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Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.
In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.
“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”
On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppy-seed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.
“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’
“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”
Tributes were swift and many.
Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”
The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”
The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”
The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”
The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.
By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.
In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.
Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.
In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.
“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”
In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.
After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.
Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.
On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.
Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”
In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.
“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.
“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”
Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.
His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.
“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’”
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com
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Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92
This one hurts.
We will miss Dan sorely. He was a guiding light to us, a reminder that you could and should do what you had to do -- no matter what your inner circle might think.
Dan did what was right -- not what was easy. May his memory be a blessing.
Daniel Ellsberg, RIP.
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steven spielberg - pentagon papers
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Daniel Ellsberg in July 1971, a month after The New York Times began publication of the Pentagon Papers.
A former Marine and military analyst, he would become an outspoken antiwar activist / Associated Press
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1971-Pentagon Papers
In 13th Jun 1971, The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers.
The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.[1][2] A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress."
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks—none of which were reported in the mainstream media. For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg
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By Abby Zimet
Common Dreams
June 17, 2023
We mourn the loss of Daniel Ellsberg, singularly principled truth-teller, activist and "patriarch of whistleblowing" who exposed the murderous lies of the Vietnam War - with, it turns out, the help of his 13-year-old son - and spent the next 50-plus years bearing righteous witness to "the human consequences (of) what we're doing" - our wars, ravages of the planet, dalliance with nuclear mayhem. A fierce ally of "those who care about the others," he grew weary but never hopeless, insisting, "One candle lights another."
"My dear father, Daniel Ellsberg, died this morning June 16 at 1:24 a.m., four months after his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer," wrote his son Robert. "His family surrounded him as he took his last breath. He had no pain and died peacefully at home." His father's time since his diagnosis was largely happy: "Just as he had always written better under a deadline, it turned out he was able to 'live better under a deadline' – with joy, gratitude, purpose (and) perhaps a feeling of relief that the fate of the world no longer depended on his efforts." He "didn’t feel there was any tragedy attached to dying at the age of 92," and remained true to his vision till the end. In May, he spoke with his usual eloquence and acuity to Politico about the deadly impact of America's ceaseless imperialist adventures, duplicitous arrogance and warmongering in the specious name of democracy - the same issues that stirred him to oppose those in seemingly unassailable power more than five decades before.
Ellsberg was a military analyst with a Harvard doctorate, a resume from the right-wing RAND Corporation and high-level security clearance when in 1964 he became an advisor to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who years after forging "McNamara's War" decried his own actions as "terribly wrong” - a mea culpa many dismissed. "His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers," said one critic who somehow elided the brutal reality of a war that also cost billions of dollars and millions of lives other than 60,000 American ones. “The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara.” Meanwhile, from his first day at the Pentagon - the day of the Tonkin Gulf encounter used as a pretext for Congressional approval of the war - through two years spent on the ground in Vietnam, including with Marine patrols, to working on the damning report now known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg came to consistently view Vietnam as an immoral and unwinnable war almost wholly built on lies.
That report, says Robert, convinced him the war was "not just a problem or a mistake, (but) a crime that must be resisted." He didn't release the Pentagon Papers because "he was offended merely by its chronicle of lies...He was offended by the crimes those lies were protecting - they were lies about murder." As a child, Robert said his father "tended to talk to me about 'grown-up' things": the Vietnam War, the perils of nuclear war, history, empire, non-violence, "the human capacities for evil and for changing the world." (He was also "wildly funny," had memorized many favorite poems, loved magic, music, movies and nature, especially the ocean.) One day in 1969, Daniel took him out to lunch and told him about his plan to copy secret documents in hopes of helping end an untenable war. "He'd been sharing with me books and writings by Gandhi, Thoreau, Martin Luther King, so I understood what he was talking about," he said. "He asked if I would help him. So that afternoon I spent the day at a Xerox machine copying documents. I was thirteen."
Read more.
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Daniel Ellsberg.
#daniel ellsberg#ellsberg#vietnam war#vietnam#pentagon papers#barack obama#obama#donald trump#trump#potus#espionage act#ed snowden#watergate#richard nixon#nixon#Youtube
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When Steven Spielberg made The Post, the real-life story about how the Washington Post broke the story of the infamous Pentagon Papers, he recruited an all-star cast. While Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks were the top-liners, the ensemble also included Bob Oedenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Bradley Whitford, Alison Brie, Bruce Greenwood, and David Cross. It was literally Spielberg's dream team of actors for the film; as he told us when the movie was released, all of the actors in the film were his first choices for the roles.
The Post is available on DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K, and most digital platforms.
#Steven Spielberg#The Post#Meryl Streep#Tom Hanks#Bob Oedenkirk#Sarah Paulson#Bradley Whitford#Alison Brie#Bruce Greenwood#David Cross#Dream Team#All-Star Cast#Pentagon Papers#Washington Pos#Movies#Movie News#Entertainment#Entertainment news#Celebrities#Celebrity#celebrity news#celebrity interviews
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‘Courage is contagious’: Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to release the Pentagon Papers didn’t happen in a vacuum
June 16, 2023
READ MORE https://theconversation.com/courage-is-contagious-daniel-ellsbergs-decision-to-release-the-pentagon-papers-didnt-happen-in-a-vacuum-204244
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Imagining Vietnam Without the War
The Vietnam War costly in lives, collateral damage and national pride. Even worse, it wasn't a war we had to wage. There was another choice.
News: President Biden goes to Hanoi to promote trade and establish a strategic partnership with Vietnam.
Imagine if the United States never fought the Vietnam War. Some 58,000 Americans would not have died and 350,000 would not have been maimed. Up to 2 million Vietnamese would have been spared. The United States wouldn’t have spent $176 billion (the equivalent of $1 trillion in today’s dollars)…
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#Apocalypse Now#Cam Ranh Bay#China#Communist Domino Theory#French colonialsim#Ho Chi Minh#Les AuCoin#Lyndon Johnson#Pentagon Papers#Vietnam War#Vietnamese independence#Vietnamese state legislators#Wayne Morse
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Daniel Ellsberg and ‘The Post’
Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers, ‘The Post’ and the short road that leads to Watergate
You realise part of the way through Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post—about Daniel Ellsberg’s ‘Pentagon Papers’—that it’s designed as a prequel to All The President’s Men, released in 1976. This is made completely explicit at the end of the film, with a shot that is a quote from the start of the 1976 movie. As it happens, the action takes place only a year earlier, even if it seems like a…
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The Difference Between Daniel Ellsberg and D****d T***p
https://the-orbit.net/greta/2023/06/16/difference-ellsberg-trump/
June 16, 2023 Greta Christina
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023. He was famous for, among other things, the public release of the Pentagon Papers, top-secret government documents detailing a massive pattern of government lies about the Vietnam War.
Lots of people see him as a hero. I’m one of them.
So how does the illegal retention and dissemination of classified documents make Ellsberg a hero — and make T***p a villain?
I think it’s pretty obvious. But I want to spell it out.
One: Ellsberg retained and disseminated classified documents, not for his own personal gain or aggrandizement, but for a serious and important matter of principle.
Two: He did this at considerable risk to himself.
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[Free Audiobooks] Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers & You Can't Say That!: Writers For Young People Talk About Censorship etc. [Award-Winning 1970s History Drama & YA Storyteller Interviews]
The annual SYNC Summer of Listening program encouraging literacy among teens by giving away a themed weekly pair of audiobooks—1 modern or non-fiction, 1 classic or drama—returns for another year, courtesy of sponsor AudioFile Magazine and participating publishers.
This 1st week's theme is “Freedom to Know”, with works focusing on the importance of access to information and freedom of expression, and obstacles placed in their way, available from Thursday April 27th through Wednesday May 3rd:
Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers by Geoffrey Cowan, a professor at the University of Southern California, & the late Leroy Aarons, a journalist at the Washington Post who reported on the original story, read by a full cast from L. A. Theatre Works. This is an historical docudrama, recorded from a performance in front of a live audience, about The Washington Post newspaper's struggle with U.S. President Richard Nixon's administration over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, documents detailing the extent of the government's actions in the Vietnam War, previously unknown to the public. The audiobook recording for this was a winner of the Earphones Award, and the play itself won the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Gold Award.
You Can't Say That!!: Writers for Young People Talk about Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus, read by an assorted cast from Brilliance Audio/Candlewick. This audiobook uses actors to reenact interviews between the editor and 13 writers of controversial books for kids and young adults, including notable authors of prize-winning vintage and modern YA classics like Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia) and Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give) and bestsellers such as David Levithan.
The freebies are available via Overdrive's Sora service (listenable via browser on their website, or via their mobile app for iOS & Android devices).
To claim them, you'll need to register on the SYNC website with a valid email address to use in a Sora account, using the setup code and directions in the instructions in SYNC's FAQ (no need to re-register if you've participated in previous years' giveaways), clicking “Borrow” to add them to your Sora library as a permanent loan. NB: if you need to free up space on your device later, follow the instructions in the FAQ to only “delete files” and DO NOT “Return” the title, which would remove your future access.
Offered worldwide through Wednesday May 3rd until just before midnight Eastern Time, available via the Sora website and app. You can also browse AudioFile Magazine's planned season list to see what will be offered in the weeks ahead and if there's anything you'd especially like to get.
#free audiobook#pentagon papers#vietnam war#interviews#young adult#history#storytelling#censorship#nixon administration#theatre#documdrama
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Henry Kissinger spread the insane lie that Daniel Ellsberg - no G.I. but a military analyst - was a sexual pervert who liked to take pot shots at civilians in Vietnam and Richard Nixon happily believed it.
Nixon ordered the "plumbers" who later broke into the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiater and steal his medical records.
#oliver stone#richard nixon#nixon#anthony hopkins#daniel ellsberg#ellsberg#henry kissinger#vietnam war#vietnam#watergate#pentagon papers#kissinger#john wiliams#film music#soundtrack#soundtracks#film score#movie music#film composer#composer#composers#orchestra#music#musician#musicians#movie#movies#film#films#Youtube
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