Daniel Ellsberg, former American military analyst and globally known whistleblower of the 1970s, died on June 16 at his home in Kensington, California, leaving a legacy of courage. He was 92 years old and had been battling pancreatic cancer for the past four months.
Ellsberg gained fame for leaking the “Pentagon Papers,” the top-secret Defense Department documents that revealed the truth about the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. The report, consisting of thousands of pages spread across 47 volumes, documented the failure of consecutive American Presidents to admit the full history and extent of the conflict. The papers covered a period of over 20 years, from France’s failed colonisation efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the US, including bombing raids and the deployment of thousands of ground troops during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.
Until the early 1970s, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite, serving as a Harvard graduate and self-defined “cold warrior”. He worked as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, fought in the war, held the highest security clearances, and earned the trust of officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.
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Ellsberg reportedly became disillusioned with the war effort while accompanying American and South Vietnamese troops on patrols across the Vietnamese countryside. Upon returning to America, he began leaking the Pentagon Papers to journalists from The New York Times, concluding that there was no chance of success in Vietnam and that the deployment of young American men was in vain.
Daniel Ellsberg wrote about the sense of disillusionment with the Vietnam War in his 2002 memoir Secrets.
At the time, Ellsberg felt that the publication of the papers would intensify political pressure to end the war. “An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
The Pentagon Papers were commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the US and Vietnam and help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after.
The Pentagon Papers were first published in The New York Times in June 1971, followed by The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and more than a dozen other publications. They revealed that the US defied a 1954 settlement barring foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam (the US ally during the war) had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighbouring countries, and plotted to send American soldiers despite President Johnson’s vow against it at the time.
The publication of the Papers led to a landmark Supreme Court case when the Richard Nixon-led administration attempted to block their publication in The New York Times, an action seen by many journalists of the time as a clear violation of the First Amendment. The Court ruled 6-3 in favour of the press.
Following the publication, an FBI investigation was launched to uncover the identity of the leaker. Ellsberg, due to his access to the papers and his public condemnation of the war over the previous two years, became a leading suspect. Fearing further persecution, he willingly surrendered to authorities in Boston and was subsequently charged with espionage. The charges were later dismissed by the Supreme Court.
Ellsberg was a man who embodied the individual of conscience—who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. | Photo Credit: AP/File Photo
Ellsberg was a man who embodied the individual of conscience, answering only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. He became a national hero in the anti-war movement and, at the same time, a traitor to the war’s supporters. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger labelled him the “most dangerous man in America.”
Ellsberg was no ordinary convert, according to the late author and Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam, who had known him since their overseas posting. Halberstam described Ellsberg as knowledgeable, obsessively curious, and profoundly sensitive—a born proselytizer who saw political events in terms of moral absolutes and demanded consequences for abuses of power.
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After the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which shaped the trajectory of his later life, Ellsberg embraced a life of advocacy. He worked as a college lecturer and spent decades campaigning for freedom of the press and championing the anti-nuclear movement.
Following his demise, his son Robert Ellsberg wrote on his Twitter handle, “My dear father, #DanielEllsberg, died this morning June 16 at 1:24 a.m., four months after his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. His family surrounded him as he took his last breath. He had no pain and died peacefully at home.” In his final months, following his diagnosis, Ellsberg reflected on the Pentagon Papers and whistleblowing more broadly.
In a March 2023 email obtained by media outlets, Ellsberg wrote, “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. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed.”
(with inputs from AP and Bloomberg)
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