Opinion | A tribute to Daniel Ellsberg’s tireless work in the name of truth
He first gave the documents to The New York Times, then The Washington Post. Next came The Boston Globe — his hometown at the time — followed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and 11 more regional papers owned by Knight and the Christian Science Monitor.
It was 1971, and Daniel Ellsberg was an insider, working high up in the U.S. Department of Defense and RAND Corporation, a public policy research organization that provided him security clearance. He’d also worked in Vietnam for the U.S. State Department. The more he knew, the more he was certain the U.S. war in Vietnam was wrong, and decided he had a moral responsibility to prevent deaths if he could.
He tried some of the prescribed and legal routes — writing reports and signing onto a letter of RAND employees. But he determined the disconnect between public statements and the truth was too severe.
To make an impact, he risked it all — his job, his security, and ultimately, his freedom. Ellsberg contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ordered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Ellsberg determined the documents — now known as the Pentagon Papers — showed former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson's respective administrations lied to the public and U.S. Congress. He wagered revealing the documents would convince Congress the war couldn’t be won and lead to the United States withdrawing from the war. Ultimately, he hoped lives would be saved.
He smuggled the 7,000 pages from a safe. He then photocopied page after page at a friend’s advertising shop in the middle of the night and on weekends. His kids snipped the words “top secret” from the tops of pages.
Initially, he hoped to move the documents into public record through a U.S. Senator, but as the F.B.I. caught up to him, he knew he needed to move quicker.
He turned to the press.
After The New York Times first published some of the Pentagon Papers, former President Richard Nixon's administration attempted to block further publishing in an act of "prior restraint."
The New York Times and then other papers fought back, resulting in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting press freedom.
In New York Times Co. v. United States, the Supreme Court further limited the government's ability to prohibit a media outlet from publishing certain information.
The drama about a president attempting to stifle the press only amplified press coverage, achieving the public attention Ellsberg was never able to achieve through reports and public letters.
He was charged with espionage and other crimes in January 1973, but all charges were dropped by May 1973 because of illegal activity ordered by Nixon, including breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to secure his records.
For the rest of his life, Ellsberg supported people of conscience, calling on people who had access to information that could save lives to come forward. He died June 16 at age 92.
I only spent one day with him, but it was, for me, formative. In 1995, he’d come to Walla Walla, Washington, where I lived at the time. He gave a public lecture promoting his book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” My husband, Jules Boykoff, organized the lecture.
I got a glimpse of his gusto as we spent a day wandering around Walla Walla and its parks with peacocks, its sleepy streets. We stopped for tea, we talked about poetry. This economist and military analyst had always loved poetry. I knew some of this already from a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, for whom Ellsberg gave one of the first reviews — maybe the first — in the Harvard Advocate when they were both students.
He recited reams of poetry from memory and urged me to revisit the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a poet horrified by human violence. At one point, he played the piano. At the end of the day, after I asked him about the magic tricks he described performing for children in Vietnam, he performed a magic trick with handkerchiefs in front of a crowd of about 500 people.
Ellsberg asked if poets — as the language workers who resuscitate language from worn-out usage — could come up with a new term for “whistleblower.” I later put a call out to poets , and perhaps the best response I got was from poet Susan Schultz, who said that we could simply call whistleblowers “Daniel Ellsbergs.”
That summed up the importance Ellsberg played in the last 50 years of summoning courage at great personal risk to turn to the press and then supporting others who did too. The freedom of the press is an important part of this story — how newsrooms stood up to power and prevailed, strengthening press freedoms today.
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