Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died June 16, 2023, Kensington, California) was an American military analyst and researcher who, in 1971, leaked portions of a classified 7,000-page report that detailed the history of U.S. intervention in Indochina from World War II until 1968. Dubbed the Pentagon Papers, the document appeared to undercut the publicly stated justification of the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg earned a B.A. in economics from Harvard University in 1952, and from 1954 to 1957 he served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. Ellsberg was awarded a three-year fellowship to undertake independent postgraduate study, and he returned to Harvard after his separation from the military. In 1959 he joined the RAND Corporation as a strategic analyst, applying his academic expertise—a branch of statistics known as decision theory—to matters of national security. While still at RAND, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard (1962), and an article presenting his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision, became a frequently cited work in the field of game theory.

In 1964 Ellsberg left RAND to join the Department of Defense, where he was tasked with analyzing the expanding U.S. military effort in Vietnam. The following year he transferred to the State Department. With his headquarters at the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Ellsberg accompanied troops on patrol to evaluate the war effort. During that time, Ellsberg reached the personal opinion that the war was unwinnable. He returned to the United States in June 1967 and rejoined RAND the following month. There he worked on U.S. Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945–68, a top secret report commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Its content strengthened Ellsberg’s opposition to the war, and in October 1969 he began photocopying it with the intention of making it public. Over the next 18 months, he offered the document to several members of Congress, but none chose to act on it.

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In 1970 Ellsberg left RAND for a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, inspired by the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, he leaked portions of the report to The New York Times. On June 13, 1971, the Times began publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers—as the McNamara report came to be known—and the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a restraining order against the newspaper. After more than two weeks of legal wrangling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had not made the case for prior restraint of publication.

Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act, and the charges leveled against him could have resulted in up to 115 years in prison. The trial against Ellsberg, which began in January 1973, lasted four months and concluded with the dismissal of all charges after evidence of gross governmental misconduct came to light. John D. Ehrlichman, an adviser to Pres. Richard M. Nixon, had utilized a team of “plumbers”—so named for their ability to “repair leaks” and later made famous by their role in the Watergate break-in—to burglarize the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an unsuccessful effort to uncover embarrassing or harmful material; the burglary was masterminded by former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. Cleared of wrongdoing, Ellsberg devoted the rest of his life to peace activism and academia.

His books included Papers on the War (1972), Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision (an expanded treatment of his Ph.D. thesis; 2001), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017). In 2006 Ellsberg received the Right Livelihood Award, an honour that bills itself as the “alternative Nobel Prize.” His later awards included the Olof Palme Prize (2018). He was a vocal proponent of the media organization WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, that group’s founder, cited Ellsberg as an inspiration for its creation.