SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
pentagon papers
Named for Daniel Ellsberg, Tlaib Proposal Would Protect Whistleblowers and Journalists
"With whistleblowers, journalists, and civil liberties under significant attack and government decision-making shrouded in increasing secrecy, reining in the abuses of the Espionage Act could not be more urgent.”
Mar 12, 2026
Warning that the Espionage Act has been used to "persecute and criminalize" dissenters, journalists, and whistleblowers numerous times since it was passed into law, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Thursday introduced the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act to "rein in" the 109-year-old law.
The proposal is named for the military analyst-turned-activist who disclosed decades of deception by the US government regarding Vietnam when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971—an act that led the government to charge Ellsberg with espionage, conspiracy, and other crimes before the case was thrown out over the Nixon administration's misconduct.
In the cases of Ellsberg, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and other journalists and whistleblowers, "Espionage Act prosecutions have been used to silence dissent and undermine government transparency and are a clear violation of the First Amendment and the fundamental right to due process," said Tlaib (D-Mich.).
“Alerting the public to government wrongdoing is not a crime,” said the congresswoman. “The Espionage Act has been abused by administrations of both parties to target whistleblowers and journalists for sharing critically important information with the public. With whistleblowers, journalists, and civil liberties under significant attack and government decision-making shrouded in increasing secrecy, reining in the abuses of the Espionage Act could not be more urgent.”
Tlaib noted that in addition to past administrations using the Espionage Act to prosecute media sources and whistleblowers who alerted the public about mass surveillance, torture, drone assassinations, and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter in January in connection to the prosecution of a government whistleblower.
The proposed legislation would limit the scope of the Espionage Act to foreign agents and government employees who have a legal duty to protect classified information—prohibiting the use of the law to prosecute publishers, journalists, or members of the public.
It would also increase due process standards and safeguards for whistleblowers who disclose government wrongdoing, war crimes, or abuses of power to the public. The legislation would create and affirmative public interest defense and require the government to prove that a whistleblower acted with the specific intent of harming the US or aiding a foreign power.
Under the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, "the government could no longer abuse [the Espionage Act] to silence those sharing information that is beneficial to the public."
“For too long the Espionage Act has been used to persecute and silence whistleblowers, journalists and publishers,” said Leventoff. “But journalism is not a crime—it is a First Amendment protected activity that protects our democracy by allowing the public to hold our nation’s leaders to account."
The Espionage Act was originally passed to crack down on those who spread information that could interfere with the war effort during World War I, and "from its inception," said Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, "the law has been used to stifle public debate and has become the go to weapon against whistleblowers and now journalists."
"Public servants who witness egregious crimes like torture, mass surveillance of Americans, or the killing of civilians, and seek to alert the American people about them are whistleblowers," said Gibbons. "Yet, using the Espionage Act the government prosecutes them as though they were spies. And with the government going further and prosecuting a journalist under the Espionage Act, the threat not just to press freedom, but to our very democracy, posed by this antiquated law is growing. Rep. Tlaib’s bill is desperately needed as it is well past time to bring the Espionage Act in line with the First Amendment.”
Tlaib noted that before his death in 2023, Ellsberg expressed public support for the reforms the congresswoman had proposed, when she introduced them as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.
“For half a century, starting with my own prosecution, no whistleblower charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 has had, or could have, a fair trial," said Ellsberg in 2022. "These long-overdue amendments would remedy that injustice, protect the First Amendment freedom of the press, and encourage vitally needed truth-telling.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
As US Attacks Iran, Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us Once More
“There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth."
Mar 02, 2026
When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.
Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. “Truth and Consequence,” being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.
“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.
The book’s subtitle—offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope”—could hardly be more timely.
Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.
At the center of “Truth and Consequence” are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.
“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.
“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”
“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the US war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.
“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”
Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing—sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence—and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”
The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power—those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”
And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders—or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”
1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”
Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.
“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”
1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”
By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”
And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence—from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”
1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”
1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”
1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”
1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”
Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”
Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dissent Is Patriotic: Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy Demands Action
Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Jun 18, 2025
Two years ago this week, Daniel Ellsberg died at the age of 92. In the popular imagination, his legacy is often reduced to a singular act of conscience and courage: the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study that exposed the systematic deceit and misconduct of successive U.S. administrations in prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg had spent over a decade inside the national security apparatus, directly contributing to the planning and execution of that war. But over time, he came to regard the intervention as a criminal, imperial war of aggression. Reflecting on the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, he concluded: “We were not on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” He described the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—which involved dropping more than three and a half times the tonnage of explosives used by the United States in all of World War II—as “totally useless, unnecessary from any point of view, and thus unjustifiable homicide, murder.”
For telling the truth about a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and conscripted a generation of Americans in service of empire and the preservation of official credibility, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act and faced up to 115 years in prison. Asked why he had risked everything, he replied simply: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?” And of his transformation: “Killing is not something I’m going to do bureaucratically ever again.”
Radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward.
His defiance helped redefine patriotism itself. “Dissent is patriotic,” he insisted. “And to be loyal to this country does not compel us to be disloyal to [humanity].” His example paved the way for a lineage of whistleblowers including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.
But to limit his legacy to the Pentagon Papers is to flatten it into a story of individual heroism, severed from the mass movements that made it possible, and that remain vital today. Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Ellsberg understood this. He often credited the antiwar movement with awakening his conscience, and pointed in particular to the courage of draft resisters willing to face prison. Their example, he said, was decisive in his own decision to leak the Papers. “Courage is contagious,” he reflected. What he did was only possible because others had already taken greater risks.
He also believed that it was mass resistance that averted the war’s most catastrophic escalations. A turning point came on October 15, 1969, a coordinated day of nationwide civil disobedience. As many as two million people walked out to protest the unjust war, followed by another massive demonstration the following month.
At the time, the Nixon administration was preparing to intensify the conflict. Henry Kissinger, in private discussions, called for delivering “a savage blow” to North Vietnam, potentially involving nuclear weapons. But the scale of public opposition forced a retreat.
“The American people,” Ellsberg later recalled, “did not in fact, I think, buy onto the notion that it was all right to kill Vietnamese to an unlimited degree, and they stopped the bombing.” Nixon, he concluded, “did not lose the war. The American people ended the war. They took his victory away from him.”
Ellsberg’s story did not end in 1971. He never returned to government or academia. Instead, he spent the rest of his life as a public educator and dissident, arrested as many as 90 times for acts of civil disobedience, most often targeting U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
At RAND in the 1950s and ’60s, Ellsberg helped draft nuclear war plans, including first-strike scenarios that projected the deaths of 600 million people, what he called “a hundred Holocausts.” In the decades that followed, he made it his mission to dismantle The Doomsday Machine.
In 1978, he was arrested at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant alongside his son, Robert. “Not without arrests,” he declared. “Not anymore, invisibly… not without public question, controversy, challenge. Not, anymore, with the presumed consent of all American citizens.” The day before, while riding in handcuffs next to his father, Robert had looked out at the tracks and said, “You know, there should have been some Germans on the tracks at Auschwitz.”
Four years later, Ellsberg was arrested again, alongside 1,300 others, at the gates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he described as “the Auschwitz of our time!” The analogy was provocative but warranted. As he explained, a nuclear strike which they were making possible there would amount to “as deliberate and engineered annihilation of non-combatants as Hitler’s Holocaust in the gas chambers… it would be bringing the gas, the death, the radioactivity to the people, instead of herding them to it.”
This radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward. Reflecting on the public’s acquiescence to the “insanity” of nuclear policy and U.S. militarism, Ellsberg warned: “We all live in Guyana. And I say it’s mutiny time.”
His words remain a call to collective defiance.
Today, that defiance is as urgent as ever. It means standing for principle over careerism, a contrast to figures like Matt Miller. It means continuing to disrupt the flow of weapons to Israel, as workers have done in France and beyond. It means joining marches and freedom flotillas to break the siege of Gaza. It means rejecting war for what it is: organized mass slaughter. And it means defending our communities against the violent overreach of an authoritarian regime.
There is little doubt that this is what Daniel Ellsberg would be doing were he alive today. To honor his legacy, we must do the same—today and every day.
Note: Quotes are drawn from the Daniel Ellsberg Papers at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Vietnam War Ended 50 Years Ago. People Still Get It Wrong.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Apr 30, 2025
April 30th marks the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War's end when Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The war was a terrible experience for the United States, but even more so for the people of Vietnam and much of the rest of Southeast Asia. Estimates are that up to 3 million Vietnamese perished, as well many many thousands of Cambodians and Laotians. Fifty-eight thousand American died, and a trillion American tax dollars were wasted.
Many of us who were there are still trying to understand and come to grips with it. Based on years of study, here is what I think people still get wrong about the war. What I write will be controversial, but it is based on what I saw and learned. If I seem angry, it is because I still am.
In nearly all wars, the other side is demonized and made into evil caricatures of human beings; doing so makes it easier to kill them. From the U.S. perspective, the Vietnam War was no exception. Even the Vietnamese who were supposedly on our side were commonly referred to as gooks, zips (Zero Intelligence Personnel), slants, slopes and more, often to their faces. In my experience, the U.S. military chain of command made no effort to correct this. Given the pervasive racism among American troops, it should come as no surprise that violence against Vietnamese civilians was common. It is hard to understand how anyone thought the Vietnamese people would rally to the U.S. side while being badly treated.
The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
In Vietnam many of us learned to be quite skeptical of the media and the U.S. government. To cite just one example out of hundreds, as the advancing NVA/VC forces began to overrun the South (mid-1970's), U.S. officials and media warned of a bloodbath to come. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger warned that 200,000 would be killed if the communists won. The American armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, in one of the last issues to arrive in Saigon, carried a headline: "At Least a Million Vietnamese Will Be Slaughtered." But that never happened. When it came to allegations of massacres, whether by the enemy in Hue during Tet, or the Americans at My Lai, the truth was regularly mangled by the U.S. government and media.
The leak of the Pentagon Papers, which so infuriated then-President Richard Nixon, revealed many other falsehoods, even as to when the war started. The Papers show that it was in 1945 that the French government decided to reclaim its Vietnam colony from the Japanese occupiers. Then the U.S. got involved under President Harry Truman. From that time the U.S. provided air transport, weapons, advisers, and funding without which the French reoccupation would not have been possible. So the Vietnamese are correct in calling it the Ten Thousand Day War—the 30 years from 1945 to 1975.
The Pentagon Papers also reveal that U.S. leaders all the way from Truman to Nixon and Gerald Ford were advised that the U.S. could not win the war. They all knew that defeat was on the horizon, or perhaps just over the horizon. But except for Ford, all the presidents decided that, while the war was a lost cause, it would not be lost on their watch—so they kept it going by kicking the can down the road to the next president. So the death and destruction continued.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran for president declaring that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. In actuality, his secret was to covertly sabotage ongoing peace talks to prolong the war. It went on for four more years, and another 25,000 U.S. soldiers died in a war Nixon knew could not be won.
During and after the war we learned a good deal about war-related post traumatic stress. Tens of thousands of returning Vietnam veterans began showing alarming signs of acute mental distress, often leading to harming others or themselves. Thanks to cutting edge research by Veterans Affairs, we learned that troops serving in support roles (which is most of them) had rates of PTSD about the same as the general population, around 6%. On the other hand, troops who were involved in abusing civilians or prisoners had rates of PTSD of over 50%. There are treatments available, but none seem to be especially effective. The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
Today, most Americans think of the anti-war movement as mostly long-haired, pot-smoking hippies—with a Doctor Spock or a Jane Fonda occasionally thrown in. But that was not the reality. Instead, by 1967 thousands of veterans who had served in Vietnam returned home and eagerly joined the anti-war movement, especially on college campuses, quickly taking leadership positions. Tom Grace, in his book on the Kent State shootings, carefully documents that the leadership of the campus protesters there was almost entirely made up of returned working class veterans. This was typical. The largest of the veteran anti-war groups was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War with 20,000 to 50,000 members at its height. They were active in colleges and universities across the country.
There were also protests and some sabotage from within the active duty forces. In the face of widespread refusals to obey, ships could not put to sea, and aircraft could not fly. Racial tensions ran high.
Even with a half million troops in Vietnam, the U.S. could not prevail against a rising tide of nationalism in Vietnam, or even control most of the country. As the Pentagon Papers explained, the U.S. never had a chance.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Anger alone solves little. If you want peace, you will have to organize to get it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Honoring Daniel Ellsberg’s Legacy One Year After His Death
While he can no longer speak to the world about the latest developments, Ellsberg will continue to speak directly to hearts and minds about the extreme evils of our time—and the potential for overcoming them with love in action.
Jun 10, 2024
On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.
After working inside this country’s doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American warmaking. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe—that we’re better than other people, we’re superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”
Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration’s illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle.”
Dan’s mix of deep humanism and realism was in harmony with his aversion to contorting logic to suit rigid ideology.
That miracle enabled Dan to keep on speaking, writing, researching, and protesting for the rest of his life. (In those five decades, he averaged nearly two arrests per year for civil disobedience.) He worked tirelessly to prevent and oppose a succession of new American wars. And he consistently gave eloquent public support as well as warm personal solidarity to heroic whistleblowers— Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, Daniel Hale, Matthew Hoh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Mordechai Vanunu, Ann Wright, and others—who sacrificed much to challenge deadly patterns of official deceit.
Unauthorized Freedom of Speech
Dan often spoke out for freeing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose work had revealed devastating secret U.S. documents on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of a visit in June 2015, when they said goodbye inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, I saw that both men were on the verge of tears. At that point, Assange was three years into his asylum at that embassy, with no end in sight.
Secretly indicted in the United States, Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for nearly four more years until London police dragged him off to prison. Hours later, in a radio interview, Dan said: “Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic.”
Unauthorized disclosures were the essence of what WikiLeaks had published and what Dan had provided with the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, countless exposés about U.S. government war crimes became possible due to the courage of Chelsea Manning, and profuse front-page news about the government’s systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment resulted from Edward Snowden’s bravery. While gladly publishing some of their revelations, major American newspapers largely refused to defend their rights.
Such dynamics were all too familiar to Dan. He told me that the attitude toward him of The New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize with its huge Pentagon Papers scoop, was akin to a district attorney’s view of a “snitch”—useful but distasteful.
In recent times, Dan detested the smug media paradigm of “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad.” So, he pushed back against the theme as rendered by New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a lengthy piece along those lines in late 2016. Dan quickly responded with a letter to the editor, which never appeared.
The New Yorker certainly could have found room to print Dan’s letter, which said: “I couldn’t disagree more with Gladwell’s overall account.” The letter was just under 300 words; the Gladwell piece had run more than 5,000. While promoting the “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad” trope, The New Yorker did not let readers know that Ellsberg himself completely rejected it:
Each of us, having earned privileged access to secret information, saw unconstitutional, dangerously wrong policies ongoing by our government. (In Snowden’s case, he discovered blatantly criminal violations of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, on a scale that threatens our democracy.) We found our superiors, up to the presidents, were deeply complicit and clearly unwilling either to expose, reform, or end the wrongdoing.
Each of us chose to sacrifice careers, and possibly a lifetime’s freedom, to reveal to the public, Congress, and the courts what had long been going on in secret from them. We hoped, each with some success, to allow our democratic system to bring about desperately needed change.
The truth is there are no whistleblowers, in fact no one on Earth, with whom I identify more closely than with Edward Snowden.
Here is one difference between us that is deeply real to me: Edward Snowden, when he was 30 years old, did what I could and should have done—what I profoundly wish I had done—when I was his age, instead of 10 years later.
As he encouraged whistleblowing, Dan often expressed regret that he hadn’t engaged in it sooner. During the summer of 2014, a billboard was on display at bus stops in Washington, D.C., featuring a quote from Dan—with big letters at the top saying “DON’T DO WHAT I DID. DON’T WAIT,” followed by “until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.” Two whistleblowers who had been U.S. diplomats, Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright, unveiled the billboard at a bus stop near the State Department.
A Grotesque Situation of Existential Danger
Above all, Daniel Ellsberg was preoccupied with opposing policies that could lead to nuclear war. “No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane,” he wrote in The Doomsday Machine. “The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness.”
It’s fitting that the events set for Daniel Ellsberg Week (ending on June 16, the first anniversary of when Dan passed away) will include at least one protest at a Northrop Grumman facility. That company has a $13.3 billion contract to develop a new version of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which—as Dan frequently emphasized—is the most dangerous of all nuclear weapons. He was eager to awaken Congress to scientific data about “nuclear winter” and the imperative of shutting down ICBMs to reduce the risks of nuclear war.
Five years ago, several of us from the Institute for Public Accuracy hand-delivered paperbacks of The Doomsday Machine—with a personalized letter from Dan to each member of the House and Senate—to all 535 congressional offices on Capitol Hill. “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years,” Dan wrote near the top of his two-page letter. Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
Dan’s letter singled out the urgency of one “immediate step” in particular: “to eliminate entirely our redundant, vulnerable, and destabilizing land-based ICBM force.” Unlike air-launched and sea-based nuclear weapons, which are not vulnerable to attack, the ICBMs are vulnerable to a preemptive strike and so are “poised to launch” on the basis of “10-minute warning signals that may be—and have been, on both sides—false alarms, which press leadership to ‘use them or lose them.’”
As Dan pointed out, “It is in the power of Congress to decouple the hair-trigger on our system by defunding and dismantling the current land-based Minuteman missiles and rejecting funding for their proposed replacements. The same holds for lower-yield weapons for first use against Russia, on submarines or in Europe, which are detonators for escalation to nuclear winter.”
In essence, Dan was telling members of Congress to do their job, with the fate of the Earth and its inhabitants hanging in the balance:
This grotesque situation of existential danger has evolved in secret in the almost total absence of congressional oversight, investigations, or hearings. It is time for Congress to remedy this by preparing for first-ever hearings on current nuclear doctrine and “options,” and by demanding objective, authoritative scientific studies of their full consequences including fire, smoke, nuclear winter, and famine. Classified studies of nuclear winter using actual details of existing attack plans, never yet done by the Pentagon but necessarily involving its directed cooperation, could be done by the National Academy of Sciences, requested and funded by Congress.
But Dan’s letter was distinctly out of sync with Congress. Few in office then—or now—have publicly acknowledged that such a “grotesque situation of existential danger” really exists. And even fewer have been willing to break from the current Cold War mindset that continues to fuel the rush to global annihilation. On matters of foreign policy and nuclear weapons, the Congressional Record is mainly a compendium of arrogance and delusion, in sharp contrast to the treasure trove of Dan’s profound insights preserved at Ellsberg.net.
Humanism and Realism to Remember
Clear as he was about the overarching scourge of militarism embraced by the leaders of both major parties, Dan was emphatic about not equating the two parties at election time. He understood that efforts like Green Party presidential campaigns are misguided at best. But, as he said dryly, he did favor third parties—on the right (“the more the better”). He knew what some self-described progressives have failed to recognize as the usual reality of the U.S. electoral system: Right-wing third parties help the left, and left-wing third parties help the right.
Several weeks before the 2020 election, Dan addressed voters in the swing state of Michigan via an article he wrote for the Detroit Metro Times. Appearing under a headline no less relevant today—“Trump Is an Enemy of the Constitution and Must Be Defeated”—the piece said that “it’s now of transcendent importance to prevent him from gaining a second term.” Dan warned that “we’re facing an authoritarian threat to our democratic system of a kind we’ve never seen before,” making votes for Joe Biden in swing states crucial.
Dan’s mix of deep humanism and realism was in harmony with his aversion to contorting logic to suit rigid ideology. Bad as current realities were, he said, it was manifestly untrue that things couldn’t get worse. He had no intention of ignoring the very real dangers of nuclear war or fascism.
During the last few months of his life, after disclosing a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer, Dan reached many millions of people with an intensive schedule of interviews. Journalists were mostly eager to ask him about events related to the Pentagon Papers. While he said many important things in response to such questions, Dan most wanted to talk about the unhinged momentum of the nuclear arms race and the ominous U.S. frenzy of antagonism toward Russia and China lacking any sense of genuine diplomacy.
While he can no longer speak to the world about the latest developments, Dan Ellsberg will continue to speak directly to hearts and minds about the extreme evils of our time—and the potential for overcoming them with love in action.
A free documentary film premiering now, A Common Insanity: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg About Nuclear Weapons, concludes with these words from Dan as he looks straight at us: “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
What Daniel Ellsberg Knew—and Rightly Feared—About Nuclear Armageddon
Throughout his adult life, the whistleblower known mostly for leaking The Pentagon Papers was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war.
Dec 15, 2023
Top American officials in the “national security” establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the world. During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist.
Most people remember him, of course, as the whistleblower who exposed voluminous official lies about the Vietnam War by providing 7,000 top-secret pages of classified documents to the New York Times and other newspapers. But throughout his adult life, he was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war.
One day in 1995, I called Dan and suggested he run for president. His reply was instant: “I’d rather be in prison.” He explained that, unlike typical candidates, he couldn’t stand to offer opinions on subjects he really knew little or nothing about.
However, for more than five decades, Ellsberg didn’t hesitate to publicly address what he really did know all too much about — the patterns of government secrecy and lies that sustained America’s wars in one country after another, along with the chronic deceptions and delusions at the core of the nuclear arms race. He had personally seen such patterns of deceit at work in the upper reaches of the warfare state. As he told me, “That there is deception — that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game… in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war — is the reality.”
And how difficult was it to deceive the public? “I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”
Dan had absorbed a vast array of classified information during his years working near the top of the U.S. war machine. He knew countless key facts about foreign policy and war-making that had been hidden from the public. Most importantly, he understood how mendacity could lead to massive human catastrophes and how routinely the key figures in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Oval Office openly lied.
His release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — revealing crucial history about the Vietnam War while it was still underway — exposed how incessant deception got wars started and kept them going. He had seen up close just how easy it was for officials like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to suppress doubts about American war-making and push ahead with policies that would, in the end, lead to the deaths of several million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And Dan was haunted by the possibility that someday such deception might lead to a nuclear holocaust that could extinguish almost all human life on this planet.
In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, he highlighted this all-too-apt epigraph from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” The ultimate madness of policies preparing for thermonuclear war preoccupied Dan throughout his adult life. As he wrote,
“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”
A Global Firestorm, a Little Ice Age
I don’t know whether Dan liked Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s aphorism about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” but it seems to me an apt summary of his approach to the specter of nuclear annihilation and an unfathomable end to human civilization. Keeping his eyes relentlessly on what few of us want to look at — the possibility of omnicide — he was certainly not a fatalist, yet he was a realist about the probability that a nuclear war might indeed occur.
Such a probability now looms larger than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, but its most essential lessons seem to have been lost on President Biden and his administration. Eight months after that nearly cataclysmic faceoff six decades ago between the United States and the Soviet Union, President John Kennedy spoke at American University about the crisis. “Above all,” he said then, “while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”
But Joe Biden has seemed all too intent on forcing his adversary in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, into just such “a humiliating retreat.” The temptation to keep blowing a presidential bugle for victory over Russia in the Ukraine war has evidently been too enticing to resist (though Republicans in Congress have recently taken a rather different tack). With disdain for genuine diplomacy and with a zealous desire to keep pouring huge quantities of armaments into the conflagration, Washington’s recklessness has masqueraded as fortitude and its disregard for the dangers of nuclear war as a commitment to democracy. Potential confrontation with the world’s other nuclear superpower has been recast as a test of moral virtue.
Meanwhile, in U.S. media and politics, such dangers rarely get a mention anymore. It’s as if not talking about the actual risks diminishes them, though the downplaying of such dangers can, in fact, have the effect of heightening them. For instance, in this century, the U.S. government has pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces arms-control treaties with Russia. Their absence makes nuclear war more likely. For the mainstream media and members of Congress, however, it’s been a non-issue, hardly worth mentioning, much less taking seriously.
Soon after becoming a “nuclear war planner,” Dan Ellsberg learned what kind of global cataclysm was at stake. While working in the Kennedy administration, as he recalled,
“What I discovered, to my horror, I have to say, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first [nuclear] strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then, because they weren’t including fire which they felt was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So, the real effect would have been over a billion not 600 million, about a third of the Earth’s population then at that time.”
Decades later, in 2017, Dan described research findings on the “nuclear winter” that such weaponry could cause:
“What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983, confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists, is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you called them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities, like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn’t be rained out in the stratosphere, it would go around the globe very quickly, and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.”
Facing the Hell of Thermonuclear Destruction
In his book The Doomsday Machine, Dan also emphasized the importance of focusing attention on one rarely discussed aspect of our nuclear peril: intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. They are the most dangerous weapons in the arsenals of the atomic superpowers when it comes to the risk of setting off a nuclear war. The U.S. has 400 of them, always on hair-trigger alert in underground silos scattered across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming, while Russia deploys about 300 of its own (and China is rushing to catch up). Former Defense Secretary William Perry has called ICBMs “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world,” warning that “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
As Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.” So, any false indication of a Russian attack could lead to global disaster. As former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”
During an interview with me in 2021, Dan made a similar case for shutting down ICBMs. It was part of a recording session for a project coordinated by Judith Ehrlich, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” She would go on to create an animated six-episode “Defuse Nuclear War Podcast with Daniel Ellsberg.” In one of them, “ICBMs: Hair-Trigger Annihilation,” he began: “When I say that there is a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs, I’m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.”
He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they’re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (“use them or lose them”). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and
“can be called back — in fact they don’t even have to be called back, they can… circle until they get a positive order to go ahead… That’s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians… Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don’t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning… to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
And he concluded: “To remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.”
While especially hazardous for human survival, ICBMs are a humongous cash cow for the nuclear weapons industry. Northrop Grumman has already won a $13.3 billion contract to start developing a new version of ICBMs to replace the currently deployed Minuteman III missiles. That system, dubbed Sentinel, is set to be a major part of the U.S. “nuclear modernization plan” now pegged at $1.5 trillion (before the inevitable cost overruns) over the next three decades.
Unfortunately, on Capitol Hill, any proposal that smacks of “unilateral” disarmament is dead on arrival. Yet ICBMs are a striking example of a situation in which such disarmament is by far the sanest option.
Let’s say you’re standing in a pool of gasoline with your adversary and you’re both lighting matches. Stop lighting those matches and you’ll be denounced as a unilateral disarmer, no matter that it would be a step toward sanity.
In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless on the subject. The narratives — and silences — offered by government officials and most media are perennial invitations to just such feelings. Still, the desperately needed changes to roll back nuclear threats would require an onset of acute realism coupled with methodical activism. As James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Daniel Ellsberg was accustomed to people telling him how much he inspired them. But I sensed in his eyes and in his heart a persistent question: Inspired to do what?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Eulogy for My Father, Daniel Ellsberg
In the final days, his joy and gratitude were based on the hope that others would carry on the effort for a better, more peaceful future. I pray that his joy may be justified.
Oct 27, 2023
Peacemaker and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023, four months after his diagnosis with inoperable pancreatic cancer. In March, he shared news of his prognosis with friends and supporters in the peace movement in a letter posted on Common Dreams. On October 22 his family hosted an online Celebration of Life which featured testimonials by his wife, Patricia, his children, Robert, Mary, and Michael, his grandchildren, and a wide range of friends, fellow peacemakers, and whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Rev. John Dear, Norman Soloman, Rep. Barbara Lee, Gov. Jerry Brown, Tom Reiffer, Richard Falk, and Randy Kehler. Dan's son Robert, the Publisher of Orbis Books, delivered this opening eulogy:
During a phone call in February, Dad mentioned—almost as a side note—“If I had a potentially serious condition, would you want to know about it?” I answered with words to the effect: Hell yes! Thus, I learned of a possible mass on his pancreas, which was later confirmed to be pancreatic cancer and was deemed inoperable. He was told he had three to six months to live. He lived for four.
I had known that Dad was never particularly worried or anxious about the prospect of his own death. Since surviving the car accident that killed his mother and sister when he was 15, I think he had always felt he was living on borrowed time. He admitted to me that this probably accounted for his ability to take risks that others might have feared—some of them, arguably reckless, such as driving through the countryside of Vietnam in his Triumph Spitfire. Others, like his willingness to risk life in prison for releasing the Pentagon Papers, served a higher purpose. That lack of fear was one of his superpowers.
[My father] believed that the danger facing humanity came not just from ourtechnology and our policies but from the tragic defect that allowed so many humans not to identify with the sufferings and fate of others far away, not of their tribe.
Yet if the prospect of his own death did not concern him, he spent a lifetime warning against the prospect of mass death hovering over the earth. He stared into the heart of darkness, envisioning a scale of death for which most people have no adequate language or capacity to contemplate. In countless hours in his study, he scratched out thoughts about this danger on one of his yellow legal pads, trying to conceive of words or actions that could arouse humanity to avert the death of our species and the creatures we would take with us.
Compared with that prospect, he accepted his own demise with calm detachment, thus foregoing all the preliminary stages of grief that Elisabeth Kübler Russ famously outlined: denial, grief, bargaining, and depression.
What surprised us was something we would not have predicted: his evident happiness, or what my brother Michael termed “ebullience.”
This was not because he felt any optimism about the state of the world. “I am not generally an optimist,” he told me. “No,” I said, “you are generally a catastrophist.” In fact, he foresaw nothing but sadness and suffering for the future. In light of the dangers posed by the war in Ukraine, he said, “I feel I’m leaving just where I first came in.”
My father was capable of joy and laughter. Often our conversations were a sustained laugh fest. He saw the humor and absurdity in so many things. But none of us had ever witnessed the sustained happiness and enjoyment of life that he showed in the three months following his diagnosis. How to explain what even he acknowledged was a mystery?
I think it came from the sense, as he confided to Patricia, that “a tremendous burden has been lifted from my shoulders.”
He was not alone in his mission, and it gave him great joy to be around those he called his “tribe”—the peacemakers and resisters, the whistleblowers, the fellow prophets like Greta Thunberg—those he said who care about the others.
He had often spoken of his identification with the mythical seer Cassandra: who received the gift of seeing the future, but also the curse that no one would believe her. For most of his life, he had struggled with this dubious gift and the driven sense that he must find some way to make people see and act appropriately. He believed that the danger facing humanity came not just from our technology and our policies but from the tragic defect that allowed so many humans not to identify with the sufferings and fate of others far away, not of their tribe.
He was not alone in his mission, and it gave him great joy to be around those he called his “tribe”—the peacemakers and resisters, the whistleblowers, the fellow prophets like Greta Thunberg—those he said who care about the others. It was that kind of deep empathy that had helped him turn against the war in Vietnam, whose people, he said, “had become as real to me as my own hands.”
And yet the burden of this responsibility definitely dimmed his capacity for sustained happiness—the feeling that somehow the fate of the world depended on him.
I tried at various times, with limited success, to lighten this burden. Using a sports metaphor that I knew was meaningless to him, I once told him that his job was not to get the ball across the goal line—just to move it down the field. Others would carry on.
It was a message he wanted and needed to believe. One time when he was feeling particularly down, I wrote him a letter saying, “Dad, you should never feel you have to do anything—give another interview, spend another night in jail, write another book. You helped end a war. And you set an example of heroic action for peace that will inspire and challenge generations to come. I couldn’t be prouder to be your son.”
After his death I found that message taped to his computer.
I had the great privilege of working with him for two years on his book, The Doomsday Machine. He once told me that he would be happy if his book could prolong the survival of the planet for 43 seconds—the time between the release of the first atomic bomb and its detonation over Hiroshima. “Forgive me,” I told him, “if I hope to aim a little bit higher.”
In his last months, I believe it was given to him to raise his eyes and see a little higher—beyond the doomsday scenarios on his yellow legal pad: to sense that he had done what was given to him to accomplish; the rest was out of his hands. In a letter he sent to friends, he wrote, “I’ve always known that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!”
His horror at the dangers of nuclear war and climate change were fueled by his love for the earth—nature, the ocean, flowers, animals, children, music, poetry, beauty in all is forms, and what it would mean if we were never to see and enjoy these things again.
That letter, which he posted in March, was a great step on his final journey. I believe it will stand as part of his legacy, a message about his own life, about what it means to be a responsible person, and the message of realism and encouragement he hoped to pass along. He described the risk he had undertaken in releasing the Pentagon Papers, and the unexpected results it had achieved, even contributing to the end of the Vietnam War. He was spared a lifetime in prison and allowed to spend the subsequent years attempting to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war. He regretted that his efforts to dismantle the Doomsday Machine had not shown better results. And yet, he wrote, “As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts.”
He acknowledged and thanked his fellow peacemakers for their efforts. “Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.” He said he could depart this life knowing that others would carry on.
And he concluded: “My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.”
His letter evoked an extraordinary response, and I think for the first time he realized how much he was loved. This came as a surprise: yes, people had told him he was admired—but loved?
His message: That you can’t know what you will accomplish, and you may not ever know the results of your actions—but the chance that you can make a difference is worth taking and at the end of the day that is a good way to use your life.
The last time he left the house was for an outing we shared to Stimson Beach, one of his favorite places in the world. It was too cold to dip our toes in the water, but we lay on the sand, surrounded by seagulls and the sound of the surf. It reminded me that his horror at the dangers of nuclear war and climate change were fueled by his love for the earth—nature, the ocean, flowers, animals, children, music, poetry, beauty in all is forms, and what it would mean if we were never to see and enjoy these things again. We talked for hours.
Many of his interviewers, he said, wanted to talk about his “legacy.” He didn’t know exactly what that meant. But he told me that maybe this was his message: That you can’t know what you will accomplish, and you may not ever know the results of your actions—but the chance that you can make a difference is worth taking and at the end of the day that is a good way to use your life.
When we drove home he told me, “This has been a marvelous day.”
That was his final gift to me, the memory of a marvelous day, the example of a marvelous life. To the extent that his joy and gratitude were based on the hope that others would carry on, I pray that his joy may be justified by the way we remember him and by the way we use our lives.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Daniel Ellsberg and the Courage Contagion
His life and legacy are reminders that individual acts of moral courage depend on examples set by others, and they have the potential to spark more, far into the future.
Jun 20, 2023
In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg arrived at a federal court in Boston, a journalist asked if he was concerned about the prospect of going to prison for leaking a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responded with a question of his own: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”
The classified documents Ellsberg released to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers were quickly dubbed the Pentagon Papers. They exposed more than two decades of government deceit about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, from 1945 to 1968.
Ellsberg died June 16, 2023, three months after announcing that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. To millions of Americans who opposed the war, his whistleblowing was an act of patriotism – but millions of others regarded it as treason. In Ellsberg’s own papers at UMass Amherst, where I teach history and direct the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, you can read hundreds of letters to him from ordinary citizens expressing both extremes: the highest possible praise, and vitriolic, often antisemitic, hostility.
How a young war planner became a peace activist is one of the most striking conversion stories in American history. But Ellsberg’s political and moral transformation did not happen in a vacuum.
How a young war planner became a peace activist is one of the most striking conversion stories in American history. But Ellsberg’s political and moral transformation did not happen in a vacuum. It reflected a titanic shift in public attitudes about the Vietnam War. The massive anti-war movement inspired and reinforced Ellsberg’s dissent – and, in turn, his example has emboldened activists and whistleblowers in the decades since.
A ‘knightly calling’
Once a fervent Cold Warrior, Ellsberg joined the Marine Corps in the mid-1950s, earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard and in 1959 became a nuclear war analyst for the Rand Corp., a think tank that, at the time, was funded mostly by the Air Force. In 1964, he was one of the brainy young analysts, dubbed “whiz kids” by the media, that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recruited to the Pentagon.
Throughout his 20s and early 30s, Ellsberg believed that serving the president was a “knightly calling,” even if it required lying to the public. So how did he come to believe that loyalty to truth-telling superseded loyalty to the chief of state?
From 1965 to 1967, Ellsberg went to Vietnam for the State Department, believing the war was a challenging but necessary part of a global struggle to contain communism. Yet he became deeply disillusioned, convinced that the war could not be won. He was particularly disturbed by indiscriminate U.S. bombing and shelling, most of it on South Vietnam, the land the U.S. claimed to be protecting. About 20,000 American lives had already been lost, and roughly a million Vietnamese people had been killed, about half of them civilians. By the war’s end eight years later, 58,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese had died.
Pivotal moments
By 1968, Ellsberg was trying to persuade U.S. leaders to seek a negotiated end to the war. On his own time, meanwhile, he was beginning to meet anti-war activists who advocated a bottom-up effort to demand immediate U.S. withdrawal.
One of them, a Gandhian pacifist named Janaki Natarajan, convinced Ellsberg that he should study leading advocates of nonviolent resistance, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau and Barbara Deming. To this day, one of Ellsberg’s favorite quotations comes from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”: “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”
But most galvanizing for Ellsberg were the Pentagon Papers, which he helped compile for McNamara. Full of technocratic euphemisms for lethal policies, the documents convinced him that the entire history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was marked by deception: that it was an aggressive counterrevolution that denied the Vietnamese people the right of self-determination, disguised as a battle for democracy.
Ellsberg had first viewed the Vietnam War as a just cause to be won, then as an unwinnable stalemate to be gradually abandoned. By late 1969, however, he saw it as an immoral war to be ended unilaterally and immediately.
Millions of Americans had already come to that conclusion. Back in 1965, in fact, Ellsberg’s future wife, Patricia Marx, agreed to a first date only if it included an anti-war demonstration in Washington.
Just as he finished reading the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg attended a War Resisters League conference that proved pivotal to his decision to leak the documents. There he met a few of the 3,250 young Americans who were sentenced to up to three years in prison for resisting the draft. Deeply moved by their courage, Ellsberg asked himself what he could do if he were willing to risk prison and his career.
A month later, with help from his friend and Rand colleague Anthony Russo, Ellsberg began photocopying the Pentagon Papers.
Going public
For the next year and a half, Ellsberg tried to get anti-war members of Congress to put the documents into the congressional record and hold hearings. None was willing, so he eventually offered them to war correspondent Neil Sheehan at The New York Times – the first newspaper to report on the papers’ revelations.
Public interest was scant, however, until President Richard Nixon began attacking the press and Ellsberg. Although the Pentagon Papers did not include Nixon’s time in office, the White House feared that Ellsberg might leak more documents – especially about Nixon’s 1968 effort to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks to improve his odds of winning the presidential election.
The government indicted Ellsberg on a dozen felony counts with a possible 115-year prison sentence. He was the first American ever criminally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for disclosing classified documents to the press and public rather than to a foreign agent or nation.
Ellsberg was spared prison. Late in his 1973 trial, Watergate prosecutors discovered that the White House had authorized crimes against him, including a break-in at his psychiatrist’s office, in a failed search for incriminating information. The judge had little choice but to declare a mistrial.
Post-Papers life
Ellsberg was a free man, but the personal cost of his dissent was severe. He lost many friends and had to forge a new career as a writer and lecturer. For more than five decades he has been an activist and has been arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience some 80 times on behalf of peace, nuclear disarmament, government accountability, and First Amendment rights.
To most government insiders, Ellsberg’s mutiny was an unpardonable breach of the national security state. No one with so much access to power and privileged information in the U.S. government has ever broken so radically with the policies they once supported.
Yet 50 years later, Ellsberg was widely lauded, even by many people critical of the younger whistleblowers he inspired and defended. Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than a dozen other people have faced criminal charges under the Espionage Act, and some – including Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale and Reality Winner – have been incarcerated.
In early March 2023, Ellsberg made public a letter to friends and supporters announcing that he had only months to live. He closed by thanking fellow activists whose “dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.”
Ellsberg’s life and legacy are reminders that individual acts of moral courage depend on examples set by others, and they have the potential to spark more, far into the future. As Ellsberg often said, “civil courage is contagious.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Daniel Ellsberg: A Friend and Peacemaker Who Did So Much More Than Leak the Pentagon Papers
Many know him as the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, but for those of us who labor for peace and disarmament, it’s the 50 years of peace activism that followed that have been the most inspiring.
Jun 19, 2023
A few months before he died on Friday, June 16th, famed whistleblower and peace activist Daniel Ellsberg sent an email letter to hundreds of friends announcing that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three months or so to live. After reflecting on his life’s work for peace, he announced that he was full of “joy and gratitude” and wished the same for all of us who work to end war.
It was one of the most moving and hopeful letters I’ve ever received. For weeks now, I’ve been hearing regularly from his son, my friend Robert Ellsberg, about the profound peace, joy, and sheer happiness Dan was experiencing as he faced his last days. It was befitting that this great icon of peace and truth should know such profound consolation in his last months.
“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969,” Dan wrote on March 1st, “I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War. Yet in the end, that action—in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses—did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon's crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.”
“What's more,” he continued, “I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and nonviolent resistance.”
Dan now lives on with the God of peace and all the great prophets of peace.
Dan’s death at age 92 has made headlines around the world, not only because of the Pentagon Papers and the lies he exposed about the horrific Vietnam War, but because his daring act led to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold freedom of the press and then further revelations of Nixon’s other crimes and ultimately his resignation.
But for many of us who labor for peace and disarmament, it’s the fifty years of peace activism that followed the release of the Pentagon Papers that has been so inspiring. I’ve known Dan personally for over thirty-five years, and I can attest that he never once let up his passionate writing, speaking, and demonstrating for an end to war and nuclear weapons. He was one of the most passionate anti-war truth-tellers not just in U.S. history, but in all of history.
A week before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr. announced his definition of hope as “the final refusal to give up.” In that spirit, Dan Ellsberg was one of the most hopeful, persistent peacemakers in the world.
Dan would be the first to acknowledge the influence of the growing anti-war movement for his decision to release the 7,000 pages outlining the history of U.S. warmaking in Vietnam. It was Randy Kehler’s speech at the 1969 War Resisters League conference that turned Dan around.
Randy announced to the small crowd that he was about to head off to prison for refusing to be drafted. After hearing his speech, Dan went to the nearest men’s room, sat down on the floor and sobbed uncontrollably for one hour. If this young man could go to prison to stop this war, what am I going to do? he asked himself.
He knew that he faced life imprisonment, and might even be killed for releasing the papers, but the steadfast resistance of young people like Randy Kehler inspired him to risk his own career and life. There’s an important lesson here: we may never know the outcome of our public work for peace and how it might touch others in unexpected ways, but we can trust the God of peace, resist war, speak the truth, and do what’s right simply because it’s right and true, and know that, despite the odds, the God of peace can use us to build a tidal wave of opposition that can stop a war and change the world.
I saw Dan many times over the decades and was arrested with him at various anti-nuclear protests. Last year, while visiting him and his family for a day in Berkeley, I reminded him of a moment that has stayed with me.
“There’s nothing to thank me for yet. You and I have to keep working for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. That’s what I want and what I intend to do till the day I die if necessary.”
It was 1995 and Dan and I were holding a press conference to network news reporters on the steps of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. That afternoon, we had met with the head of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., and officials from the “Air and Space Museum.” We asked them to change the script that was about to be unveiled at the new display of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima fifty years earlier. We argued passionately that, contrary to the Smithsonian’s conclusion that the U.S. atomic bombings “saved lives,” instead, it killed some two hundred thousand people and was done to prove our military superiority over the Russians. It led directly to the development of the nuclear arms race which continues to threaten the planet today. Eventually, we persuaded the Smithsonian to drop its entire display, which they had spent ten years and millions of dollars preparing.
After our press conference, I turned to Dan and thanked him for his help to stop the revisionist lie about Hiroshima. He looked me in the eye and said, “No, John, there’s nothing to thank me for yet. You and I have to keep working for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. That’s what I want and what I intend to do till the day I die if necessary.” I was profoundly moved and inspired by his determination, and witnessed him speak out for the urgent need to abolish nuclear weapons right up until the end. He took a turn last week just as he was preparing to be interviewed for 60 Minutes.
Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023) pictured with his friend, Rev. John Dear.(Photo: Courtesy of John Dear)
“I wish I could report greater success for our efforts,” Dan wrote on March 1st. “As I write, ‘modernization’ of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas--like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.”
“China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war--let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out--are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.”
“As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts,” he concluded. What a profound statement! Many national leaders have said that Daniel Ellsberg was one of the smartest persons on the planet, and so it is noteworthy that this brilliant man insists that the best way we can spend our lives is to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
But Dan didn’t stop there. Instead of lamenting his personal predicament, he went on at length in his last letter to lament our global predicament—one that we never hear anyone talk about: the impending catastrophic threat of a nuclear winter.
“For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth. So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon's nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats.”
Dan’s two mammoth best-selling memoirs, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, should be required reading for every American. Yes, he is the father of all whistle-blowers, and his support of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden should push us all to do likewise. Yes, his public efforts to help end the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were critically helpful in breaking through the silence, as were his regular talks and periodic civil disobedience in our campaign to close Livermore Laboratories near the Bay Area.
But I think Dan was far greater than he has been portrayed in the mainstream media. To me, Dan was a holy prophet. He was like Isaiah, calling us to “beat swords into plowshares and study war no more.” He was like Ezekiel, describing the nightmarish vision of a field of dry bones. He was like Jonah walking across the great city of Nineveh, criss-crossing the U.S., calling Americans to repent of the mortal sin of war and nuclear preparations, and to give our lives like him in a new global grassroots peace movement for the abolition of war itself and a new culture of peace and nonviolence. Unlike the people of Nineveh, we Americans have not heeded his call; nevertheless, it is not yet too late to repent.
As I mourn my friend and celebrate his peacemaking life, my thoughts turn to those unheralded brave souls who continue his effort to uphold the vision of nuclear disarmament.
In this historical moment when we have so little leadership, so little vision, so little courage, Dan Ellsberg was the real thing. He offered the prophetic vision, voice and leadership that we desperately needed. He pointed a way back from the brink of permanent warfare and nuclear destruction toward the sanity of peace and nonviolence. Despite what he said of himself, his was a devoutly religious life for he gave himself every day to the cause of truth, peace and the fullness of life for all.
His visionary leadership and prophetic voice for peace should be the norm for every U.S. priest and bishop, and yet it is almost entirely absent—except of course for Bishop Tom Gumbleton, Bishop John Stowe, and Archbishop John Wester who last year published his great pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament.”
As I mourn my friend and celebrate his peacemaking life, my thoughts turn to those unheralded brave souls who continue his effort to uphold the vision of nuclear disarmament. Today, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has helped sixty eight nations to sign the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Last week, I joined a zoom with Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts who has launched the first serious bill in Congress (H Res 77) to get the United States on track to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and sign the UN ban treaty. I urge everyone to join this campaign (led by “Back from the Brink”) and publicize this great effort. (www.preventnuclearwar.org).
Dan now lives on with the God of peace and all the great prophets of peace. May the rest of us heed his cry, repent of our nuclear violence like the people of Nineveh, and welcome God’s gift of peace. Thank you, Daniel Ellsberg, as Hopkins would say, for “brute beauty and valor and act.” Pray for us who remain that we too might persist, come what may and do our part to abolish war and nuclear weapons forever. Amen.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'An Unmistakable Voice': Remembering Daniel Ellsberg
The world will never see another Dan Ellsberg, but the legacy he leaves is bigger than his family and friends.
Jun 18, 2023
The world lost an unmistakable voice this week, as Daniel Ellsberg passed away at 92.
Dan will be remembered for many things, of course most prominently providing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Although he hated being called one, he was rightly a hero to anyone who believes that we must be in a position to evaluate our governments and cast our votes based upon truth rather than lies.
The biggest lesson Dan taught me was to see the dangers arising from governmental secrecy from the position of those keeping the secrets. Dan talked about how the government was too often driven by what he called “smart dumb” people. He talked about how governmental officials' proximity to power and insider knowledge led them to do stupid things—like continuing a war that was clearly lost, or lying about weapons of mass destruction—and how these kinds of terrible misjudgments and mistakes are as inevitable as they are insidious. Dan was as steadfast in debunking the myths surrounding governmental secrecy as he was in giving unwavering public support to others who took courageous steps to tell the truth about illegal, immoral, and improper governmental actions, especially around matters of national security.
The biggest lesson Dan taught me was to see the dangers arising from governmental secrecy from the position of those keeping the secrets.
I first met Dan when I was helping with the creation of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. FPF was started in 2012 by Trevor Timm with help from Rainey Reitman and Micah Lee, who were all EFF staffers at the time, along with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and a few others. One of EFF's founders and Board members, John Perry Barlow, was also a driving force for the creation of FPF. I believe it was Barlow who brought Dan into the founding conversations. EFF served as legal counsel for the fledgling organization, and we still advise it at times.
I’ll never forget one of the first organizing meetings we held at EFF’s brick Mission District offices. Upon seeing Dan unceremoniously walk in to our little conference room, I was both tongue-tied and star-struck. But he didn’t seem to notice. He sat down and quickly helped us think through what the organization should be and how it should function. He was steadfast that the organization should stand up unapologetically for Wikileaks and Julian Assange, which had just published evidence of war crimes by the U.S. government in Iraq provided by Chelsea Manning. Wikileaks was subject to a financial blockade in which no payment processor would handle contributions to it. Dan went on to stand up for—and attend the trial of—Chelsea Manning, and much later he stood firm in support of Ed Snowden. Dan’s certainty and conviction were contagious, as was his courage.
EFF later held a public event in Berkeley discussing NSA spying, where Dan spoke. He explained how those who are charged with keeping secrets become convinced that they are smarter and more capable than those who don’t have that information. He discussed how secrecy creates a feedback loop in which officials inside a secrecy bubble start to believe that they are invincible. They become subject to groupthink and so are increasingly unwilling to recognize legitimate criticism or concerns from those outside the bubble. He made clear the dangerous and corrosive power of governmental secrecy, something he had experienced, and then rejected, in himself.
Dan also was unflinching in asserting that most governmental secrecy is not necessary. “Most secrecy is not directed at keeping secrets from external nations, enemies, allies, or otherwise. It’s to keep secrets from Americans, Congress, and public courts. They’re the ones that have the votes and write the budgets,” he said at a Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic event in 2011. “They’re the ones whose blame is to be feared.”
I'm also happy that EFF helped facilitate the first meeting between Dan and Chelsea Manning, at our November 2018 Pioneer Awards ceremony. Dan was lit up and exuberant that night: “I waited 39 years for her to appear in this world,” he said before detailing the significance of the documents Manning had leaked. He praised both her and Edward Snowden, saying, “I have often said that I identify more with them as 'revelationaries' than with any other people in the world."
The world will never see another Dan Ellsberg, but the legacy he leaves is bigger than his family and friends. His legacy is in all of the other whistleblowers and truth tellers out there today, and in those who will bravely step forward in the years ahead. May his memory be a blessing to us all.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy