Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92

[Trell]

>>>Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the voluminous, top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, a disclosure that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedoms and enraged the Nixon administration, serving as the catalyst for a series of White House-directed burglaries and “dirty tricks” that snowballed into the Watergate scandal, died June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92.

The family confirmed his death in a statement. Mr. Ellsberg announced in an email to friends and supporters on March 1 that he had pancreatic cancer and had declined chemotherapy. Whatever time he had left, he said, would be spent giving talks and interviews about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the perils of nuclear war and the importance of First Amendment protections.

Mr. Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated Midwesterner with a PhD in economics, was in some respects an unlikely peace activist. He had served in the Marine Corps after college, wanting to prove his mettle, and emerged as a fervent cold warrior while working as an official at the Defense Department, a military analyst at the Rand Corp. and a consultant for the State Department, which dispatched him to Saigon in 1965 to assess counterinsurgency efforts.
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“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969,” he wrote in the email announcing his cancer diagnosis, “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, unlikely as that seemed.”
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Mr. Ellsberg said he felt a kinship with those 21st-century leakers, though their methods were vastly different. While Manning and Snowden used digital technology to download and share vast file sets in a matter of minutes, Mr. Ellsberg spent weeks copying the documents with a bulky Xerox machine — “the cutting-edge technology of my day,” as he put it in a 2017 address at Georgetown University.

“Manning and Snowden and I all thought the same words,” he added, “which I heard them say: ‘No one else was going to do it, someone had to do it — so I did it.’”<<<

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/06/16/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-dead/

 

[Swerd]

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the voluminous, top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, a disclosure that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedoms and enraged the Nixon administration, serving as the catalyst for a series of White House-directed burglaries and “dirty tricks” that snowballed into the Watergate scandal, died June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92.

A point of correction … Although Daniel Ellsberg's leaked Pentagon Papers did enrage Nixon and his gang, that leak did not provoke Nixon into creating his own private police, known as "The White House Plumbers". Ellsberg's leaks certainly played a large role in turning the US public against the war in Vietnam, but Nixon's illegal & unconstitutional "Plumbers" existed before all that.

In the fall of 1968, before he won the November election, Nixon, along with Henry Kissinger, directly interfered in the 3-sided peace negotiations between the USA, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. Nixon told the South Vietnam representatives to reject any peace treaty and wait until he took office for a "better deal". By US law, the Logan Act, only official US Govt. representatives can conduct foreign affairs. Nixon was a private citizen with no official status at all.

As it turned out, South Vietnam took Nixon's offer, and blocked the proposed peace treaty, while the USA and North Vietnam had agreed to it. It turns out that the Lyndon Johnson administration was aware of Nixon's interference, but continued to keep it secret. Making it public would reveal that the US was intercepting and decrypting secret messages sent to South Vietnam's Embassy in Washington, DC.

Once he became president, Nixon was desperate to keep his illegal act from the US public. That's why he created his secret police force. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, Nixon feared that Ellsberg might also have knowledge of his crime from 1968. (Apparently, Ellsberg knew nothing about that.) That's when Nixon directed his "Plumbers" to search the office of Daniel Ellsberg's private psychiatrist, to see if they could find, steal & destroy any documents that could reveal Nixon's illegal interference. They ransacked the office, but failed to find what they were looking for.

Ellsberg was one of the victims of the Plumbers, but he was not the reason why they were created.