Ellsberg, Daniel (1931–)

On June 13, 1971, several newspapers, led by the New York Times, began publishing a 7,000-page history of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam known as the Pentagon Papers. The secret document was leaked to the Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a 40-year-old Defense Department analyst who became a hero to anti-war activists. His decision to leak the Pentagon Papers did not bring the Vietnam War to a quick end, but it helped set in motion the chain of events that led to the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

During the 1960s, Ellberg's opinion of the Vietnam War underwent a transformation. He was an early supporter of the war. A former Marine with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Ellsberg worked as a high-level defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. In 1965 he joined a team of government officials who toured Vietnam. He returned to the United States in 1967 with growing doubts about the chances for an American victory. Having believed in the war for many years, his doubts shook him personally, and he began seeing a psychoanalyst in 1968. After meeting anti-war activists at conferences around the country, Ellsberg began smuggling sections of the Pentagon Papers out of his RAND Corporation office so he could photocopy them at night.

Ellsberg wanted to leak the Pentagon Papers because they demonstrated how four consecutive presidents had deceived the public about the war. He [Page 521]feared that Nixon would follow the pattern. Advised by a lawyer that publicizing the classified documents personally would land him in prison, Ellsberg first approached several members of Congress. After each lawmaker refused to help, Ellsberg met with Times reporter Neil Sheehan in February 1971. On June 13, the Times began printing the documents. On June 16, at the behest of the Nixon administration, a federal court enjoined the press from further publication. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated this injunction on June 30, but in the meantime the Justice Department had Ellsberg indicted for espionage. His trial lasted until April 1973, when the judge dismissed the charges after learning that the White House had engaged in its own brand of espionage, one that included breaking into Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office to find information that might ruin Ellsberg's reputation.

White House officials formed the “Plumbers” (so called because it was their job to stop leaks), the group of burglars who stole Ellsberg's files, because President Nixon was exasperated by a series of leaks, Ellsberg's being the most serious. Nixon and his advisors also hired the Plumbers to break into the Democratic Party's campaign office at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972, the incident that began a 2-year scandal that brought down Nixon's presidency. The Pentagon Papers leak and the formation of the Plumbers demonstrate the direct connection between the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

Ellsberg's willingness to leak the papers and face imprisonment won him the admiration of anti-war protestors, who saw him as the bureaucrat who told the truth. On the day before Thanksgiving 2005, Ellsberg and a dozen others were arrested outside President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where they were protesting the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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