The historical lessor of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has died. His actions exposed decades of official wavering and duplicity regarding the Vietnam War, and his revenge actions against President Richard Nixon contributed to Nixon’s eventual resignation. He was 92 years old. It was revealed in February that Ellsberg, whose efforts resulted in a landmark First Amendment verdict by the Supreme Court, was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. In a letter sent by family spokeswoman Julia Pacetti on Friday morning, they disclosed his death.
The note reads: “He was in no pain and was surrounded by a loving family.” “I want to express my gratitude to everyone who has expressed their support for Dan over the past few months. His final moments were filled with comfort because of this. Until the early 1970s, when Ellsberg revealed that he leaked to the media the Department of Defense’s 47-volume, 7,000-page assessment of the United States’ role in Indochina, he was a senior member of the government and military elite.
He was a Harvard graduate and considered himself a “cold warrior”. Throughout the 1960s, he worked as a consultant on Vietnam for the government and private companies, putting his life in danger. In return, he was granted top-secret clearance and gained the trust of Democratic and Republican leaders. Ellsberg, vivacious and silver-haired, became a renowned free speech and anti-Iraq war activist in his later years, drawing parallels between US involvement in Iraq and Vietnam and calling for impeachment of President George W. Bush. Under the Obama administration, he expressed similar worries about Afghanistan, warning it could turn into “Vietnamistan” if the United States sent more troops.
In 2017, he wrote “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner”, drawing on his experience in government to reveal, among other things, that the United States had considered launching nuclear attacks against the Chinese. in 1958. Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, the government contractor who revealed details of secret US surveillance systems and who currently resides in Russia, were among the leakers and whistleblowers he defended . In 2023, Ellsberg told The New York Times, “A lot of people who whistleblowers work with know the same things and actually view the information the same way — that it’s false,” but they keep quiet.
Snowden tweeted on Friday that he had spoken with Ellsberg the previous month and found him more worried about the fate of the planet than his own. According to Snowden’s account, “he estimated the risk of a nuclear exchange to be over 10 percent.” He planned to spend his final moments working to alleviate it for the sake of his loved ones. A true hero all the way.
Two of Ellsberg’s children from his first marriage as well as his current wife, journalist Patricia Marx, survive him. In 1970, a year before the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he married Marx. The New York Times reported that he was a “Senior Fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote a critical study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”