Daniel Ellsberg in Memoriam
06-18-2023 Roger Berkowitz
Daniel Ellsberg died this week. A military analyst for the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg is best known for his act of principled courage in leaking the Pentagon Papers to the Press. As Hannah Arendt wrote in essay occasioned by the publication of the Pentagon Papers:
The Pentagon Papers–as the forty-seven-volume “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy” (commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in June 1967 and completed a year and a half later) has become known ever since the New York Times published , in June 1971, this top-secret, richly documented record of the American role in Indochina from World War II to May 1968–tell different stories, teach different lessons to different readers. Some claim they have only now understood that Vietnam was the ‘logical’ outcome of the Cold War or the anti-Communist ideology, others that this is a unique opportunity to learn about decision-making processes in government, but most readers have by now agreed that the basic issue raised by the papers is deception…. The famous credibility gap, which has been with us for six long years, has suddenly opened up into an abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material, which unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy.
Ellsberg was originally part of the brain trust that helped to prosecute the Vietnam War and the self-deceptive justifications that kept it going. But he gradually came to see the contradictions and lying as both morally and politically disastrous. In an obituary in the New York Times, Robert D. McFadden describes the moment Ellsberg finally chose to go down the path of war resister.
You can watch a discussion of Arendt’s Lying in Politics as part of the Hannah Arendt’s Center’s Virtual Reading Group here.
In August 1969, he went to a War Resisters League meeting at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and heard a speaker, Randy Kehler, proudly announce that he was soon going to join his friends in prison for refusing the draft.
Profoundly moved, Mr. Ellsberg had reached his breaking point, as he was quoted saying in “The Right Words at the Right Time” (2002), by the actress Marlo Thomas. “I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room,” he said. “I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.”
Mr. Ellsberg began to oppose the war openly. He wrote letters to newspapers, joined antiwar protests, composed articles and testified at the trials of draft resisters. He also resigned from RAND, under pressure.
With Anthony J. Russo Jr., a RAND colleague he had met in Vietnam, Mr. Ellsberg, who had a top-secret security clearance, photocopied the 47-volume Pentagon study. Still believing he could work within the system, Mr. Ellsberg in 1970 gave partial copies to Senator J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and others in Congress. All cautiously refused to act.
Frustrated, disillusioned and aware that he might be committing a crime and could be sent to prison, Mr. Ellsberg approached Neil Sheehan, a veteran New York Times correspondent he had met in Vietnam, with the documents. The transfer was a delicate matter. In an account that was withheld at his request until after his death in 2021, Mr. Sheehan told a Times colleague, Janny Scott, a dramatic story of how he had obtained the 7,000-page scoop of a lifetime.