Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers, documents that revealed previously unknown details of the U.S. military’s strategy in the Vietnam War, died on Friday at the age of 92.
The whistleblower had been diagnosed months before his death with terminal pancreatic cancer, which he decided not to aggressively treat.
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Ellsberg's leak of classified documents showed the true scale of the United States involvement in Vietnam, revealing that multiple presidential administrations had lied to the public and Congress between 1946-1967. The papers, which he provided to the New York Times and Washington Post, and were first published in 1971, showed the U.S.'s expansion of its actions in Vietnam without informing the public.
"When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was)," he wrote in a social media post from March announcing his diagnosis. "Yet in the end that action — in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon's illegal responses — did have an impact on shortening the war."
In late 1969, Ellsberg and a former Rand Corporation colleague Anthony Russo, made several sets of photocopies of a top-secret study of classified documents that he had previously worked on regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War, commissioned by then-Defense Secretary McNamara. Ellsberg had tried to get lawmakers to introduce the documents into the congressional record but to no avail.
The New YorkTimes started publishing stories based on the leaked documents on June 13, 1971. With the Nixon administration desperately trying to get the outlets to stop publishing pieces based on the information from within the papers, they filed a lawsuit claiming the leaks created a national security risk.
Despite a victory in a lower court, on June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing publication of the details from within those pages on what became a landmark First Amendment case.
The Nixon administration then sought to discredit Ellsberg after the documents release, including orchestrating a break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to find information to discredit him, though their actions in trying to discredit him ultimately led to the charges against him getting dropped.
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He was charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case ended in a mistrial due to evidence about government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins. He faced more than 100 years in prison had he been convicted.
Ellsberg announced in early March, he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer with doctors giving him about three to months to live. He declined chemotherapy and said he was willing to accept hospice care.