Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of Pentagon Papers that helped end Vietnam War, dies at 92

Daniel Ellsberg, an iconic whistleblower who helped and the Vietnam War by leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers of government secrets about the ill-fated conflct, died Friday of pancreatic cancer.

He was 92.

Ellsberg had announced in February that he was terminally ill.

Once a trusted member of the U.S. government elite that promoted the American-backed war in southeast Asia, Ellsberg handed the dossier over to journalists who published them and exposed the flawed strategies and lies at the root of the conflict.

“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable,” Ellsberg wrote in his 2002 memoir. “By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war.”

The documents leaked by Ellsberg, which were first published in The New York Times in 1971, documented that the U.S. effectively started the war by breaking a 1954 deal barring foreign military presence in Vietnam. The papers also questioned whether the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam could survive.

They exposed how the U.S. military plotted to expand the war to neighboring Southeast Asian nations and countries and planned to send American soldiers into the fray even as then-President Lyndon Johnson vowed he would not do so.

The shocking bombshells quickly galvanized opposition to the raging war and blindsided the administration of President Richard Nixon.

The White House sought to block further publication of the stories, but the Supreme Court ruled against it.

Ellsberg and a colleague were charged with violations of the Espionage Act for mishandling government secrets. Ellsberg faced more than a century in prison in the case.

But a judge tossed the criminal case, citing government misconduct — including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist by Nixon administration operatives, dubbed the White House Plumbers.

The break-in was aimed at seeking information that would discredit Ellsberg. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had convinced Nixon to order a campaign of dirty tricks aimed at Ellsberg’s reputation.

The White House Plumbers also carried out the 1972 Watergate break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974.