[Honoring Ellsberg requires not just recalling him as a historic
figure, but carrying on his work and legacy to dismantle the machinery
of war that has claimed far too many lives and end its accompanying
regime of secrecy.]
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DANIEL ELLSBERG, AMERICAN HERO  
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Chip Gibbons
June 16, 2023
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Honoring Ellsberg requires not just recalling him as a historic
figure, but carrying on his work and legacy to dismantle the machinery
of war that has claimed far too many lives and end its accompanying
regime of secrecy. _

Daniel Ellsberg in 2008, (Christopher Michel / Wikimedia Commons)

 

Few people can say their actions helped to strengthen press freedom,
end a war, and bring down a presidency. Daniel Ellsberg, who died
today at the age of ninety-two, did just that.

Ellsberg came to public prominence in 1971 when he photocopied a
secret history of US involvement in the Vietnam War, what became known
as the “Pentagon Papers
[[link removed]],”
and gave a copy to the _New York Times_. The_ New York Times_’
decision to publish the papers set off a landmark press freedom battle
that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Ellsberg became the first whistleblower indicted under the Espionage
Act. In addition to seeking an indictment, Richard Nixon also set up a
“White House Plumbers” unit to gather dirt on Ellsberg. This unit
would later be at the heart of the Watergate scandal that resulted in
Nixon’s downfall.

For the next half a century, Ellsberg was a continuous campaigner for
peace and disarmament, as well as an unflinching champion of those who
faced the wrath of the same secrecy regime that had sought to imprison
him.

While Ellsberg spent five decades as an antiwar activist, his career
began in a very different way. In Ellsberg’s own recounting, he had
once been an ardent cold warrior. But his experiences working for the
war machine led to a change of heart.

He worked in a number of positions within the US national security
state. He was in the Pentagon the day North Vietnamese forces
allegedly attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. He quickly
became aware of the fact that the government was lying about the
incident.

He traveled to Vietnam twice — first in 1961 as part of a Pentagon
fact-finding mission, then again in 1965 as part of a State Department
mission, during which he was photographed in camouflage carrying a
rifle.

Daniel Ellsberg holding a rifle in front of bunker, ca. 1965.
(Ellsberg Archive Project)

In addition to being involved with the US war in Vietnam, Ellsberg was
involved with US nuclear policy, something he described as being a
“doomsday planner.” Eventually, Ellsberg would become horrified by
the prospects of a nuclear doomsday and turn against the Vietnam War.
While working at the Pentagon-connected RAND Corporation, Ellsberg
went from defending the war to becoming actively involved in antiwar
organizing.

He befriended Howard Zinn
[[link removed]] and Noam
Chomsky [[link removed]], participating in
demonstrations with them. Ellsberg led an affinity group
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the 1971 May Day protest against the war that included both Zinn and
Chomsky.

But the pivotal moment in Ellsberg’s life occurred in August 1969,
when he attended an antiwar conference. He listened to the stories of
draft resisters who would be jailed for their act of courage. After
hearing them, Ellsberg went into the bathroom, lay down on the floor,
and began to cry. At this point Ellsberg made his most fateful
decision.

Ellsberg had first come to view the war as a mistake, but eventually
came to realize it was a crime. While a mistake can be corrected, a
crime must be resisted.

A Whistleblower Against the War

As a RAND employee, Ellsberg had access to a forty-seven-volume, seven
thousand–page study on the Vietnam War. This study went all the way
back to the Truman administration, when the United States had funded
French attempts to recolonize the country. It proved that
step-by-step, across two decades and multiple administrations, the US
government had lied to the people about the war.

Ellsberg decided to release the top-secret history to the people.

Whistleblowers today are able to copy and transmit large amounts of
data with ease, but at the time, there were no flash drives or email.
The only way for Ellsberg to copy the documents was with a
photocopier. The task took months.

Ellsberg initially attempted to give the Pentagon Papers to members of
Congress, but they were reluctant to accept them. He then turned to
the _New York Times_. After intense internal deliberation, the paper,
guided by its general counsel James Goodale
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decided that publishing them was in the public interest and that the
First Amendment protected the right to do so.

 

The Nixon administration sought an injunction under the Espionage Act
preventing the _New York Times _from continuing to publish the
secret history. Temporarily silenced, Ellsberg took the Pentagon
Papers to the _Washington Post_. The _Post_ published them before
also being hit with an injunction. This began a process where, as one
paper was enjoined, another would step up and publish the Pentagon
Papers.

In addition to the press, Ellsberg arranged for the antiwar
senator Mike Gravel
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receive a copy. Gravel entered them into the congressional record.
Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not
prevent newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers. Yet the court
left open the question of whether newspapers could be prosecuted under
the Espionage Act after they had done so. As a result, Gravel
struggled to find a publisher to print the Pentagon Papers, though
eventually the Unitarian-Universalist Beacon Press stepped in.

While it remained an open question whether the Espionage Act could be
used against a publisher, the Nixon administration brought Espionage
Act charges against Ellsberg and Anthony Russo for liberating the
Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg had fully expected to spend the rest of his
life in jail, but drawing on the experience of war resisters, he
copied them anyway. As he would later tell a journalist when turning
himself in, “Wouldn’t you go to jail if it would help end the
war?”

The Nixon administration’s misconduct, however, had so soiled the
case that a judge had to throw it out. Prior to this, the draconian
nature of the Espionage Act had all but ensured Ellsberg’s and
Russo’s convictions.

Ellsberg’s pursuit of a better world did not cease. He was a
frequent fixture of protests against US wars, whether they be in
Central America or Iraq. By 2018, Ellsberg had been arrested
eighty-seven times in acts of civil disobedience.

Ellsberg also took on renewed prominence during the Obama years. Army
private Chelsea Manning
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secret documents about US wars to WikiLeaks
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Manning, like Ellsberg, was indicted under the Espionage Act. In the
midst of her court martial, the_ Guardian _began publishing a series
of revelations about the National Security Agency’s global
surveillance programs. This information came from
whistleblower Edward Snowden
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Snowden would also be indicted under the Espionage Act. A new war on
whistleblowers was under way. And the Espionage Act was the
government’s main weapon against them.

Ellsberg was vilified by the political establishment when he released
the Pentagon Papers. Henry Kissinger, who recently marked his
hundredth birthday
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dubbed him the “most dangerous man in America.” Yet as the decades
have passed, history has proven that Ellsberg’s acts were heroic.
When new whistleblowers like Manning popped up, some commentators
perversely tried to contrast them to Ellsberg: he was a good
whistleblower, they were not. Ellsberg never stood for that, as he
recognized himself in their actions. He told
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I was willing to go to prison. I never thought, for the rest of my
life, I would ever hear anyone willing to do that, to risk their life,
so that horrible, awful secrets could be known. Then I read those logs
and learned [Chelsea Manning] was willing to go to prison. I can’t
tell you how much that affected me.

Ellsberg not only spoke out on behalf of Manning but attended her
court martial. It was through his campaigning against the Espionage
Act that I got to know him. I saw him speak in person for the first
time at a rally outside Fort Meade on behalf of Manning. Years later,
as policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, I spoke to him, as
Ellsberg supported our work to reform the Espionage Act, halt the
extradition of Julian Assange, and secure a pardon for Daniel Hale
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Ellsberg’s commitment and compassion were incredibly clear to me.
When it came to whistleblowers persecuted and tortured by the US
government, the stakes weighed heavily on his mind. In December 2022,
when Hale supporters organized a virtual press conference calling for
a commutation of Hale’s sentence, we asked Ellsberg to speak. It was
clear he was not feeling well, and none of us thought that he would
actually make it. Yet to the surprise of all of the organizers,
Ellsberg appeared, wearing a full suit and tie. Such was his
dedication to freeing his fellow whistleblower.

In recent years, Ellsberg became increasingly focused on abolishing
nuclear weapons. In 2017, he published his second memoir
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revealing for the first time his role as a “doomsday planner.” He
also made another revelation. At the same time that he copied the
Pentagon Papers, he also copied a study of the US response to the 1958
Taiwan Straits crisis. According to the study, US generals pushed
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a nuclear strike.

By publishing this study, Ellsberg had again violated the Espionage
Act. In doing so, he had two aims. First, with tensions heating up
between the United States and China over Taiwan (again), Ellsberg
wanted to warn the world how perilously close it had come to nuclear
war in the past. Also, he challenged the US government to charge him
so that he could fight
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constitutionality of the Espionage Act.

This was not Ellsberg’s final battle with official secrecy. Two
months before his cancer diagnosis, Ellsberg revealed that in 2010,
WikiLeaks had given him copies of the materials provided by Chelsea
Manning. Ellsberg had held onto the materials as a backup. Although he
never published them, the Espionage Act equally criminalizes retaining
“national defense information” as it does publishing it. Ellsberg
urged the US government to indict
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along with Assange. Again, he made his motives clear: he wished to
stage a constitutional challenge to the Espionage Act.

“I Will Continue, as Long as I’m Able”

In a recent interview
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the _Washington Post, _Ellsberg noted the similarities between the
Vietnam War and the current war in Ukraine. Both wars were obviously
stalemated, but respective governments denied it. “I’m reliving a
part of history I had no desire to live again. And I hoped I
wouldn’t. And by the way, that makes it easier to leave — this is
where I came in,” Ellsberg told his interviewer.

In his email announcing his terminal cancer, the threat of nuclear war
was clearly weighing heavily on Ellsberg’s mind. Stating that the
world risked nuclear war over Ukraine or Taiwan, Ellsberg wrote, “It
is long past time — but not too late! — for the world’s publics
at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their
past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I’m able, to
help these efforts.”

 

While he viewed the world as close to catastrophe as ever, he noted,
“I’m happy to know that millions of people — including all those
friends and comrades to whom I address this message! — have the
wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these
causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its
creatures.”

When I interviewed
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for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ release, it was
clear that he was far less interested in reminiscing about the past
than carrying forward his urgent work to avert nuclear war and reform
the Espionage Act. Honoring Ellsberg requires not just recalling him
as a historic figure, but carrying on his work and legacy to dismantle
the machinery of war that has claimed far too many lives and end its
accompanying regime of secrecy that crushes truth-tellers while
granting impunity to war criminals.

* Pentagon Papers
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* whistleblowers
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* government secrecy
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* U.S. militarism
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* Vietnam War
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