Ellsberg, who announced that he had terminal pancreatic cancer in February, was steadfast in his dedication to government transparency, press freedoms and whistleblower protections throughout his life.
The Pentagon Papers consisted of over 7,000 government documents that were painstakingly photocopied by Ellsberg using a single Xerox machine in 1971. They revealed that several US presidential administrations had misled the American people about the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg faced life in prison for choosing to reveal documents. He evaded capture by the authorities long enough to ensure publication and then turned himself in, facing 12 felony counts of violating the Espionage Act. The government sought to jail him for more than a century.
After turning himself in, a reporter asked if he regretted leaking the Pentagon Papers, even then Ellsberg didn’t express doubt:
“How can you measure the jeopardy I’m in … to the penalty that has been paid already by 50,000 American families and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families? It would be utterly presumptuous of me to pity myself, and I do not.”
Before the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was among the military elite. He had helped plan the war, had the highest of security clearances and worked for the RAND corporation, one of the Pentagon’s closest partners, after gaining a doctorate at Harvard.
In 1964, he became an adviser to then Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and in 1965 went to Saigon to inspect the civilian pacification program.
It took some time after that for him to turn on the war completely, but it was an eye-opening experience for him.
“I saw it was all very hard on those people,” he told the columnist Mary McGrory. “But I told myself that living under communism would be harder, and World War III, which I thought we were preventing, would be worse.”
He returned to the RAND corporation in 1968, but his views had already shifted and he wrote war policy statements for Robert F Kennedy’s presidential campaign and attended anti-war rallies.
As his views changed, he began collecting documents that showcased the government’s malfeasance in Vietnam. He initially attempted to get senators to read the documents on the Senate floor since they were immune to prosecution, but they refused.
It was then that Ellsberg first sent copies to The New York Times; however, after they began publishing it, a federal court prevented further publishing at the behest of the Nixon administration. Ellsberg then sent the papers to the Washington Post and five other newspapers. The government attempted to stop the Post from publishing but a different court ruled in their favor.
Daniel Ellsberg is all smiles and his wife Patricia throws back her head in happiness as they emerge from the Federal building in Los Angeles May 11, 1973 shortly after the trail judge in the Pentagon Papers case made his decision. The judge dismissed all charges of espionage, theft, and conspiracy against Ellsberg and his co-defendant, Anthony Russo.
© AP Photo / Anonymous
Former US Sen. Mike Gravel (D-AK) then began to read excerpts on the Senate floor.
The legal wranglings made their way to the Supreme Court and resulted in the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case, still considered one of the most significant freedom of speech rulings in US history. It ruled the press should not be subject to pre-publication censorship absent a national emergency.
The case against Ellsberg went differently. He had planned to argue that though his disclosure was illegal, it was a moral necessity to inform the American people. However, the judge ruled such arguments are not permissible in Espionage Act cases, an argument still used by the federal government in whistleblower cases today.
What saved Ellsberg from a likely lifelong prison sentence was the overzealousness of the Nixon administration, which, in addition to illegally wiretapping Ellsberg’s phones, ordered FBI and CIA agents to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to dig up dirt on his sexual preferences.
The judge threw out the case against Ellsberg on the grounds of government misconduct and illegal evidence gathering.
Ellsberg continued to fight for whistleblowers throughout his life. He heavily criticized the Obama administration for its treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
In 2018, Ellsberg was awarded the Olof Palme Prize in Sweden for his humanism and moral courage.
He also dismissed the idea that former US President Barack Obama was any better when dealing with whistleblowers than former US President Richard Nixon. “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case,” he said while discussing the Manning case.
Ellsberg also testified for Assange’s defense at his 2020 UK extradition hearing and in 2021 he continued his leaking, revealing a previously unknown document that showed the US was planning a first-strike nuclear attack on China in 1958. The document had never been declassified and he dared the government to arrest him under the Espionage Act.
“My one regret, a growing regret really, is that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective,” Ellsberg explained in a 2021 interview celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ release. “I’ve often said to whistleblowers, don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.”