![]() ![]() Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.īorn in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.” “By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out. In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation. In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Įllsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.Įllsberg and his wife Patricia Marx Ellsberg attend the premiere of the The Post, in Washington in 2017. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 19 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.īy the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.” The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.” He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.” But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Īlan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. “Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. “In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’ He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added. On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!” ![]() ![]() “I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care. In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. ![]()
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