Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg Has Died
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Daniel Ellsberg, who became one of the most important anti-war whistleblowers in U.S. history when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, died Friday, according to a statement from his family.
The 92-year-old revealed in March that he’d been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer and had about three to six months left to live.
“As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts,” Ellsberg wrote of his anti-war activism in a letter he shared to Twitter announcing his diagnosis.
“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars,” he wrote. “It was a fate I would have gladly accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was).”
Daniel Ellsberg, co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers case, talks to reporters in Los Angeles on April 28, 1973, after the judge in the case released a government memorandum saying G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, convicted Watergate conspirators, had burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
The Pentagon Papers ― a highly classified study on U.S. conduct in Vietnam that Ellsberg helped work on ― revealed that multiple U.S. presidents had lied to both Congress and the American people about circumstances regarding the Vietnam War. The documents Ellsberg leaked showed that U.S. authorities had long known American forces had no chance of winning in Vietnam.
Ellsberg, who’d been a staunch supporter of military action in Vietnam until he began mingling with anti-war activists in the late 1960s, was charged under the Espionage Act and faced a potential 115 years behind bars for his actions. But due to governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering in his case, he evaded punishment.
“Thanks to [former President Richard] Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia [Ellsberg’s wife] and my family, and with you, my friends,” he wrote in March.
Over the course of 15 days in 1971, The New York Times published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers it received from Ellsberg. Forty years later, the government declassified them and released them to the public.
Ellsberg went on to be active in many more anti-war movements, speaking out against U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. At 74 years old in 2005, he was among those arrested for protesting the Iraq War at then-President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch.
He also voiced his support for government whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
“All the young activists rising up give me hope as I leave my life,” Ellsberg tweeted in March. “As the movement against the Vietnam War showed, young people can save lives when they make their care known in action. Keep going. The world is in your hands.”
Ellsberg speaks during an interview in Los Angeles on Sept. 23, 2009. A former Pentagon analyst, Ellsberg was indicted for leaking classified government information about the Vietnam War in 1971 to The New York Times and other newspapers.
