A U.S. defense consultant turned antiwar activist, Daniel Ellsberg is best known for leaking the 47-volume secret study of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the PENTAGON PAPERS, to the New York Times in 1971.
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Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931. He attended both Harvard and Cambridge Universities, eventually receiving a master’s degree in economics from Harvard.
In 1954, Ellsberg entered the U.S. Marine Corps, ris- ing to the rank of first lieutenant. When his two-year term of service was completed in 1956, he requested an extension in order to ship out with his battalion, which was deploying to the Middle East and the developing cri- sis in the Suez.
After leaving the Marines, Ellsberg returned to Har- vard, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1962. He then joined the RAND Corporation, an academic “think tank” specializing in research and analysis projects for decision makers in the corporate world and the federal government. By 1967, he was a senior research associate at the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology (MIT) Center for International Studies. That same year, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned Ellsberg and 34 other researchers to com- pile a history of American/Vietnamese relations from 1945 through 1968. Ellsberg was responsible for researching the escalation period during President John Kennedy’s admin- istration in 1961. The project took 18 months.
Initially, Ellsberg supported American military interven- tion in the Vietnam War. But as the war escalated and he got deeper into his research, Ellsberg grew disillusioned with U.S. policy and became a staunch opponent of any American involvement in SOUTHEAST ASIA. “I think now to a large extent it was an American president’s war,” he would write years later. “No American president, Republican or Democrat, wanted to be the president who lost the war or who lost Saigon.” He added, “To call a conflict in which one army is financed and equipped entirely by foreigners a ‘civil war’ simply screens a more painful reality: That the war is, after all, a foreign aggression. Our aggression.”
In mid-1969, Ellsberg and several of his associates wrote President Richard Nixon a letter expressing their opposition to the war. Ellsberg’s protests became more public when in 1970 he participated in an antiwar rally at Georgetown University.
In 1971, Ellsberg released to the media the completed Pentagon Papers—a 47-volume history of the war, some 3,000 pages of classified analysis and another 4,000 pages of appended documents, much of it top secret and top secret–sensitive. The Pentagon Papers first appeared on the front page of the New York Times on June 13. The story was then picked up by a number of other newspa- pers, including the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. The U.S. government obtained an injunction that tem- porarily prevented the publication of further stories. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the media, and the stories continued to be published.
Ellsberg, who contended that he was willing to risk a prison sentence to end the war, was indicted on several counts, including converting government property to per- sonal use (via a copy machine), possessing government
documents, conspiracy, theft, and espionage. The first trial was declared a mistrial in 1972 after Ellsberg’s attor- neys successfully argued that the papers were in the pub- lic domain and therefore did not constitute a threat to national security. The following year, just as Ellsberg was preparing for a second trial, the judge dismissed all charges when it was revealed by the WATERGATEprosecu- tors that the Nixon White House had directed former CIA dirty-tricks master EVERETTE HOWARD HUNTto burglarize the offices of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding—Ellsberg’s psychoana- lyst—in an attempt to uncover personal information that might prove damaging to Ellsberg’s reputation. It would later be discovered that the CIA had supplied Hunt with a wig, a camera, a speech-altering device, and false identifi- cation papers for the operation.
Citing government misconduct, the judge declared that Ellsberg and the American public had been “victims of a conspiracy to deprive us of our civil liberties.” Ells- berg regarded the judge’s ruling as “the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been an outspoken opponent of the nuclear arms race and nuclear proliferation. To that end, he has lectured all over the country, and he has been arrested on nearly 70 occa- sions in acts of civil disobedience.
From 1992 to 1995, he served as a lobbyist for the Washington, D.C.–based Physicians for Social Responsi- bility, a group with antinuclear goals. On January 10, 1999, Ellsberg was interviewed by CNN reporter Bruce Kennedy for CNN’s Perspectives series Cold War. Asked about the White House’s alleged willingness to “neutral- ize” him, Ellsberg claimed to believe that CIA operatives had once been assigned the task of physically harming him. A portion of that interview reads: “Charles Colson, who was the counsel to the president, called Jeb Magruder, who was running the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), to arrange for counter-demonstrators to disrupt physically a demonstration, a rally at which I would be speaking on May 3 [1972]. Magruder turned to Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, who arranged for 12 Cuban Americans, all of whom had worked for the CIA or were still on the CIA payroll, to be flown up from Miami for this purpose. They have testified that they were shown my photo, told that this was their target and that I was to be beaten up. Eventually the special prosecutor, Watergate prosecutor, who was investigating this action told me that their orders were ‘to incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally.’ I asked him, “What does that mean? To kill me?’ And he simply repeated the orders. But you have to realize that these guys never used the word ‘kill.’ He believed the intent was to kill me. My own judgment, looking at sev- eral other things, including over 1,000 pages of Watergate special task force documents, [is] that the intention was not to kill me but simply to shut me up physically at that particular moment. That is, to put me in the hospital.”
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