Daniel Ellsberg
By 
Daniel Ellsberg has died.
Few Americans did more to expose the evils of American actions overseas than Ellsberg. While most of what he exposed about the Vietnam War probably would have eventually come out anyway, the impact would have been vastly different if some historian had figured it out after the war concluded. Ellsberg’s incredibly brave actions not only defied multiple presidents of both political parties, but was a deathly pin prick into the military/foreign policy establishment that had acted with impunity since the end of World War II. The U.S. routinely lied to its own people while engaging in massive violations of human rights and any reasonable conduct overseas. Finally, someone on the inside just couldn’t take it anymore. Than man was Daniel Ellsberg.
Born in 1931 in Chicago, Ellsberg came from a Jewish background but his parents had converted to Christian Science and that is how he was raised. He had a tough upbringing. His father fell asleep while driving, wrecked the family car, and in so, his mother and sister died. Hard to imagine how anyone manages that loss as a child. He was training to be a concert pianist due to his mother’s wishes, but he gave it up after her death.
Ellsberg made it through that by focusing on his studies and he made into Harvard. He did very well there, graduated with a degree in economics, spent a year at Cambridge, and then went back to Harvard for graduate school. His studies were interrupted when he enlisted as a Marine. He did well there too, was a platoon leader and company commander, leaving as a first lieutenant in 1957.
Ellsberg took a job with the RAND Corporation in 1959 while finishing his PhD at Harvard, which he completed in 1962. He was an economist and made an immediate impact with what became known as the Ellsberg Paradox. Basically, this demonstrated that people will make choices with quantifiable risks, even if they are significant, more than they will unknown risks.
In 1964, Ellsberg took a job with the Pentagon that would change his life. He was named as a special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton. Basically, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara brought in Ellsberg as part of his best and the brightest men who would run the government and, specifically, the Vietnam War. Edward Lansdale soon brought him on as an assistant while he was working in South Vietnam.
By 1967, Ellsberg was back with RAND and also still working for McNamara. He became part of McNamara’s Vietnam Study Task Force to study what the heck was going on in Vietnam. McNamara was incredibly frustrated by this time and would leave the Johnson administration the next year. The VSTF was intended to put together a set of documents that would provide information on what went wrong. McNamara….sort of didn’t tell Lyndon Johnson that he was doing this. Eventually, 4,000 pages of government documents and 3,000 pages of historical analysis were put together, though it was not finished until shortly before Richard Nixon took office in 1969.
Now disgusted by the war, Ellsberg decided to release the study to the press. By 1969, he was attending anti-war rallies, even though he still worked for RAND. For Ellsberg, the Vietnam War was a complete disaster of American foreign policy, a serious of horrifying errors extending back to the end of World War II that damned presidents of both parties and had created an atmosphere of lying to the American public. He had access to the final report and so he photocopied the entire thing. Now, Ellsberg gave others the chance to look at it first. He approached Henry Kissinger, who had no interest at all. He went to leading senators, including William Fulbright and George McGovern, but they didn’t want it either. So Ellsberg went to the New York Times, which was in fact quite interested.
Now, the Times was highly concerned about what would happen, but despite legal advice against it, they went ahead and published the first part of it anyway in 1971. Then Ellsberg leaked the whole thing to the Washington Post. This got the attention of Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, who wanted it published and worked with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky to see that happen.
By this time, Ellsberg had left RAND finally, taking a job with MIT in 1970. He became the target of an unbelievable amount of criticism when the Pentagon Papers came out. After all, he had the receipts, he showed the public that the government had lied, and leaders of both parties were furious about this telling of the truth. The FBI wanted to detain him and he avoided the agency for nearly two weeks.
It is impossible to overstate the bombshell that was the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg really had changed American history. That this was still during the war was even more important. As Nixon tried to win the war, now he had to deal with the reality coming out to the public. And Nixon was absolutely furious. He wanted to punish Ellsberg and he had the men to make it happen. Or he thought he did anyway. As the president would discover with Watergate, his thugs were actually incompetents. First, Nixon sued the Times to stop further publication, which worked only temporarily and the Supreme Court sided with the paper.
Then Nixon’s top aide John Ehrlichman created the Plumbers to stop other leaks. He ordered a couple of right-wing clowns named Egil Krogh and David Young to meet with G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt to create a covert operation to find dirt on Ellsberg. This led to the famous burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office. They did it like clowns, making it obvious what was going on, trying to bash in the filing cabinet (now in the Smithsonian Museum of American History!). They wanted damning information on Ellsberg. They didn’t find it. His files were completely anodyne. So rather than put the file back and at least try to cover up what was going on, they just threw it on the floor and walked out. Gee I wonder which file they were after! Hard to see how these geniuses didn’t succeed at their later Watergate break-in.
It is also at least possible that Nixon wanted Ellsberg assassinated. Ellsberg later claimed that William Merrill, one of the prosecutors of Watergate, told him that Liddy was preparing a group of Cuban exiles to eliminate Ellsberg. Whether that meant actually killing him or not is unknown, but such an act would hardly be surprising, though given their amazing incompetence, they probably would have left business cards on the scene.
In late 1971, Ellsberg surrendered to the government, who charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, the horrid World War I law still on the books. He could have gotten 115 years for all of this. The case went to trial in 1973 and it was an unmitigated disaster for the Nixon administration. First, this is when the story of burglarizing the psychiatrist’s office came out. The judge tried to deny Ellsberg any real defense, not allowing him to explain himself to the jury. The judge in fact really wanted to see Ellsberg convicted, at least at first. But the case was so bad—illegal wiretapping came to light as well. Nixon had the FBI engage in all kinds of recording of Ellsberg’s phone calls without a court order. Even the judge became disgusted at the government’s actions. When the Nixon administration claimed it had lost the recordings of the wiretaps of Ellsberg’s phone, the judge finally dismissed the case. Watergate was coming to light during this time and most of Nixon’s idiot advisors would soon be forced from their positions anyway.
Ellsberg came out of this hell scot free. For many, he was one of the few heroes of the era, someone who not only stood up against the war, but went far to take it down. In the aftermath, he became a senior figure in the larger anti-war movement. In 2003, he actively denounced the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and its use of lies and propaganda to justify it. He was completely correct about this, once again. He generally criticized American involvement in the Middle East as counterproductive and horrifying for the people living in the region. Again, it’s hard to argue against his point.
Ellsberg was very big on civil liberties and national security issues as the twenty-first century went on. He was active in the protests in support of Chelsea Manning’s imprisonment for leaking secrets. In fact, he was arrested during a protest in 2011 over this. He praised Edward Snowden for his leaks as well. Not surprisingly, this extended to the vile Julian Assange. The reality here is that for someone like Ellsberg, the rape charges against Assange really couldn’t be taken seriously because the issue of his whistleblowing was the only thing that mattered. Obviously such charges were created by the security state against the man for his heroic act.
Ellsberg’s commitment to these issues did not lessen over time. In 2021, he released a bunch of classified documents he had collected all the way back in the Pentagon Papers era that in 1958, the Eisenhower administration had created plans to nuke China if it attacked Taiwan. He said he released them finally because of his concerns over growing tensions between the U.S. and China and hoped this horrible history would create a change in American attitudes. He also openly wanted to be charged with violating the Espionage Act so he, as an old man with little to lose, could create a test case that would hope to throw that horrifying law out entirely. With the current courts, this seems an unlikely end result and the Biden administration had no desire to touch this anyway, especially over documents from the 1950s.
Unfortunately, as is not uncommon among people like this who are driven by a single issue, he had blinders on that made every U.S. support for a nation something that could only be negative. As such, he was against American support for Ukraine as it fought against the imperialist Russians under Putin’s leadership. He justified it by saying it had nothing to do with the U.S., which really isn’t true and that Russia was an “indispensable enemy” to the U.S. He was just wrong about this. It happens, but it’s sad.
Honestly, those people who are obsessed by single issues—even those who have earned the right to be skeptical of everyone and everything given their own personal histories—are going to make mistakes. Unfortunately, they almost always lose perspective and nuance. Everything is the same issue and everything is the same moral battle. Whether this is in the end good or not, I leave up to readers to discuss. I am ambivalent here. I don’t think Ellsberg hurt anything too much by speaking out for Assange and against Ukraine. On the latter, no one was listening except tankies and right-wingers anyway.
But this is the complicated legacy of the single-issue person. There’s no question that Ellsberg offered the world much, much more than he took away. He is basically as close to a hero as it gets for the Pentagon Papers. Not surprisingly, it gets more complicated in his last half-century.