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IN MEMORIAM –
“Heroes are not made. They are born out of circumstances and rise to the occasion when their spirit can no longer coexist with the hypocrisy of injustice to others.”
― Shannon L. Alder, Life Coach
Daniel Ellsberg, who died in his Bay area home on June 16 from pancreatic cancer, never ran for public office, never was a media personality, and never pursued fame or fortune.
He did what his heart told him was right and, for many Americans, he was the real hero of the Vietnam War; changing the course of human history in ways few private citizens have done before or since.
Ellsberg’s defining moment was to copy the American military’s secret 7,000-page justification of the war in Indochina from the 1940s on. Known as the Pentagon Papers, it was commissioned in 1967 by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading advocate of the war.
Its release in 1971 rocked the nation.
The pages revealed in excruciating detail the hubris of the United States government, its deceit about the war as evidenced in its ongoing lies to all Americans and that, as noted in the New York Times by Neal Sheehan, the endless U.S. embroilment in Indo-China was not to save the Vietnamese from Communism but to maintain “the power, influence and prestige of the United States ... irrespective of conditions in Vietnam”.
The most disturbing disclosure was that one American president and administration after another continued spinning the same web of lies while knowing the war in Southeast Asia was a lost cause.
The Pentagon Papers
Unlike many opposed to the U.S. war in Indochina, Daniel Ellsberg was a man in a position to make a difference. As part of the government-military elite with a high security clearance, he served as a consultant to government organizations on Vietnam throughout the 1960s.
He was a polymath, moving from being a Marine to earning a doctorate from Harvard in economics before becoming a strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation, a global policy think tank, and consulting for the Defense Department and the White House on nuclear weapons and crisis decision-making.
A “hawk” prior to going to Vietnam in 1965 with the State Department, Ellsberg learned first-hand how cavalierly military and political officials lied, and became convinced the conflict was unwinnable, in part through his own survival of firefights with the North Vietnamese.
In the late 1960s, Ellsberg started sneaking classified volumes from the safe in his Santa Monica offices out past security. With Anthony Russo, a Rand colleague, he photocopied the pages, one at a time, over a period of many months at Russo’s girlfriend’s ad agency.
In the entire series of top-secret documents, nothing contained an assessment of the effects of U.S. policy on overall casualties among Vietnamese, or on the growing numbers of refugees, or on the consequences of defoliation and other ecological damage. The documents simply massaged the internal sensibilities of the Pentagon brass.
Leaking the information was not Ellsberg’s first choice. He had hoped that government officials including Kissinger would read the study and, embarrassed, accept that the war was hopeless.
By the spring of 1971 when nothing had changed, Ellsberg submitted the Pentagon Papers in segments to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Both newspapers were initially distrustful of the information, but could not risk the other getting the drop with such explosive documentation.
Originally released as part of a series of articles in the New York Times that June, the rival Washington Post continued the saga after Nixon’s Justice Department persuaded a federal judge to order the New York Times to cease publication, claiming a potential breach national security.
In an expedited Supreme Court First Amendment ruling later that month the justices rejected the claim of “prior restraint” 6-3, ruling the government had not met a high enough standard of irreparable harm, and the New York Times resumed publishing on July 1.
The Associated Press and over a dozen other news outlets picked up the exposé about the covert expansion of American military intervention into neighboring countries dramatically escalating the war, and damningly documented the government’s violation of international agreements, and the lies that had led to the deaths of so many young Americans.
Ellsberg was an obvious suspect because of his access to the papers and his now overt criticism of the war. He became a hero to the antiwar movement when he turned himself in to authorities in Boston to face a slew of charges as a traitor for spying, theft, and violation of the 1917 Espionage Act, a law too often used to suppress dissent.
Ellsberg was facing trials in Boston and Los Angeles on federal charges which could have consigned him to 115 years in jail. However, proof of the Nixon government’s involvement in wiretapping privileged conversations and the burglary of Ellsberg’s Beverly Hills psychiatrist’s office generated a mistrial and dismissal.
To punish Ellsberg and his co-conspirators, and possibly afraid that attempts to derail President Johnson’s South Vietnamese peace proposals prior to the 1968 election would come to light, Nixon created the clandestine band of off-the-book White House “plumbers” organized by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to prevent future leaks.
After being caught out in Beverly Hills, the “plumbers” continued their crime spree with the 1972 break-in of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation.
In the end, due to Nixon’s own illegal actions, Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers did shorten the war and removed any threat of incarceration, enabling him to pursue a career fighting for the end of American military involvement in Southeast Asia.
Subsequent History
For over 50 years following the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg continued his activism as a lobbyist, lecturer, writer and participant in acts of peaceful protest and resistance, primarily advocating for free speech, and battling the existential danger of nuclear war.
“[Mankind] is so adaptable. Maybe one percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.” “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
Ellsberg understood that the release of the Pentagon Papers could condemn him to spending the rest of his life in jail, a fate he was willing to face to hasten the end of the Vietnam War.
With the ascendency of George W. Bush and his unjustified aggression against the Middle East, Ellsberg began a strident opposition to the Iraq war, underlining its parallels with Vietnam and, with the expansion of the U.S. military in Afghanistan during the Obama years, to the whole Southeast Asia debacle.
With Putin’s threats of nuclear weapons during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, escalating tension with China and North Korea, and climate change, all magnified by the public moving away from cooperation mode to one of aggression and exacerbated by tribal divisiveness across the country, Ellsberg’s work is as relevant today as it was in 1958 when the American government had made plans to nuke China during a crisis over the Taiwan Strait.
In recent years, Ellsberg felt his work fighting nuclear arms proliferation had little impact “leaving a world in terrible shape and terrible in all ways that I’ve tried to help make better… [b]ut I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time”.
“When everything is at stake, it is worth risking one's life or sacrificing one's freedom in order to help bring about radical change.”
And Ellsberg may have had more influence than he believed. In defending others, such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who released damning material against the U.S. military and its allies, his unflinching support has encouraged other leakers.
Such as Edward Snowden, the NSA/CIA computer intelligence consultant who, in 2013, embarrassed the American government by releasing information on illegal surveillance programs run by the NSA and agencies of allied governments.
And Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who, in 2010, provided three-quarters of a million records to WikiLeaks including videos of a 2007 helicopter strike on a Baghdad street and a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan, both of which killed innocent civilians.
In the vein of Ellsberg, Snowden believed that “what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting”.
But too many potential whistle-blowers, while privately believing what they learn is immoral, keep their mouths shut.
Legacy
So why haven’t there been more Daniel Ellsbergs? Why won’t more people who, when presented with evidence of something morally objectionable, speak up?
Unfortunately, today’s “plumbers” appear more effective – less Keystone Cops – in their ability to threaten and muzzle disseminators of information necessary to hold the government accountable for its actions.
Apart from threats of jail time, people fear losing their jobs on which the financial security of their families depend, and the loss of the security clearances on which their careers rely. Too many have invested decades in demonstrating that they can keep secrets, a trust that has becomes part of their self-image, losing track of any sense of moral responsibility as a human being.
Preventing the release of information is a protection racket run by government bureaucrats intended to protect both officials and administrations from blow-back from any revelation of mistakes, falsehoods, crimes or potential embarrassments, a “prior restraint” defense against any accountability.
Every politician and their allies have to buy in… or risk their rivals mining peccadillos to defeat them in the next election.
Since mainstream media is mostly a tool of their corporate owners, other investigative journalists must take up the challenge to probe this bloated secrecy system and expose its malign impact on our lives. Very little classified material actually justifies being hidden from the public in a democracy for three or thirty years. If at all.
As Ellsberg told Walter Cronkite, “I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions”.
And later opined: “It is long past time—but not too late!—for the world's publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders”.
Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience, answering only to his personal sense of right and wrong, even at the cost of his own freedom. David Halberstam, acclaimed as a writer on modern history, described Ellsberg as a man who saw political actions as demanding a moral assessment with consequences for abuses of power.
To quote Norman Solomon in Common Dreams: “The power of [Ellsberg’s] vibrant example spurred us to become better than we were.”
Now that’s a great epitaph.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
