In this cloud-based, data-mining age, we’ve become used to leakers of vast troves of government information, missives from employees unsettled about policies with which they disagree, and can share with the world with a few presses of a button.
Perhaps the grandest document-leaker of them all, Daniel Ellsberg, didn’t have that luxury at his fingertips. When he became determined to share the shameful, secret history of the Vietnam War that later became known as the Pentagon Papers, it was in the print-only era of 1971. And since the documents he wanted to leak amounted to 7,000 pages, well, let’s just say that involved an awful lot of Xeroxing.
Ellsberg, who died here in California last Friday, aged 92, was no wild-eyed anti-war radical when he reached his decision to leak.
He served in the Marines in the 1950s, and later became a military analyst employed by RAND as an economist after taking degrees from Harvard and the University of Cambridge. He had been to Vietnam as a civilian adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, where for 18 months he accompanied American combat patrols.
And it was there that his views of the American military involvement in Vietnam began to change. He witnessed torture, unnecessary civilian deaths, villages burned down, an absolute failure of the expressed desire from Washington, D.C. to win “the hearts and minds” of many of the South Vietnamese. But, again, he was hardly radicalized. As his obituary in The New York Times reported, he told the syndicated columnist Mary McGrory: “I told myself that living under communism would be harder, and World War III, which I thought we were preventing, would be worse.”
When he came home in 1967, he participated at McNamara’s request in creating a history of American involvement in Vietnam, and then became more appalled at what that secret history noted: that presidential administrations since the 1950s greatly expanded the war while keeping the facts from Congress and from the citizenry.
He then did get involved publicly in anti-war efforts, advising the presidential campaign of Sen. Robert Kennedy. He quit RAND. And, though a proud veteran himself, he had an epiphany when he heard a speaker say he would rather go to jail for avoiding the draft rather than serving in an immoral war: “I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.”
Ellsberg still had a top secret clearance, and with former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, he photocopied the 47 volumes of the Pentagon study. But what is sometimes not remembered, as the documents only became crucially important after he leaked them to The New York Times, he at first tried to work within the system, showing excerpts from the damning study to Sen. J. William Fulbright and other members of Congress, none of whom would act on them.
When the Times began to publish them, incurring the wrath of Attorney General John Mitchell, who tried to bring espionage charges against the paper, Ellsberg became known to some as “the most dangerous man in America.”
But he was not that. In a grand American tradition of speaking truth to power, Ellsberg was the patriot, and the men in power, whose secrets he had exposed, the traitors.
He went into hiding. He came back out. He and Russo were charged with espionage and conspiracy. In 1973, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed all the charges — because of government misconduct.
When our government loses its moral compass, Americans have a right, and a duty, to expose it. RIP, Daniel Ellsberg.
