Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday, of pancreatic cancer, at age ninety-two, became the father of whistle-blowing in America when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the Times, in 1971. In the course of several months in 1969 and 1970, he copied seven thousand pages of top-secret documents that laid out how four successive Presidents, from Truman to Johnson, deceived the public about U.S. policy in Vietnam. But, at the time, Ellsberg was also planning an even more audacious reveal. Another several thousand pages, which were never released to the public, detailed Washington’s plans for an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union and China.
Ellsberg had been hired at RAND Corporation, the Air Force-affiliated think tank headquartered in Los Angeles, in the throes of the Cold War, in 1959, and worked on an élite team that helped formulate U.S. nuclear strategy and the command and control of its nuclear weapons. While interviewing officers at a remote American air base in the Pacific, Ellsberg made the unsettling discovery that commanders there had been empowered by President Eisenhower to launch nuclear missiles themselves if time or circumstances did not permit authorization by the President. His job involved regular consultations with the Pentagon, and, after John F. Kennedy was elected President, in 1960, Ellsberg quickly became a trusted rising star, working under Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. In the spring of 1961, when he was thirty, Ellsberg drafted the top-secret operational plans for general nuclear war issued by McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Soon after, Kennedy decided to seek out more detail on the effects of a nuclear war. He submitted a question, in writing, to the Joint Chiefs. The question was drafted by Ellsberg: “If your plans for general [nuclear war] are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?’’ Ellsberg was shown the chiefs’ answer in the form of a graph—two hundred and seventy-five million would be killed initially, and fifty million more within six months, from injuries and fallout. If a U.S. first strike also included Warsaw Pact allies in Eastern Europe, and Moscow retaliated against our Western allies, the death-toll estimate would rise to six hundred million. “From that day on, I have had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan,’’ Ellsberg would later write.
Ellsberg’s copying of classified material took place at night. He would smuggle batches of documents out of a safe in his office at RAND, use a friend’s Xerox machine to copy them, and return them to his safe in the morning. After Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was charged with theft and espionage, and he surrendered to federal authorities in Boston. If convicted, he faced a possible prison sentence of up to a hundred and fifteen years. While awaiting trial, Ellsberg gave the nuclear papers that he had copied to his older half brother, Harry, for safekeeping. Harry buried them in a hole that he dug near the town dump of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he lived. But, when Tropical Storm Doria hit the area in August of 1971, the nuclear papers were washed away, never to be found. Daniel later said that he regretted not having released the nuclear papers before they disappeared.
“It was just shattering to me when my brother lost the nuclear papers,’’ Ellsberg told me during more than forty hours of interviews that I conducted in the course of the past three years, while working on a biography of him. “They were much hotter than the stuff in the Pentagon Papers.’’
Ellsberg believed that he was never charged with possessing the nuclear papers because senior government officials, unaware that the documents had been washed away, feared that he would leak them. “They were afraid that, if they charged me, I would release it all,’’ he said, referring to President Richard Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Ellsberg remembered hearing Kissinger telling Nixon on the White House tapes, “I’m certain he has other stuff that he is going to unload at the trial.” And, Ellsberg added, “the key thing that they were worried about was the nuclear documents, including a big study by Kissinger, Dr. Strangelove, which they didn’t want out.” (Kissinger denies that he had any such concerns about the study.)
After the United States exploded a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, in 1945, Ellsberg, who was then fourteen, felt “a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened.” He suppressed these thoughts at the time, he said, because “they could only sound unpatriotic.” Ellsberg’s life was a striking evolution from right to left—the tale of a top Harvard graduate who became a devoted marine and a committed Cold Warrior, then decided that he was on the wrong side of the Vietnam War. “On the way to becoming an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist in the middle of my life, I participated directly in a way that generated an increasing incidence of atrocities on the ground as well as from the air,” Ellsberg said. “How could I have joined that, and why did it take so long to see the wrongness of it?’’ He ultimately renounced the life of secrecy that he had long led in order to leak the Pentagon Papers—to become a whistle-blower, a peace activist, and one of America’s leading symbols of dissent.
As he aged, Ellsberg grew frustrated that people associated him primarily with having leaked the Pentagon Papers and that they knew little of the six decades that he had subsequently spent as an anti-nuclear activist, getting arrested as many as ninety times in civil-disobedience protests. “Really, only the people who’d been doing anti-nuclear resistance with me knew, though it’s actually been the theme of my life since I was twenty-seven,” he told me. “That part nobody’s written about at all.’’ In 2017, Ellsberg tried to remedy that, publishing “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” a memoir of his role in building the American nuclear arsenal at RAND and the Pentagon, which warned of nuclear disaster if the U.S. and other nuclear powers failed to take more active steps toward disarmament.
At first, President Nixon paid scant attention to the publication of the Pentagon Papers. But soon Kissinger was prodding Nixon to move against Ellsberg, whom he knew from his days as a Harvard professor. Kissinger said his counterparts from around the world were asking whether the United States could still be trusted to keep secrets. The Paris peace talks with North Vietnam could be jeopardized, as could Nixon’s upcoming secret trip to China, Kissinger added. They also feared, Ellsberg believed, that he might release the Administration’s secret plans to use tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam. At one point, Nixon huddled in the Oval Office with Kissinger and other top aides to plot retribution against Ellsberg. Though Kissinger has since denied it, he’s been widely quoted as telling Nixon, “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America, and he must be stopped at all costs.”
“We’ve got to get him,’’ Nixon agreed. “These fellows have all put themselves above the law, and, by God, we’re going to go after them.’’
Nixon ordered the formation of a Special Investigations Unit, which later became known as the Plumbers, an inside joke that referred to its supposed mission to stop leaks. For its first mission, the group burglarized the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist—to gather material they could use to blackmail him into not releasing the nuclear papers, he concluded. They failed, but Ellsberg’s case would become the direct line to Watergate. Several months later, the same ex-intelligence operatives who had led the Plumbers—Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy—plotted a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, at the Watergate office building.
Ellsberg’s 1973 trial in Los Angeles drew Hollywood royalty, including Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand. Streisand raised fifty thousand dollars for his defense by putting on a singing benefit that was attended by three of the four Beatles, among other celebrities. During the trial, a brazen effort by the Nixon White House to influence the presiding judge backfired. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top domestic adviser, offered the trial judge, Matthew Byrne, a job as director of the F.B.I. Byrne went to Nixon’s San Clemente estate during a break in the trial to meet Ehrlichman. When that scheme and the full extent of the Plumbers’ role in breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist became public, the judge was forced to dismiss the case owing to government misconduct.
In the end, Ellsberg acknowledged that his release of the Pentagon Papers had no effect on Nixon’s handling of the war. Rather, it was the rampant lawlessness of the President and his men that proved pivotal to Nixon’s resignation, in 1974, and hastened the end of the war. “In short,’’ Ellsberg said, “although the Pentagon Papers themselves did not affect Nixon’s policy, and the war actually expanded after the Pentagon Papers came out, the criminal actions that the White House took against me and some others to prevent me from exposing his nuclear threats against North Vietnam were extraordinarily revealed in ways that no one foresaw.’’
Ellsberg always remained grateful to the Watergate star witness John Dean, Nixon’s thirty-one-year-old White House counsel, who publicly revealed that Liddy and Hunt, with the approval of Ehrlichman, had been responsible for planning the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. In 1975, Ellsberg went to Dean’s house in Beverly Hills to thank him for what he had done, and the two became friends. “While I was delighted my revelations helped Dan, I was laying it out because you couldn’t understand the behavior of the White House without understanding the Ellsberg break-in,’’ Dean told me. “The misbehavior against Dan exercised by the White House became the basis of the Watergate coverup. They are intertwined, no question.’’
Ellsberg often praised the leaks of classified documents by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. “I waited thirty-nine years for someone to do what I had done and put out a large amount of classified information, and that was Chelsea Manning,” he told me. “I’d pretty much given up, frankly. Then, three years later, there was Snowden.” He added. “We do not have nearly the amount of whistle-blowing we need. My message to whistle-blowers now is ‘Don’t do what I did. If you have information that we are being lied to or the Constitution is being violated, do not wait until the bombs are falling.’ ’’
One thing that has changed today is that whistle-blowers are not nearly as stigmatized as they were when Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers; he was vilified by many at the time as a traitor. In 2021, at the age of ninety, Ellsberg made another intrepid leak to the Times, revealing that, in 1958, the Pentagon had drawn up plans for a nuclear strike against China over tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Because Ellsberg was revealing classified information, he challenged Washington to indict him under the 1917 Espionage Act, which had been used against him in the Pentagon Papers case. This time, the Department of Justice didn’t bite. “My dad seems to have achieved a venerable status as a righteous whistle-blower,’’ Ellsberg’s eldest son, Robert, told me. “There is no real claim that he harmed national security. His leaks were obviously in the public interest. He was willing to accept the consequences of his actions. And events tended to vindicate his judgment and responsibility.’’
On March 1st, Ellsberg sent an e-mail to friends and supporters notifying them that he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and that doctors had given him three to six months to live. He tried to make light of the grim news, noting that his doctors had cleared him to abandon his salt-free diet, and he could now eat anything he wanted. “This has improved my quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods!’’ Ellsberg wrote.
“I feel lucky and grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life,” he went on. “When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars . . . Thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with [my wife] Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends. What’s more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war . . . 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.’’ ♦
