Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing the history of the Vietnam War, has died at 92. Ellsberg had revealed in March that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and declined to have chemotherapy. His family confirmed his passing in a statement, according to The Washington Post, noting he passed away at his home in Kensington, California.
Ellsberg became a strong anti-war protestor and advocacy figure after leaking the 7,000-page document to the New York Times at first, then the Washington Post after a legal injunction by the Nixon administration stopped the publishing of stories drawn from the document. The fight ended up in front of the Supreme Court which delivered a 6-3 ruling in favor of allowing the publication to continue.
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The first amendment win was the least of Ellsberg’s concerns at the time, turning himself in to the authorities after the court ruling. He would face a possible 115-year sentence, drawn from charges of theft, conspiracy, and violations of the espionage act. Anthony J. Russo was hit with the same charges due to his hand in the leak. No ruling was ever delivered by the jury of this case, with the judge calling a mistrial in 1973 while citing “governmental misconduct” that was so bad that it offended “the sense of justice.”
The release of the Pentagon Papers, detailing the U.S. government’s expansion in Vietnam, and the dissonance when comparing public sentiment and ideas shared behind closed doors. A big part of the document showed that government leadership had suppressed doubts about the progress of the war, and lied to the public about the troop buildup and other details that kept the war machine churning.
It also acted as a catalyst for President Richard Nixon and his administration to push for The Watergate break-in in 1972, eventually bringing about the demise of Nixon’s presidency and the eventual end of the Vietnam War. “Nixon’s doom was triggered by Daniel Ellsberg’s massive release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post,” Leonard Garment, Nixon’s lawyer during the scandal wrote in 1997. “Nixon and Kissinger let anger overwhelm political judgment.”
For Ellsberg, he felt that the document’s release on its own didn’t change much or “shorten the war by a day,” noting how the U.S. continued bombing Southeast Asia and kept troops in the country until 1973. “[The] criminal actions that the White House took against me … led to this absolutely unforeseeable downfall of a President, which made the war endable,” Ellsberg told the New Yorker in 2021. “In the end things couldn’t have worked out better.” Rest in peace.
