Daniel Ellsberg was in the midst of a federal trial, facing the prospect of a long prison term, when he sat down with Reason in the summer of 1973 to talk about his decision to leak a trove of documents. Those documents, known as the Pentagon Papers, showed that top American officials, including President Lyndon Johnson, had lied constantly about the country's war in Vietnam.
"The only thing that I could personally hope to achieve by my own efforts was to make these documents available to the American public for them to read and to learn from," Ellsberg told Reason. But he had a "very important secondary objective": halting what he saw as a dangerous trend of "executive secrecy" that had allowed successive presidents to "steal away so much power from the Congress and the public and to free itself from the kinds of checks and balances that were intended in the Constitution."
