Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers died on Friday at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife and children said in a statement.
Mr. Ellsberg, disclosed in an email in March that he addressed to “Dear friends and supporters,” that he had recently been told he had inoperable pancreatic cancer, and said that his doctors had given him an estimate of three to six months to live.
Ellsberg was a military analyst who was fervently against the Vietnam war. Reputedly, “he experienced a sobbing antiwar epiphany on a bathroom floor and in 1971” and felt compelled to disclose the secret history of American lies and deceit in Vietnam that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers,
The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who had abused their authority, bypassed Congress, and misled the American people to justify a war under false pretenses, plunged a nation that was already in crisis and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.
The leaking of the Pentagon Papers lead indirectly to Watergate, the huge scandal that roiled the nation and eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, as the White House took countermeasures to discredit Mr. Ellsberg and deny information in the leaks.
And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. In that conflict, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the New York Times and upheld the freedom of the press.
Mr. Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy and other crimes and tried in federal court in Los Angeles. But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun,” Mr. Ellsberg said after being released. “It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.” And indeed, as a result of his actions the public was given a glimpse of the dirty politics abounding in Washington D.C. and the presidency of Richard M.Nixon.
