An American military expert who revealed US government deception by leaking the “Pentagon Papers” about the Vietnam War has passed away.
At his Kensington, California, home on Friday, Daniel Ellsberg passed away from pancreatic cancer, according to his wife and kids. He was 92.
In March, Ellsberg sent an email to his ‘close friends and allies’ informing them of his diagnosis of incurable pancreatic cancer and his decision to forgo chemotherapy. He stated that he only had three to six months left to live.
In 1971, Ellsberg disclosed volumes of top-secret history of American deceit and lies around the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The 7,000 pages of papers revealed that US presidents bypassed Congress, overstepped their authority and misled the public on the controversial war.
The US government then embarked on an illegal campaign to discredit Ellsberg and stop the leaks. The series of crimes came to be known as the Watergate scandal and prompted President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974.
In addition, Ellsberg’s leaks led The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon administration to allege it was espionage that put national security in jeopardy. The Supreme Court in a landmark decision upheld the freedom of the press.
Ellsberg was charged with crimes including espionage and conspiracy and faced a federal trial. A judge threw the case out over government misconduct just before the jury began deliberations.
The Vietnam War began in the 1950s to contain communism in Indochina and concluded with the US withdrawing in 1973, after more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died.
‘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,’ Ellsberg wrote in the email message on his cancer diagnosis.
‘It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed.’
Ellsberg grew up in the Midwest and earned his PhD in economics form Harvard University and was also educated at the University of Cambridge in the UK. After college, he served in the Marine Corps and later worked as a Defense Department official, Rand Corp military analyst and State Department consultant.
He wrote books including Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers in 2002 and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner in 2017.