and that casualty figures were higher than reported.
The NYT never said who leaked the papers but the FBI quickly figured it out.
Ellsberg remained underground for about two weeks before surrendering in Boston.
Even though the Pentagon Papers did not cover Nixon’s handling of Vietnam, the White House’s “plumbers” unit, which would later pull off the Watergate break-in that led to Nixon’s downfall, was ordered to stop further leaks and discredit Ellsberg.
Two and a half months after first publication, G Gordon Liddy and E Howard Hunt broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to search for incriminating evidence.
Ellsberg and a RAND colleague were eventually charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy.
But at their 1973 trial, the case was dismissed on the grounds of government misconduct when the break-in was revealed.
-with AAP
