Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers Whistleblower and Ceaseless Anti-War Activist, Dead at 92

Jon Blistein
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Daniel Ellsberg, the U.S. military analyst-turned-whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped reveal the political deceptions underpinning the brutal expansion of the Vietnam War, died Friday in his California home. He was 92. The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to a statement by Ellsberg’s family.

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In early March, Ellsberg revealed that he’d been diagnosed with “inoperable pancreatic cancer” and had “three to six months to live” in a letter first shared with his friends in the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements, and then posted on social media. Ellsberg said he had chosen not to do chemotherapy “which offers no promise,” and instead said he would enter hospice care “when needed.”

Despite the diagnosis, Ellsberg appeared to be in high spirits, saying he felt physically strong after a hip replacement in 2021, and noting he was now able to eat more of his favorite foods after his cardiologist gave him permission to abandon a salt-free diet. Ellsberg said he looked forward to spending his final months with his wife and family, while also pursuing “the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else).”

Ellsberg mentioned the Pentagon Papers briefly in his note, saying only that he was prepared at the time to spend the rest of his life in prison — “a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was).” He continued, “Yet in the end, that action — in ways I could not have foreseen due to Nixon’s illegal responses — did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last 50 years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.”

Born April 7, 1931, Ellsberg was raised in Chicago, the son of two nonreligious Jews who became Christian Scientists. He spent much of his childhood practicing and playing piano, as his mother was adamant that he become a concert pianist. In 1946, when Ellsberg was 15, his father fell asleep at the wheel during a family road trip and crashed the car; Ellsberg’s mother and sister died instantly. Per a bio for The Ellsberg Archive Project from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ellsberg acknowledged that the crash left him with “a vigilance toward figures of trusted authority, like his father, who might ‘fall asleep at the wheel’ in ways that could lead to catastrophe.”

Ellsberg went on to study at Harvard, graduating in 1952 with a degree in economics. Despite his high academic prospects, he enlisted in the Marines in 1954 and excelled there too, becoming an operations officer and rifle company commander, before being discharged in 1957 as a first lieutenant. He then returned to Harvard to pursue his PhD; he also began working at the RAND Corporation, the prominent think tank with deep ties to the U.S. military.

It was Ellsberg’s academic work in the field of “decision theory” that led him to RAND, where he focused on what he described, in a 2006 biographical statement, as “the most fraught, and possibly final, such decision in human history”: nuclear war. Very much a believer, broadly speaking, in America’s Cold War policies at the time, Ellsberg also admitted that at RAND he came “under the delusion… that a ‘missile gap’ favoring the Soviets made the problem of deterring a Soviet surprise attack the overriding challenge to U.S. and world security.” (That lie, Ellsberg added, was exposed to him in 1961.)

Ellsberg spent the first half of the Sixties at RAND, consulting with the Defense and State Departments, as well as the White House, on issues relating to nuclear weapons, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, in 1964, Ellsberg was hired to work at the Department of Defense (specifically on Vietnam), which Ellsberg described then as a “a low-level American engagement.”

As it happened, Ellsberg’s first day at DoD was Aug. 4, 1964, “the occasion of a supposed — actually, illusory — attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, and the beginning of our eight-year bombing campaign against Vietnam.”

Ellsberg spent the rest of the Sixties focused on Vietnam, even spending several years in Saigon. In 1967, he left DoD and returned to RAND where he was put on a new top secret study for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara titled “U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945 – 68” — later known as the Pentagon Papers.

During his decade in the heart of the war machine, Ellsberg’s views changed drastically. He was deeply influenced by the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and Barbara Deming; the work of young anti-war activists like Bob Eaton and Randy Kehler; and also his wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg, who had always opposed to the Vietnam War (the couple married in 1970).

And then there was everything he learned in the McNamara report, which Ellsberg described in a 2021 interview with The Guardian: “7,000 pages of documents of lies, deceptions, breaking treaties, hopeless wars, killing, et cetera.” Of his thinking at the time, he added, “I don’t know whether it’ll have any effect to put it out but I’m not going to be party to concealing that any more.”

In Oct. 1969, Ellsberg started photocopying the Pentagon Papers. He smuggled pages out of his office over eight months, taking them to an advertising agency owned by a friend’s girlfriend, feeding the pages through a Xerox machine, and then bringing the originals back the next day. He was nearly caught twice when someone at the agency turned a key the wrong way, set off a burglar alarm, and roused the cops. Once, the police came in and found Ellsberg working alongside his two children.

“I think I was running the Xerox machine, and [my son] was collating. Or it might have been the other way around,” he told NPR in 2017. “He was then 13. And my daughter, who was 10, was cutting off top secret from the tops and bottoms of the pages with the scissors. The reason they were there was that I expected to be in prison very shortly… I wanted them to know that their father was doing something in a businesslike way — a calm, sober way that I thought had to be done. And I did let my older son know in particular that it might — in fact, would probably result in my going to prison. And that was an example that I actually wanted to pass on to my children — that they might be in such a situation.”

Ellsberg first took the Pentagon Papers to a handful of anti-war members of Congress, hopeful that they’d enter them into the public record, but none were interested. It wasn’t until 1971 that he found a receptive audience in Neil Sheehan, a reporter at The New York Times. While Ellsberg let Sheehan read the documents and take notes, he refused to let Sheehan make copies. This led to another round of furtive photocopying as Sheehan spent several months smuggling papers out of the Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment where Ellsberg was stashing the material, and making copies that he took to The Times. (Sheehan’s side of the story was only revealed in an interview published, at his request, after his death in 2021.)

The first installment of the Pentagon Papers was published June 13, 1971, taking Ellsberg by surprise. In that posthumously published interview, Sheehan recalled speaking with Ellsberg’s wife, Patricia, not long after; Patricia said Ellsberg was happy with how the material had been presented but “unhappy over the monumental duplicity.” A few days later, on June 18, The Washington Post, started publishing its own stories based on the Pentagon Papers, which Ellsberg had brought to another reporter, Ben Bagdikian.

The Nixon administration moved swiftly to suppress any further stories based on the Pentagon Papers. They successfully obtained injunctions against The Post and The Times, and a lawsuit involving The Times was in front of the Supreme Court by the end of June 1971. But while The Times and The Post were tied up, other papers — from the Boston Globe to the Christian Science Monitor — went ahead with their own stories based on copies of the report Ellsberg had sent them.

Two days before The Times prevailed at the Supreme Court in a landmark 6-3 decision, Ellsberg turned himself in to federal authorities. He was charged under the Espionage Act and faced a possible sentence of 115 years in prison. Henry Kissinger, speaking with Nixon in the Oval Office, called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America,” adding, “We’ve got to get him.”

Nixon agreed. “We’ve got to get him! Don’t worry about his trial. Just get everything out,” he said (via The New Yorker). “These fellows have all put themselves above the law, and, by God, we’re going to go after them.’’

Nixon’s efforts to undermine Ellsberg were like a proto-Watergate, involving many of the same key figures from the Plumbers, like Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Most infamously, the Plumbers broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist looking for blackmail material; there was also a failed effort to dose Ellsberg with LSD before he gave a speech. When Ellsberg’s case finally went to trial in 1973, the Nixon administration tried to tempt the judge with a job as head of the FBI. When all this came out, in the midst of the actual Watergate scandal, Ellsberg’s case was promptly dismissed.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in November 1973, not long after those charges were dismissed, Ellsberg was asked what he made of Nixon’s fixation with him. He brought up the possibility that Nixon saw him as another Alger Hiss to prosecute, but also proffered that the Pentagon Papers leak was such a “Gandhian” act of non-violence, it completely rattled the administration.

“It was nonviolent, in fact an act of pure, abstract truth-telling,” Ellsberg offered. “It’s almost a classic Gandhian dream, to suppose that such an act of truth-telling — and taking personal responsibility for it, publicly — is precisely what it took to disturb this government profoundly. Their policy and administrative framework had been based for a whole generation on secrets and lying. The notion that the Ship of State is leaking truth is as frightening and unstabilizing for the government as anything could possibly be.”

Despite their damning revelations, the Pentagon Papers did little to bring the Vietnam War to a swift end, as Ellsberg had hoped. It raged for another four years, finally ending with the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

“Nixon went right on with his aims, and, a year after the Pentagon Papers, we had the heaviest bombing of the war,” Ellsberg told The New Yorker in 2021, likely referring to Operation Linebacker II or the 1972 “Christmas bombings.” “People asked me, ‘What did the Pentagon Papers do?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ I never convinced anyone that Nixon was doing the same thing as his predecessors. Nobody wanted to believe that, and I did not convince them. The Times’ slant on the Pentagon Papers was, ‘This is history.’ The message I wanted to get out was: this is history being repeated.’’

After his trial, Ellsberg embraced his role as an anti-nuclear and peace activist. He lectured around the world and popped up at various protests, like a 1978 action outside the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, which produced plutonium pits; he was arrested four times for blocking the railroad tracks that led to the plant. (Ellsberg put his total arrest count at nearly 70, with about 50 occurring at protests over nuclear weapons.) In 1992, he helped launch Manhattan Project II, an initiative aimed at reducing the number of nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century.

In the new millennium, Ellsberg wrote several books, including Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and 2017’s The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He also remained a fierce anti-war voice, especially during the Iraq War, and has regularly lent his support to fellow whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Katharine Gun.

Ellsberg remained a devoted activist to the end. Tellingly, he spent much of his note about his terminal cancer diagnosis writing about the threat of nuclear disaster and expressing his admiration for the activists he worked alongside. “As I look back on the last 60 years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts,” he said, adding: “I’m happy to know that millions of people — including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message — have the wisdom, dedication, and moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work increasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.”

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