Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers and was labeled the “most dangerous man in America” by Henry Kissinger, has died at age 92.
Ellsberg announced in March that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. He died Friday at his home in Kensington, Calif.
“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. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). 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,” he explained in a March post announcing his illness.
“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,” he added.
Ellsberg graduated from Harvard with a doctorate in economics and then turned to military service. Dispatched to Saigon in 1965, he became increasingly disillusioned with the Vietnam War. In 1969, Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara two years earlier and comprising 7,000 pages that revealed how the U.S. government had secretly expanded engagement in Vietnam across four presidential administrations.
After failing to convince a senator to reveal the secrets on the floor of the upper chamber, Ellsberg made the momentous decision in 1971 to leak the Pentagon Papers to the press. The disclosures included details about troop buildup and the U.S.’s acknowledgment that it was overconfident about the Vietnam War’s prospects.
The leak led to the Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), in which the Nixon administration argued the president had the executive authority to force the newspaper to suspend the publication of classified material. The high court ruled in favor of the newspaper, holding that the freedom of the press under the First Amendment trumped the administration’s claims.
President Richard Nixon’s administration decided to pursue Ellsberg, creating a unit of “plumbers” to conduct covert operations and gather information about political opponents. The unit would break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and later the DNC, where several were caught. Watergate, as the scandal would come to be known, transformed modern politics.
Ellsberg was charged with violating the Espionage Act and conspiracy, among other things, and faced up to 115 years in prison. After a mistrial on procedural grounds in 1972, a jury dismissed all charges the following year on the grounds of government misconduct.
Ellsberg then turned to political activism, alerting “the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions,” as he put it.
He is survived by his wife, children, five grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.