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George Kennan. Memoirs. In 1950 the famed diplomat wrote the Secretary of State his opinion about the situation in Indochina. “we are getting ourselves into the position of guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win. . . . the French position there . . . is basically hopeless. . . . we cannot honestly agree with then that there is any real hope of their remaining successfully in Indo-China, and we feel that rather than have their weakness demonstrated by a continued costly and unsuccessful effort to assert their will by force ofd arms, it would be preferable to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level, unimpeded by foreign troops or pressures, even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Viet-Nam and Viet-Minh, and the spreading over the whole country of Viet-Minh authority.” (59) He also expressed his horror over the American military attitude toward war. The thought of a war with Russia was sickening enough just from the standpoint of the slaughter and destruction it would involve, even if nuclear weapons, as one scarcely dared hope, should not be used. But it was particularly alarming and important to me, because of my acute awareness, (both the year at the war college and the later study of diplomatic history had brought this home to me) that in a war of this nature of the American side would have no realistic, limited aims. Falling back on the patterns of the past, and seized by wartime emotionalism, we would assuredly attempt once again to achieve the familiar goals of total enemy defeat, total destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, his unconditional surrender, the complete occupation of his territory, the removal of the existing government, and its replacement by a regime that would respond to our concepts of “democratization.” The concept of limited warfare – of warfare conducted for limited objectives, and ending with the achievement of those objectives, by compromise with the existing enemy regime – was not only foreign, but was deeply repugnant to the American military and political mind.” (95)

John T. McAlister and Paul Mus. The Vietnamese and Their Revolution. The following is the best and clearest explanation of the conflict in Indochina. “Some American critics feel that Western military power in Viet Nam has been unduly shackled by political constraints. Without restrictions on heavy bombing and orders against hot pursuit of the enemy into privileged sanctuaries, the military results of the war, they believe, would have been quite different. In the French era of the fighting they would have advocated the massive bombing of Dien Bien Phu by American air power and the denial of a safe haven across the China border to the Viet Minh. In the American era they have called for the bombing of Haiphong and the end of sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and northern Viet Nam itself. These criticisms and others like them are calculations about power, specifically about the military power balances in the war . . . They don’t explain the enormous change between 1938 and 1970 in the effects of military power and the quantity of it required to have an impact in Viet Nam. They don’t get to the very essence of the power relationships in the struggle in Viet Nam. . . Expectations about the war- by both critics and supporters alike-have been based on the usually correct assumption that most armies are trained to fight for control over territory. Armies must have bases, sources of supply, avenues of retreat, and rear-area sanctuaries where they can regroup. “The Communist substitute for territorial control has been a political link tying together a steadily larger portion of the people in the countryside. So resilient has this tie been that it does not depend on military protection to be maintained. So formidable is the power derived from this popular link that it is hard to overestimate. In military terms alone it has meant that the Communists have almost never had to defend territory or fixed positions. Since their adversaries, the pro-Western governments, have, by contrast, depended almost entirely on control over terrify as their primary source of legitimacy, an asymmetrical pattern of warfare has developed.” (158-159) “The Communists’ goal in mobilizing the potential power of the rural people by organizing them politically has been to tie down larger and larger numbers of their opponent’s troops in static defense of territory. This strategy has struck at the critical vulnerability in pro-Western governments: their dependence on military force to maintain political power.” (160)

David Cohen Fri, June 16, 2023 at 8:39 AM HST Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who profoundly influenced American politics, military history and journalism by leaking to the press the Pentagon Papers, secret documents about the Vietnam War, died Friday. The person whom Henry Kissinger once dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” was 92. Ellsberg’s family confirmed his death in a statement. In March 2023, Ellsberg disclosed he had been “diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer.” Ellsberg’s 1971 disclosure of the Pentagon Papers revealed secrets about how America found its way into Vietnam and got stuck there, while also casting light on the way U.S. leaders had deceived the nation about why its sons were dying. The release of the papers led to a high-stakes legal battle over freedom of the press and pushed President Richard Nixon’s team on the dark path toward the Watergate scandal. Some called Ellsberg a hero and others branded him a traitor. Those debates hardened over the years, resurfacing whenever someone tried to shine light on painful truths. “He had concluded the violence in Vietnam was senseless and therefore immoral. His conscience told him he had to stop the war,” Neil Sheehan, the journalist who was the first to publish parts of the Pentagon Papers, wrote in “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.” Ellsberg’s conversion from dedicated Cold Warrior to ardent peace activist symbolized what so many Americans had experienced during the 1960s, though not always so dramatically. “Ellsberg, in whatever incarnation and in any job, was no ordinary man,” David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book “The Powers That Be.” “He was an obsessive man. That which he saw, others must see, that which he believed, others must believe. Thus as he became increasingly disillusioned, he also became a force. No one entered an argument with him lightly or left it exactly the same,” Halberstam added. Daniel Ellsberg was born April 7, 1931, in Chicago, the son of Harry and Adele Ellsberg. His mother and sister Gloria were killed when his father fell asleep at the wheel of their car in July 1946. “It probably left an impression on me,” he said years later, “that someone you loved or respected, like my father — an authority — could fall asleep at the wheel and had to be watched. Not because they were bad, but because they were inattentive, perhaps, to the risks.” A stellar student, he attended Harvard and left with a doctorate in economics, but not before wedging in a stint in the Marines, where he was a top marksman. “I didn’t seem the type,” he acknowledged later in “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” But Ellsberg was nothing if not a fervent foe of communism, and in 1964 he went to work as a strategic analyst at the Pentagon. Even as President Lyndon B. Johnson was promising not to send America’s sons to die in Asia, Ellsberg was tasked with helping to build up the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Ellsberg spent two years in Vietnam and became close to former Army officer John Paul Vann, who was known for his fearlessness in the face of danger and brashness in seeking to overhaul what he saw as dangerously misguided American policies in Vietnam. Ellsberg was seen by Vann and those in his circle as “another in the small band of Americans who dared and cared,” according to Sheehan. “Ellsberg was a complicated man,” Sheehan wrote in “A Bright Shining Lie.” “The son of middle-class Jewish parents who had converted to Christian Science, he was an intellectual and a man of action. His mind had surpassing analytical ability. His ego was so forceful it sometimes got out of control.” On patrol with the infantry and traveling around South Vietnam, Ellsberg was startled by the chasm between what was being said about the war by the U.S. government and what was actually occurring. He also became increasingly agitated by American callousness toward civilians. “Nothing else,” he wrote later, “seemed so purely incomprehensibly evil as the deliberate bombing of women and children.” Halberstam wrote that he “became fascinated by the question of war crimes.” Returning to Washington, Ellsberg did not find a receptive audience. When he tried to persuade Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security adviser, that the war was a mess, Rostow offered to show him charts. “You don’t understand,” Rostow said. “Victory is near.” The Pentagon Papers was the name given to a 1967 report commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that sought to trace the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. McNamara — “a technocratic manager extraordinary who had run out of solutions,” as Sheehan dubbed him — wanted to comprehend the ongoing mess. The final report was 7,000 pages spread over 47 volumes; only 15 copies existed and all were classified as top secret. Ellsberg had access to the Pentagon Papers via his job at RAND Corporation, and he was appalled by the cynical decision-making process that pulled more and more U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. “What struck him was the pattern of deception — and how clearly it was documented,” Steve Sheinkin wrote in “Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War.” As the war dragged on, he became increasingly guilt-ridden and committed to sharing what he knew. “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side,” Ellsberg would say later of the war. “We were the wrong side.” Once Ellsberg decided these papers needed to see the light of day, intrigue and voluminous photocopying followed. Aided by RAND colleague Anthony Russo, Ellsberg started smuggling papers in and out in October 1969, making copies in various locations with the help of family members and others who opposed the war. The copies all had to be carefully sorted and hidden. In 1969 and 1970, Ellsberg tried to hand off the material to antiwar lawmakers, including Sens. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) and George McGovern (D-S.D.), hoping they would expose the material. They declined to do so. Ellsberg then reached out to Sheehan at The New York Times. On June 13, 1971, The Times, having spent months combing through the vast material at its disposal, began to publish parts of it. Nixon biographer John A. Farrell would later call that day “the Sunday morning that sired the flames that came to claim his presidency.” The Nixon administration was granted an order blocking the Times from publishing more, but Ellsberg had gotten some material to The Washington Post, which began its own series of articles on June 18. After an injunction against The Post, other newspapers began publishing the material. Sen. Mike Gravel, an Alaska Democrat opposed to the war, also read portions into the Congressional Record. (Ellsberg didn’t leak the whole report, as the final volumes dealt with ongoing diplomatic efforts.) At stake was whether the U.S. government could stop newspapers from publishing material in advance. On June 30, after opting to hear the case on an expedited matter, the Supreme Court voted to let publication of the papers resume. “In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War,” Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority in a 6-3 decision, “the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.” Others saw the disclosures as traitorous. “The press should be able to fulfill its secular role of exposing rascals and mistakes in government without making common cause with the enemies of government,” Gen. Maxwell Taylor, retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a New York Times op-ed. The subject of an intense manhunt, Ellsberg outed himself as the source of the material on June 23, 1971, on “The CBS Evening News.” “I hope that truth will free us of this war,” he told CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who had declared the war unwinnable in a February 1968 broadcast. Even as his Justice Department prepared to prosecute Ellsberg, Nixon told his top aides, “We’ve got to get him,” and urged them to gather information to discredit Ellsberg. In September 1971, a team approved by Nixon staffer Egil “Bud” Krogh broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, in California. “They came to California to ruin a man,” Sheinkin wrote. “Not to kill him, not literally. But the next best thing.” The burglary by the White House’s self-proclaimed “plumbers” was an utter failure, yielding nothing usable — “The wannabe James Bonds left a trail of botch and bungle,” Farrell wrote in “Richard Nixon: The Life“ — but the members of that team, led by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, weren’t deterred. They would subsequently become infamous because of another staggeringly inept burglary, this one in June 1972 at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, in the Watergate complex. “With the Fielding break-in, some of us in the Nixon White House crossed the Rubicon into the realm of lawbreakers,” Krogh wrote in The New York Times in 2007. Fielding’s dented file cabinet now resides at the Smithsonian. The Nixon administration was still intent on prosecuting Ellsberg for revealing secrets, but the drip-drip-drip of revelations about misconduct by the administration (including the Fielding burglary) and the CIA led to the charges being dismissed in May 1973. “The debacle of the Ellsberg trial was killing anything it touched,” Ray Locker wrote in “Haig’s Coup: How Richard Nixon’s Closest Aide Forced Him From Office.” The revelations about the Nixon White House did not stop. In August 1974, Nixon resigned the presidency. Ellsberg remained an activist throughout his life, particularly on the issue of nuclear proliferation. He and his second wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg, were regular figures at demonstrations. In 2009, he was the subject of a documentary called “The Most Dangerous Man in America.” Matthew Rhys portrayed him in the 2017 Steven Spielberg film “The Post,” which hinged on his revelations, and Ellsberg’s presence seemingly hovers over the Hunt and Liddy characters in HBO’s 2023 “White House Plumbers.” When the full Pentagon Papers were declassified and published in 2011, Ellsberg urged others to follow his example and publish secrets of ongoing U.S. conflicts in the Middle East. “The personal risks are great,” he wrote in The Guardian. “But a war’s worth of lives might be saved.” For decades, whenever a whistleblower leaked secrets, Ellsberg would invariably be asked to comment. “I think he’s done an enormous service, incalculable service,” Ellsberg said of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013. “It can’t be overestimated to this democracy. It gives us a chance.” Journalist Barton Gellman chronicled in “Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State” an electronic meeting he arranged between Snowden and the 82-year-old Ellsberg, whom he described as still having “the bearing of a raptor on the hunt.” Ellsberg and Snowden were a mutual admiration society, praising each other. “I desperately want more Snowdens,” Ellsberg told Snowden, who was living in exile in Russia. “What distinguished whistleblowers from their peers was intolerance of belief without action,” Gellman wrote. He added: “Whatever else drove Ellsberg and Snowden, their zeal was sincere.” Those who most fiercely opposed the war in Vietnam continued to hold him in high esteem through the decades. “His memoir, ‘Secrets,’ should be read in every American history class as a primer on the war in Vietnam,” antiwar activist Mark Rudd said. “He learned the truth by being at the highest level of the Pentagon and then from the front seat of a jeep.” Daniel Ellsberg’s message to us, and to future generations By Martin E. Hellman | June 16, 2023 Dan Ellsberg was a brave man. In an effort to end the Vietnam War, he risked spending the rest of his life in jail by leaking the Pentagon Papers. In so doing, he changed history—and our knowledge of our own history. I’ve been privileged to know Dan for almost 40 years, as a friend and as an activist who is trying to save humanity from our self-created nuclear Doomsday Machine. So it was with sadness and a sense of impending loss that I read his March 2 post, where he revealed that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had been given less than six months to live. When the Bulletin invited me to write this piece about Dan, I had a conversation with him so he could tell us what he would like to say to us and to future generations, upon his death. (He died on June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif., at age 92.) We met on April 19, and Dan was in good spirits throughout our talk. In fact, as he looked over the list of questions I thought we should address, this one produced a smile and a laugh: In your book, The Doomsday Machine, you talk about the discrepancy between what Americans are told is the purpose of our nuclear arsenal—preventing aggression—and its actual purpose—“to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia.”[1] I was surprised to find the goal of winning a nuclear war in both the Trump and Biden Nuclear Posture Reviews.[2] What do you think should be done to bring stated and actual policy in line with one another? Dan’s laughter was sparked by seeing the goal stated so baldly, especially since both Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden had stated that, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Dan then noted that America’s nuclear posture is “directed toward meeting that mission” (that is, winning a nuclear war), even though such a mission is “infeasible and impossible.” He decried the American nuclear establishment for giving “no importance whatever to expressing in public what their actual aims and interests and options are.” He also noted that Russia does roughly the same thing and that this refusal to acknowledge reality has to change. Daniel Ellsberg speaks at a “De-Nuke NATO” protest during NATO’s 50th Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C., April 23, 1999. (Photo by Elvert Xavier Barnes / CC-BY-SA) In The Doomsday Machine, Dan recommends a two-step process to make the world safer (see pages 335-350). First, he notes, current, bloated nuclear arsenals and unrealistic war fighting plans would destroy the planet if used. He then says that: … you can’t eradicate the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons and delivery systems. But you can dismantle a Doomsday Machine [that would destroy the planet]. … the existence of one such machine [does not] compel or even create a tangible incentive for a rival or enemy to have one. In fact, having two on alert against each is far more dangerous for each and for the world than if only one existed. … the current danger of Doomsday could be eliminated without the United States or Russia coming close to total nuclear disarmament, or the abandonment of nuclear deterrence, either unilaterally or mutually (desirable as the latter would be). … This dismantlement of the Doomsday Machines is not intended as an adequate long-term substitute for more ambitious, necessary goals, including total universal abolition of nuclear weapons. We cannot accept the conclusion that abolition must be ruled out “for the foreseeable future” or put off for generations. Our subsequent conversation dealt with a variety of aspects of nuclear risk and how to reduce it. The Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, and nuclear risk Marty: Let’s talk about Vietnam and The Pentagon Papers. They are what you’re best known for and were the subject of Steven Spielberg’s 2017 movie, The Post. In your March 2 letter telling us of your medical diagnosis, you say: 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). 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 addition, thanks to Nixon’s crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.[3] Dan: In the Bulletin, I would prefer to focus on my main concern in life, which is nuclear war. Marty: But Vietnam did have nuclear risk associated with it, as you know. Conventional war, as in Vietnam, and nuclear war are inextricably interconnected, with the most likely spark for setting off a nuclear war being a conventional conflict that spirals out of control. That almost happened in Cuba in 1962 and could happen today in Ukraine. Dan: From the very beginning I was aware that nuclear weapons had been discussed as a possibility in Vietnam. The whole basis for my copying The Pentagon Papers was news I got from Mort Halperin, who was working for Henry Kissinger, that Nixon did not mean to get out of Vietnam on any terms that had a realistic chance of being accepted by the North Vietnamese, and thus, that the war would continue and would get larger and would ultimately lead to the use of nuclear weapons. And yet, most of that time, the public at large and even most of the government had no notion that there was the slightest possibility of the use of nuclear weapons. And that’s what did happen in the offensive of ’72, when Nixon was urging Kissinger actually to consider the use of nuclear weapons. A transcript of formerly secret White House tape recordings shows President Nixon telling Henry Kissinger, “The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.”[4] In the 50 years since The Pentagon Papers came out, no one has asked me the question, why did Nixon and Kissinger consider me a dangerous person, let alone—to use Kissinger’s words—the most dangerous man in America? The answer is because they knew that I knew the threats they were making [including nuclear threats]. They knew those threats had to be kept secret from the American public, even though we were directly making them to the North Vietnamese. And therefore, I was dangerous in that I threatened their national security policy. So they had to shut me up, and they tried a number of ways to do that, mainly to blackmail me, but also by bringing people up from Miami to incapacitate me. Watergate burglar and CIA operative Bernard “Macho” Barker told Lloyd Shearer of Parade, “My purpose was to break both his legs.” But I think that was not the main purpose, because that would not have shut me up. I think it had to do with my head and my mouth. Watergate Assistant Special Prosecutor William Merrill had no doubt that their purpose was to kill me. He said that these guys never used the word kill. They used words like incapacitate, neutralize with extreme prejudice, and various things. Nuclear weapons are a Sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads Marty: Let’s come back to what you would like to say to future generations—or people right now even. Dan: Right now, that there is, and has been for 70 years, a very significant danger of the end of civilization: the death of most humans on Earth within a year by the effects of nuclear winter and nuclear fallout. And that almost nothing has succeeded in lowering that probability, although there are many things that could be done and should have been done. But perhaps it is not too late to accomplish those things now. We are living, as John F. Kennedy put it, “under a sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads.” And that thread has not been strengthened in the slightest over the years. What is happening now in the new Cold War is that the chance of reducing that risk is vanishing, the door is in the process of closing. Is it already too late? We don’t know. But I choose to act, and I urge others to act as if it’s not too late. And I can be very specific on what that would mean. We need coordination of action that also applies to climate change. It is hard to imagine a way of reducing the global emissions of CO2 that does not involve coordinated action between the major emitters like the US, China, India, Russia, and Europe. Coordinated action of a kind that seems almost impossible after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, exploited as that has been by the West to reintroduce a Cold War in which the aims of the adversary are magnified, in which military solutions are looked for. So the chance of lowering the arms budget has virtually disappeared. But, even more importantly, the chance of doing any of the things that would lower the risk of nuclear winter has been almost eliminated at this point. For over half a century, the existence on both sides of vulnerable land-based ICBMs[5] has been the hair trigger to the Doomsday Machine. They pose a use-it-or-lose-it mentality which encourages each side to launch its missiles on ambiguous warning, lest they be destroyed—in order to attack the ICBMs of the other side. The elimination of just one of these pairs of ICBMs would significantly reduce the chance of all-out nuclear war taking place, even in the event of a small nuclear exchange. So it would be the strongest thing we could do do. The warheads in the submarines are far more than enough, even without any ICBMs. Along with eliminating the ICBM “use-them-or-lose-them mentality,” policies of no first use would be important changes for both sides. It’s been argued that a no-first-use statement would have no more significance than the statement that threatening a nuclear attack is inadmissible, while you continue to make threats, or the statement that nuclear war is not winnable, while you spend trillions of dollars trying vainly to win it. But a no-first-use statement is necessary as part of a policy of changing this entire stance away from a first strike. The numbers [of nuclear warheads] per se don’t matter so much, except for reducing them down to a level that could not produce Doomsday, could not produce omnicide. The potential for that catastrophe has existed for decades and can be eliminated without giving up deterrence. Does any nation have the right to threaten to kill billions of people? I would say they don’t, and they cannot possibly justify it by a need to deter nuclear attack on themselves, since much smaller arsenals would serve that purpose. But it gets very tricky when you add that little thing of deterring a nuclear attack against your allies. That produces a very strong incentive to make it look as though you believe you could lower the damage to your own nation, and God knows we have acted as though we believe that hoax since the ’50s or ’60s. When it comes to that, it’s a total license, as McNamara found, to build a first-strike weapon, to try and make it credible that you’ll respond to an attack on your ally by initiating nuclear war against a nuclear weapon state. And there’s no limit to what you can spend under that crazy assumption. In other words, it’s been a madman threat from the very beginning. Nixon, who tried to convince the Soviets and the North Vietnamese that he was crazy[6] in an effort to end the Vietnam War on his terms, said he was imitating Eisenhower, which is true. The same is basically true of Truman in the 1948 Berlin crisis. It’s been true all along that it was mad, but it turns out, it’s a madness that is very easy to make credible. Humans are that mad. How do you move people from a totally insane plan to which they’re committed? It’s like waking up somebody who’s sleepwalking—a dangerous process. You may cause panic. Or they’re walking on a precipice; how do you move them away from it? Or they’re drunk, how do you deal with it? You don’t just tell them that it’s wrong; You somehow have to coax them away from this insane path that they’re on. How do you persuade them away from a plan that is batshit crazy? The risk of a nuclear war Marty: We have both been concerned with evaluating the risk of nuclear war. That risk may be small per year, but builds up over time, just like one mile an hour is not very fast, but if you go one mile an hour for a whole year, you’ll cover almost 9,000 miles. Dan: Look, the risk of a nuclear war on October 27th, 1962 during the Cuban crisis—known as “Black Saturday”—was much more than even; 90 percent or something like that.[7] The prominent Cold War strategist Paul Nitze thought there was at least a 10 percent chance of something going wrong and blowing up the world. McNamara thought that there was a high chance he would never see another Saturday night. My guess is that there is not a high likelihood of nuclear war in the current stalemate in Ukraine, so long as Putin is not confronted with losing Crimea or all of the Donbas. But if American troops or Polish troops or German troops were to maintain those tanks and planes that are being given to Ukraine by the West, or to man them, that would be a very significant change, because it could confront Russia with actually losing the Donbas or Crimea. And I think, in those circumstances, Putin would be strongly tempted, as we would be in similar circumstances, to break through that with “small” nuclear weapons in an effort to bring people to their senses and say, “This can’t go on. You’ve got to negotiate at our terms.” Putin’s use of nuclear weapons in that kind of scenario could succeed, but probably would not. And another thing that I’ve learned, Marty, and that I think is not sufficiently appreciated, is that men in power are willing to risk world annihilation rather than to accept a short-term loss. And it’s not a question of realism or unrealism, it’s a willingness to gamble. They know it’s not likely to succeed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it, because there is a chance that it may succeed, which is enough to get them to gamble the world. Our presidents have that power every hour of every day. Dan’s father’s awakening Dan: Well, Marty, the first time I ever heard your name was in an article that you published in 1985. I can tell you exactly when it was because my father died in 1985, he was 96, and he was in the same situation I am at the moment. We didn’t know then, but he did die a week after I had this conversation with him. You and I are having this conversation a month or two or so, three, six, probably a month before I’m gone. It so happens that in that week before he died, he had read your article in a journal that he trusted, the journal of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, to which he belonged as a structural engineer. And he took seriously what he read there. In that article, you said that there was a mathematical certainty of eventually destroying life on Earth if we did not change in fundamental ways. Marty: Right. The title of the paper was “On the Inevitability and Prevention of Nuclear War.” How we could avoid that, but the inevitability on our then-current path and, unfortunately, our now-current path. Dan: So years after The Pentagon Papers, which was ’71, this was in 1985, he had never taken too seriously all my talk about nuclear war; wasn’t his subject, wasn’t his field particularly, he didn’t get too interested in it. He did follow me on Vietnam, and I convinced him, I persuaded him that that war should be ended. So in that respect we’d come together. So he said in this particular last talk together that it’s wrong to be doing something which has, the way he put it, using your term, a mathematical probability, eventually approaching one, of blowing up the world, ending living life on Earth—a Doomsday machine, without using that term. And he said it’s wrong to have that capability or for it to exist. And I said, “Dad, there are those who would say that it makes it less likely to have the overall cataclysm if you have the ability to blow things up; that will make it less likely that it will ever go off at all.” And he said something very interesting to me that I haven’t seen reproduced; it gave me something to think about, which I’ve never fully finished thinking about to this day. He said, “Yes, but there is a moral cost to having this capability at all. It’s not just a matter of a risk and a cost of blowing the world up. There is a moral cost in telling yourself and teaching your children that there are circumstances that would justify killing everything and therefore that would justify having this capability.” I would say, from a reasonable ethics, there is no such objective. The objectives of national policy and imperial policy are the same as they’ve always been, except now we have the capability of pursuing them by means of massacring everybody. And every nation has proven absolutely willing to do that and wanting to do that, and the ones who don’t do it themselves are quite willing to be allied with ones who do. The need for action: a fool’s errand? Dan: People just don’t realize how big this is. What do they do? They don’t do anything one way or the other. The death of humanity is not something that moves them to vote. They act as if there is no chance to make any difference. As if it’s impossible to change things. Yet, we all thought the Berlin Wall coming down was impossible. Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa without a violent revolution seemed impossible. In the same way, I currently cannot see any chance of getting rid of ICBMs, or of no-first-use. But miracles do happen. I choose to act as if it makes a difference. And it’s just a choice. I can’t defend that. It’s just a better way to live. It’s the way I choose to live. We can work to prevent the cataclysm. And I think one aspect of that is, 12 months into this Ukraine war, suggesting anything that involves a chance to end it is seen as being on the wrong side. Yet going on as we have has risks vastly disproportionate to any advantage that would be gained in another 12 months of stalemate. The latest leaks indicate exactly what The Pentagon Papers showed: that the people inside perceive themselves as in a stalemate for at least the next 12 months. So what will the effort to break through the stalemate in the 12 months be likely to accomplish? Very little. And what’s the possible downside? The end of everything, essentially. And likewise, on Taiwan. It’s outrageous. We are risking everything over the issue of the control of Taiwan. When I say risking everything, I mean we are risking all-out nuclear war. And would people, a thousand years ago, have taken such a risk? I think if they could have, they would have. So we’re not worse than people were. We just have a lot more at stake. This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons. Concluding the interview Marty: In your email to me, you said, “Other than dying, I’m okay.” I like your humor. Dan: Well, we’re all dying. I’m in very good shape. For my best friends, I would not wish better than to have the last month I’m having with my wife and my friends like you. Editor’s note: A 2018 Bulletin interview with Daniel Ellsberg about his book, The Doomsday Machine, can be found here. Notes [1] From Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine, page 12. All page numbers refer to the hardcover edition of The Doomsday Machine. [2] Biden’s NPR says, “the Joint Force will need to be postured with military capabilities—including nuclear weapons—that can deter and defeat other actors who may … engage in opportunistic aggression.” Trump’s NPR says, “No country should doubt the strength of our extended deterrence commitments or the strength of U.S. and allied capabilities to deter, and if necessary defeat, any potential adversary’s nuclear or non-nuclear aggression.” [3] Nixon’s “plumbers” were apprehended when they burglarized the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building on June 17, 1972, leading to the Watergate scandal that caused Nixon’s resignation. But almost a year earlier, on September 3, 1971, they broke into Dan’s psychiatrist’s office in an operation that had been approved by John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top aides, on the condition that it not be traceable. Fortunately for Dan, the break-in was traced to the plumbers and, when the judge in his trial learned of this government misconduct, he dismissed all charges. [4] The Doomsday Machine, page 309. [5] Intercontinental ballistic missiles. [6] Dan is referring to Nixon’s “madman theory.” Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman says that Nixon told him: “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace. Source: H.R. Haldeman with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power, New York, Times Books, 1978, p. 83. Emphasis is in the original. [7] Dan has information that was unavailable to any American at the time. It wasn’t until 1992 that we learned the Soviets had battlefield nuclear weapons on Cuba to repel the kind of American invasion that the US military wanted to mount. And it was only in 2002 that we learned that three Soviet submarines that were attacked by American destroyers each carried a nuclear torpedo. According to an account by a crew member, the captain of one of those submarines gave orders to arm the nuclear torpedo but was talked down. Daniel Ellsberg was one of history’s most consequential figures Trevor Timm ‘His own story is also so cinematic, it’s almost hard to believe.’ May we all one day have as much courage – in life and in death – as Daniel Ellsberg Sat 17 Jun 2023 10.05 EDT Last modified on Sat 17 Jun 2023 10.36 EDT In All the President’s Men, the classic film on the downfall of President Richard Nixon, the name “Daniel Ellsberg” is not uttered once. And what a shame that is. Because for all the journalistic heroics of Woodward and Bernstein, it’s possible that there was no one more responsible for the only resignation of a president in American history than Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg, the legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower, passionate anti-nuclear activist and staunch press freedom advocate, passed away at the age of 92 on Friday. History should remember him as one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures. But we should also be reminded that his own story is also so cinematic, it’s almost hard to believe. For those too young to remember (or like me, not born yet), Ellsberg was a brilliant Vietnam analyst who had worked for the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. A graduate of Harvard, he was in the upper echelon of the Washington DC elite, when he volunteered to go to Vietnam and slowly came to the realization he must do everything he can to stop the war – even if it meant going to prison. He would first help write, and then leak to the New York Times, what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page top secret government report that detailed two decades of lies about the Vietnam war. His goal was to stop the war, but – at least at first – Ellsberg thought the leak of the Pentagon Papers was a failure. It was the summer of 1971, and the war initially continued on, unabated. Yet little did he know at the time, he had driven Nixon mad with rage and would ultimately lead to the president’s undoing. You see, contrary to popular belief, the “Plumbers”, the criminal unit set up in the basement of the White House and currently the subject of an HBO miniseries, was not formed to break into the vaunted Watergate Hotel. No, it was created to discredit Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg obituary Read more Before the Democratic National Committee was even on the Plumbers’ radar, they were tasked with breaking into Ellsberg’s psychologist’s office to dig up dirt on him, a blatant crime that would surface at Ellsberg’s trial. As the history professor Christian Appy recently wrote, it’s just one of many seeds involving Ellsberg that sowed Nixon’s demise. Ellsberg’s impact can be even found in the draft impeachment articles against Nixon. The articles were never voted on by the full House of Representatives, because Nixon accepted the inevitable, and resigned. Article 2, section 2 of the charges read: “[Nixon] has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.” Every word of that refers to Daniel Ellsberg. To this day, there’s no evidence Nixon directly ordered the Watergate break-in, but there is direct evidence the White House tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg through multiple illegal means. The psychiatrist’s office was just the tip of the iceberg in the government’s criminal scheme. Nixon’s aide would later try to bribe Ellsberg’s trial judge with the FBI director job, the CIA would illegally create psychological profiles of him, and the justice department had to admit it had overheard Ellsberg on warrantless wiretaps that they had lost or destroyed. They were crimes that would make even Donald Trump blush. Ellsberg was not acquitted because a jury found him not guilty; his trial was thrown out for extreme government misconduct. Ellsberg’s memoir about his foreign policy career, his personal transformation, and the Pentagon Papers saga, aptly titled Secrets, details this incredible story and so much more – including the nationwide manhunt for him that lasted almost two weeks, where the FBI could not catch him. He infuriated the feds by continuing to distribute more of the classified Pentagon Papers to newspapers around the country and appearing on national television with Walter Cronkite. (The Pentagon Papers also led to the most important press freedom decision in American history, and paved the way for the Guardian and others to be able to publish the Snowden disclosures.) Secrets is absolutely engrossing and it was released to universal rave reviews – yet it flopped. It happened to be published in the fall of 2003, a few months after the start of the Iraq war, at the peak of this country’s unhinged patriotic fervor. He would later lament that none of the networks would invite him on television to talk about it. Apparently, no one wanted to hear about a dissenter attempting to stop a war built on lies in George W Bush’s post-9/11 America. The documentary about his journey, The Most Dangerous Man in America, was thankfully more successful, nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2010. Yet shamefully, only 13 years later, it is almost impossible to watch. None of the major streaming services carry it, and you can’t even purchase it on Amazon or Google. (Tech executives if you’re reading: Fix this!) In 2012, I was fortunate to co-found Freedom of the Press Foundation with Ellsberg and several other prominent press freedom advocates. He has been our stalwart board member and our inspiration ever since. Along the way, we became good friends. I got to set up his first encrypted conversation with Edward Snowden, discussed with him for hours about how to stop the abuse of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, gave him feedback on his book about his days as a nuclear war planner, and even provided a little help when he decided to leak some additional still-classified information 50 years after the Pentagon Papers. But what I may remember most about him now is not the principles by which he lived his life, but how he faced death. When I first heard from a mutual friend that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer, I was depressed – and I assumed he would be too. But when I got on a Zoom call with him the following night, I was shocked. He was in the best mood I’d even seen him in – and he was not someone I would describe as normally downtrodden or brusk. ‘I’ve never regretted doing it’: Daniel Ellsberg on 50 years since leaking the Pentagon Papers Read more He greeted me with a giant grin, talking a mile a minute. He was hopped up on the caffeine from a hot chocolate, which he normally swore off because it kept him up all night. He talked about how lucky he was, at 92, to be feeling so well; how he did not fear death, as he had decades ago expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for the Pentagon Papers leak. Every day he had left, to him, was a blessing. And the entire time we were talking – and I mean the entire time, more than two hours – he was eating. First, it was a bagel with lox and cream cheese he was scarfing down between sentences. Then he asked me to hold on for a minute while he got a bacon sandwich from the fridge. He explained that for the past decade or so he had been on a no-salt diet due to a heart condition, and it was excruciating. Earlier that day, his cardiologist, upon hearing of the terminal diagnosis, gave him permission to throw caution to the wind. And boy, was he going to take advantage. (I can neither confirm nor deny that he may have also told me that he dabbled in a certain mind-altering substance synonymous with the 1960s and 70s a couple days prior.) He was, he said, very much looking forward to spending his last three to six months with his family, and especially his wonderful wife and inspiration, Patricia. But he was also adamant: he was going to work as hard as he could on the issues he cared about – nuclear proliferation, peace, reforming the secrecy system, the plight of whistleblowers – until his very last day. I got off the call feeling inspired. A few days later, he echoed the same sentiments in a touching public letter to his friends and supporters. And he would certainly keep his vow. He spoke to the New York Times editorial board. He was on one of the Times’ podcasts. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed him for her entire show. He went on MSNBC with Mehdi Hasan. He was the lead guest on one of his favorite programs, Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. He did several podcasts with his longtime friend Noam Chomsky. I was lucky enough to be on a conference panel with him and the whistleblower Reality Winner just six weeks ago. And many more. As he told Amanpour: “People say to live one day at a time, as though it were your last. I think that’s pretty hard to do – you have appointments to keep, people to say goodbye to. But, actually, one month at a time works very well … I’m having a very good time here.” Like everyone who knew him, I’m sad he’s no longer with us, but I will try to take a page out of his book, and appreciate how much extra time he got on this earth. May we all one day have as much courage – in life and in death – as Daniel Ellsberg. Trevor Timm is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation We’re Told Never to Meet Our Childhood Heroes. Knowing Daniel Ellsberg Proved That Wrong Glenn Greenwald remembers the Pentagon Papers whistleblower and ceaseless anti-war activist BY GLENN GREENWALD JUNE 16, 2023 Former U.S. Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg, whose whistleblowing helped end the Vietnam War, poses before a press conference after winning the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, 2006. JONAS EKSTROMER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES THAT YOU SHOULD never meet your heroes, as they are bound to disappoint you, has become such conventional wisdom that it requires no author to affirm it. In a 2020 satirical New Yorker article, Alex Witt attributed the proverb to the faceless “they” (“They say, ‘Never meet your heroes,’ ” adding, “It’s good advice. I’ve met all of my idols, and I’ve been disappointed by every single one”). Some internet pages attribute the quote to the British comedian Alan Carr after meeting Paul Newman, though that appears more apocryphal than reliable. It hardly matters who first said it; it just strikes one as intuitively true because the glaring, multifaceted imperfections of humans when seen up close make a heroic image unlikely to survive interpersonal scrutiny. Daniel Ellsberg, the renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower, single-handedly destroyed the validity of this advice for me. Ellsberg was one of my two or three top childhood heroes. Though I was only four years old in 1971, when he knowingly assumed a high probability of life in prison to inform the American people about systemic lying by the U.S. government regarding the war in Vietnam, I became engrossed by both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate dramas as I entered adolescence. Those became the formative events for my understanding of politics and journalism. The lies told by leading Pentagon and CIA officials about the Vietnam War were numerous, and they came fast and furious from the start of the U.S. role in the war in the early 1960s to its end in the mid-1970s. The lie that led Ellsberg to risk his liberty to expose was central. Top Pentagon and other U.S. security-state officials were publicly insisting they were getting closer and closer to winning the war, all while privately admitting from the start that victory would be impossible, that the best-case scenario was a stalemate with the North Vietnamese. Ellsberg’s remarkable moral courage and self-sacrifice to try to stop an unjust war from spirling even further out of control played a major role in shaping my understanding of journalism, the need for transparency, the virtues of bravery, and the duties of citizenship. I read everything I could get my hands on about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers case. That someone at the age of 40 would be willing to spend the rest of his life in prison for a political cause both mystified and excited me. Ellsberg occupied a central place in my childhood imagination about heroism, integrity, and courage. That is the context that led to Ellsberg’s destruction for me of the wisdom of this “don’t meet your heroes” aphorism. One of the greatest honors of my life was developing a long and multifaceted relationship with Ellsberg: first meeting him (in 2008), then spending years forming a friendship with him, and then working at his side. I was beyond nervous to meet Ellsberg. Like a junior high student meeting their favorite pop star, I began inarticulately spewing my longtime admiration for him. But he quickly intervened to say that he often felt more shame than pride about the Pentagon Papers: not because he regrets divulging those top-secret documents but because it took him as long as it did for him to find the courage to leak them. He told me that to this day, decades later, he thinks often about how many people died — Americans and Vietnamese — while he was helping plan and advocate the war at RAND Corp., and how pained he is over the fact that he could have acted earlier to try to stop that loss of life. We’re talking about someone who came very close to spending his life in prison for the act of conscience he undertook: a level of courage most people cannot get close to. Yet it was so clear to me, and it genuinely shocked me, that he imposed on himself this moral burden to have acted even earlier. In 2012, we co-founded an advocacy group for journalists, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). The group, which now engages in broad-based press-freedom activism, was originally designed to circumvent the ban on financial services imposed on WikiLeaks, at the urging of senior U.S. officials, by Bank of America, MasterCard, Visa, Amazon, and others, all despite the fact that WikiLeaks had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime. The creation of this group was far from risk-free: We decided we would collect funds and donations on WikiLeaks’ behalf in order to destroy the ability of the U.S. government and large banks to effectively crush dissident media outlets by imposing extrajudicial bans on their ability to collect funds. There was a legal concern that by helping sustain WikiLeaks financially, we could be held accountable for future criminal accusations against it. Our initial goal was to make the FPF a model for how similar future attacks on media outlets could be defeated. Along with Laura Poitras, the Oscar-winning director of CitizenFour and my journalistic colleague in the Edward Snowden reporting, various privacy activists, the actor John Cusack, and ultimately Snowden, Ellsberg became a co-founder and joined our board. Ellsberg speaks during mass rally in support for Pvt. Bradley Manning in June 2013 in Fort Meade, Maryland, just before Manning’s court martial was set to begin. LEXEY SWALL/GETTY IMAGES As was true with the Pentagon Papers disclosures and in many other instances in his life, Ellsberg never once expressed hesitation due to the risks involved. The contrary was true: As we were forming this organization, he often gave rousing speeches about the imperative of political courage precisely when the state becomes most repressive. He was continuously a source of inspiration for all of us. We often spent hours in meetings of our board, composed of famously willful people with strong opinions, which often diverged from one another. During even intense debates, Ellsberg was not only a voice of inspiration but a voice of reason and decency, constantly reminding us that we all shared the same vision and the same goals and, leading by example, urged that we treat one another with compassion and kindness even when we vehemently disagreed. In sum, the more I got to know Ellsberg as a person rather than as an icon, the more my respect, affection, and love for him grew. The image I had of him from his Pentagon Papers fame was exactly what motivated the way he conducted himself in life — from how he formed his political ideals to how he treated others. There was never a moment in the many hours we spent in conversation, either personally or during the years of FPF board meetings, where I detected any false notes let alone felt “disappointed” in him. That includes the rare occasions when we found ourselves on different sides of internal debates, and on the less-rare instances where we harbored disparate political views. He was unfailingly polite even when emphatic, always guided by immovable principles that he was unwilling to compromise for any strategic or material gain, yet was always free of personal rancor; and he was one of the most deeply knowledgeable persons with whom I have ever conversed. As a human being, he personified the values I had associated in childhood with the Pentagon Papers. What most defined my impressions of Ellsberg was his extreme humility. When Ellsberg was first identified as the Pentagon Papers leaker, he was maligned in establishment circles with the same set of accusatory labels automatically applied to those who expose the secrets of America’s most powerful actors: as a traitor, a Kremlin agent, and someone who had placed Americans in danger. Yet Americans’ views in the ensuing decades have become far more negative about the Vietnam War and he has, in the eyes of millions, become vindicated. By the time we first met, in Washington, he knew that millions of people around the world, such as myself, regarded him as a hero, but was very uncomfortable with that label. It was not the kind of false humility that many similarly admired people wear as self-glorifying costume, but one he deeply felt. Every time I heard someone placing the hero label on him, he quickly acted to dilute it by pointing out what he believed was the responsibility he bore for the war: both in the early stages, when he was helping to execute it, and then in the later stages, by which point he had turned against it (even attending anti-war rallies while still employed at RAND), but not yet willing to risk his liberty to bring the truth to the public. The torment from having to spend the rest of his life knowing that he had yet refused the opportunity to show the truth and help end this war — all due to his fear of what would happen to him — was far greater than whatever punishments he would suffer for disclosing the truth, even if that meant life in prison. Ellsberg was aggressively generous with the use of his hero status to defend others whom he viewed as motivated by the same values and objectives that caused him to disclose the Pentagon Papers. I vividly recall how viscerally happy and moved he was when the next generation of courageous whistleblowers began appearing: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who leaked to WikiLeaks; NSA whistleblowers Snowden, Tom Drake, William Binney, and others. He would never take credit for them or their bravery, but it was clear that he saw them as his progeny. He often said in private what he ended up saying in the media about all of them: that he had waited decades for people like them to appear; those who had access to secrets that would both expose the lies and corruption of the U.S. security state but also end their careers and reputations, if not land them in prison, for disclosing. Ellsberg’s tireless commitment to the FPF, even while he was already in his eighties, was motivated by his sense of obligation to use his credibility to defend what Assange and Manning had done. He viewed his battle with the secrecy abuses and systemic deceit of the military and intelligence communities as his life mission, and he never stopped pursuing it with a vigor and commitment to study that would tire most people half his age. In both instances in which I found myself in the middle of highly dangerous reporting where prison was a possibility not only for my whistleblowing source but also myself and my journalistic colleagues — the 2013 Snowden reporting and the 2020 Brazil exposés that freed Brazilian President Lula da Silva from prison — Ellsberg spent many hours of his time encouraging me, offering advice, and urging me to press forward despite various risks and threats. In emails he shared with me and other FPF board members after we learned in June 2013 that Snowden had been quickly charged with multiple felonies, he wrote: Same charges as against me, forty years ago … His case will test the question: Can it be criminal (as 18 U.S.C. 798 clearly states) to disclose classified information [about communications intelligence processes, when] that hides what appears to be a blatantly unconstitutional program? That’s never been tested before in an American court. At one particularly stressful moment when I was in Hong Kong with Snowden and Poitras — when my lawyers were receiving increasingly menacing threats about our possible criminal prosecution from DOJ lawyers if we tried to return to the U.S. — Ellsberg spent an hour on the phone with me urging me to see that not as an impediment but an opportunity. While he was, of course, happy not to spend his life in prison for the Pentagon Papers, he regretted the fact that he lost the opportunity to win a vital precedent against the U.S. government when his charges were dismissed due to government misconduct. He urged me to press forward without concern for any such intimidation, and to see the prospect of criminal prosecution as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fight the DOJ over constitutional guarantees of press freedom. That Ellsberg was fortifying my resolve, and doing so by invoking the values of courage and a willingness to risk one’s own interests for a noble cause, was an honor, personally moving, and — along with Snowden’s own self-assured bravery — undoubtedly one of the things I used to continue regardless of the risks. Ellsberg, the source of the leak of the controversial Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, gestures towards a picture in October 1976. SUSAN WOOD/GETTY IMAGES I’ve had the opportunity to meet and get to know many people who are renowned for a political or journalistic act that inspires admiration. Often, it is not always evident how the values with that they are publicly associated end up shaping their private conduct. With Ellsberg, the exact opposite was true: The ethics and morals that drove him to leak the Pentagon Papers were visible in how he treated others. At our board meetings, he was always the voice of harmony. In private conversations, he emphasized the love and human connection that he believed our politics should foster: He ended every email with “Love, Dan” and was as inspiring talking about personal challenges as he was about political or journalistic ones. It was humanistic impulses that led him to leak the Pentagon Papers — the belief that human beings were dying in large number for no good reason and that he had the moral obligation to do what he could to stop it — and he was never shy about expressing that humanism in his interpersonal dealings. The authenticity of his convictions were never in doubt: Despite being someone situated on the left wing of American politics, he was scathing in his critiques of President Obama’s unprecedented attacks on whistleblowers. Having believed in Obama’s 2007-08 vows to uproot the core precepts of the War on Terror, he viewed Obama’s strengthening of those precepts as a betrayal: not only of Ellberg’s trust but of Obama’s core oath of office. And there were few things that Ellsberg took more seriously, if there were any, than oaths of office. His core defense of the Pentagon Papers leak was that he was not just permitted but obliged to disclose these documents by the oath he had taken. “Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden Kept His Oath Better Than Anyone in the NSA,” read an Atlantic headline in 2014. Ellsberg took oaths very seriously. They were his supreme moral compass, and when he used it to tell you that he thought you were doing the right thing, few things were more gratifying and emboldening. Despite his decades of activism, Ellsberg’s obituaries will all lead with the role he played in the Pentagon Papers leak and the political and journalistic drama that arose in its wake. That is understandable. What he did then was as consequential as it was courageous. What made him so rare as a dissident was that his life was paved with establishment credentials and accolades, which he could have easily spent his life exploiting for his own personal gain. With a Ph.D. from Harvard and a Wilson fellowship at Cambridge, he joined the Marine Corps and rose to the rank of lieutenant. In the late 1950s, Ellsberg went to work for the RAND, the think tank widely regarded as the Pentagon’s closest and most trusted nongovernment partner. He focused on nuclear strategy and the nuclear arsenal, which placed him at the center of the most vital and sensitive Cold War policy-making debates. That necessitated his holding the highest security clearances the U.S. government has to offer (he often regaled us with fascinating explanations of the numerous secrecy classifications far above “top secret”). By the time he was 35, Ellsberg had risen to the highest level of Pentagon war planning and design of nuclear weapons doctrine. There was no limit on his ability to rise even further within the halls of government, academia, or corporate power centers. And that is what makes his decision to purposely throw all of that away — trading unlimited material prosperity and establishment esteem for decades in a federal prison cell, all for a cause, all to save the lives of others — so profound. It was an act at once so remarkable, so admirable, so rare, and so stunningly and singularly self-sacrificing. “How can you measure the jeopardy I’m in … to the penalty that has been paid already by 50,000 American families and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families? It would be utterly presumptuous of me to pity myself, and I do not.” daniel ellsberg Due precisely to his access to the government’s most secretive documents, Ellsberg — who began as an ardent advocate and key planner of the war in Vietnam — started turning against it several years before he catapulted himself to fame and to the top of the Nixon administration’s enemies list. He concluded that the war — and especially the annual deaths of thousands of America’s conscripted soldiers and the tens or hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians — was based entirely on lies. It was a lie that launched the start of the U.S.’ full-scale role in war. The story told by the Pentagon and the CIA about North Vietnamese aggression against American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the Vietnamese shore, led the U.S. Senate to approve by a near-unanimous vote the authorization of military force, in August 1964. Yet even the U.S. Naval Institute now acknowledges, based on declassified documents, that “high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.” In his book expressing regret for the role he played in prosecuting the war, the then-Defense Secretary, Robert S. McNamara, branded those war-starting claims about the Gulf of Tonkin incident: “LIES.” As the war dragged on year after year, and more and more Americans and Vietnamese were dying, Ellsberg came to believe that the U.S. security state did more than spread falsehoods through the corporate media to justify the start of the war (exactly as it would do again 38 years later to justify the invasion of Iraq). After the Gulf of Tonkin deceit, the prosecution of the Vietnam War was continuously fueled by and based in a massive lie: Namely, America’s top political and military leadership knew they could never win the war, and continuously acknowledged that in top-secret studies. Yet while producing study after study demonstrating the war’s futility, these same leaders repeatedly told Americans the exact opposite — that victory was just around the corner as long as they supported greater expenditures, more weapons, and drafted more and more young Americans to be sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. The Nov. 8, 1973, issue of Rolling Stone ILLUSTRATION BY DAVE WILLARDSON As he heard one American leader after the next disseminate these lies through a largely uncritical media, Ellsberg knew he had the documents in his hands that would dispositively reveal these lies to the American population, which had been deceived into believing them. Ellsberg had participated in the creation of multi-volume studies, and he had access to many others that all reached the same conclusion. The problem he faced: The truth-revealing documents were, as they so often are in Washington, marked “top secret,” which meant anyone disclosing them to those unauthorized to receive them (i.e., the press and public) would be guilty of felonies — among the gravest felonies in the U.S. code. Many of those felonies were created by the 1917 Espionage Act, first enacted under President Woodrow Wilson to criminalize opposition to the U.S. role in World War I. Ellsberg decided that he had no choice. The torment from having to spend the rest of his life knowing that he had yet refused the opportunity to show the truth and help end this war — all due to his fear of what would happen to him — was far greater than whatever punishments he would suffer for disclosing the truth, even if that meant life in prison. He first attempted to persuade U.S. senators to read the Pentagon Papers on the floor of the Senate; despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution immunizes them from any consequences for speeches on the floor, none would do so. Ellsberg then proceeded to use Xerox machines — there were no such things back then as CDs, let alone thumb drives — to secretly create multiple sets of what became the Pentagon Papers: thousands of pages of top-secret documents about the Vietnam War assembled at the highest levels of the government to which he had been granted unfettered access. It took him eight months to copy each page one by one using a single Xerox machine in a friend’s office. He delivered a copy to The New York Times. On Sunday, July 13, 1971, the paper began publishing reports and original documents that it called the Pentagon Papers. To say that this caused panic inside the U.S. government is to understate the case. Within days of the first article, the Nixon administration persuaded a federal court to restrain The New York Times from further publication, the first-ever act of prior restraint in the nation’s history. So determined was Ellsberg to ensure that Americans would see these documents that, after this court order restraining the Times, he then sent thousands of pages to The Washington Post. When the Post began publishing, the Nixon administration sought to restrain that paper as well, but a different court ruled in the Post’s favor. To make the censorship effort more difficult, if not impossible, Ellsberg sent copies to numerous other newspapers, and then persuaded Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) to begin reading parts of it on the Senate floor. The conflicts in the judicial rulings led the Supreme Court to quickly take up the case. It resolved the question in its landmark 6-3 ruling that became known via New York Times Co. v. United States, viewed as one of the most significant press-freedom decisions in American history. The court explicitly noted that it was not deciding the question of whether the newspapers themselves violated the law and could be ultimately prosecuted. The ruling was confined solely to the question of prior restraint. And there, the Court emphatically ruled that “every moment’s continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment.” Ellsberg never intended to conceal his identity as the leaker by hiding behind journalistic anonymity. To the contrary, he viewed his willingness to come forward, voluntarily identify himself, and explain his rationale to the American people to be at least as important as the Pentagon Papers themselves. He viewed his ability to argue to the American people why his actions were not only justified but morally obligatory — both prior to his trial and at the trial on the stand — as a crucial opportunity to convince Americans that the Vietnam War was immoral and based on lies. He evaded the FBI manhunt just long enough to ensure publication. And then, already indicted for 12 felony counts including violations of the Espionage Act, he turned himself in. Daniel Ellsberg and wife walk from court right after a federal judge just dismissed the Pentagon Papers case against him. BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES At the federal building in Boston where he turned himself in, he was asked by a journalist whether he regretted what he did given that he now faced multiple felony charges and a 115-year prison term sought by the government. His reply: “How can you measure the jeopardy I’m in … to the penalty that has been paid already by 50,000 American families and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families? It would be utterly presumptuous of me to pity myself, and I do not.” Ellsberg presumed that leaking the Pentagon Papers would not only subject him to criminal prosecution but also attempted character assassination. He was most certainly right about that. The government’s attempts to attack and malign Ellsberg were malicious and deranged — so much so that they are what saved him from life in prison. Several Nixon White House officials, including John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger, attempted — invoking a tactic well familiar to Americans now — to suggest he was a Kremlin agent. A 1971 memo about Ellsberg written by Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who ended up at the Nixon White House, where he later played a major role in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee that led to the Watergate scandal, was leaked to The New York Times. In it, Hunt argued that the best way to destroy Ellsberg’s reputation and thus distract attention from the revelations of the government lying about the war would be to tie Ellsberg to Moscow in the public’s imagination (sound familiar?). Hunt reasoned that while there was no evidence to substantiate the accusation, they should publicly emphasize that “the distinct possibility remains that Ellsberg’s ‘higher order’ [which he said outweighed his duty to obey the law by keeping the Pentagon Papers concealed] will one day be revealed as the Soviet Fatherland.” The former CIA operative also argued — in reasoning often used today — that “the leaders of North Vietnam, Red China, and the Soviet Union were the undoubted beneficiaries of Ellsberg’s revelations,” and that Americans could convinced that Ellsberg’s intentions were not a noble desire to inform Americans but rather a treasonous attempt to strengthen the country’s enemies. But the most twisted attack on Ellsberg was one so shocking to the conscience that it caused the federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against him. This plot came from a group of former CIA and FBI agents working in the Nixon White House as the so-called plumbers (to deal with leaks). They orchestrated a break-in into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to discover Ellsberg’s sexual proclivities and other psychosexual secrets. When first learning about the Pentagon Papers, I recall struggling for years trying to understand why Nixon officials would believe that revelations about Ellsberg’s sexual fantasies and sex life would effectively undermine the proof offered by the Pentagon Papers of deliberate government deceit. It seemed like the ultimate non sequitur. From a strictly logical framework, it was. But these veteran intelligence agency operatives had been around Washington for decades, and knew that nothing destroys one’s reputation like a sex scandal, or anything of a sexual nature that makes a person so distasteful in the eyes of the public that they want nothing to do with anything relating to them. If a person is seen as sufficiently tawdry and strange, then the public temptation is to simply turn away from anything the person has to offer. That is why it is so common in Washington for scandals about a person’s private life or innuendo about their sexual proclivities to be weaponized to discredit their revelations and other arguments. It may not be logical, but it is a form of character assassination that plays on our natural instincts for tribal acceptance and societal conformity. The White House Plumbers were masters of the political dark arts, and Ellsberg, himself having spent more than a decade at the highest levels of institutional power, knew that the attacks he would endure would extend far beyond purely legal ones. His moral courage and tireless commitment to exposing the corruption and systemic deceit of the U.S. security state never even slowed down as he entered his nineties. The burglars did succeed in finding at least one of Ellsberg’s psychiatric files, but it contained few valuable revelations to support a smear campaign. The former CIA officials became convinced that the real dirt on Ellsberg was at the psychiatrist’s house, but White House counsel John Dean refused to approve of the second break-in. Yet this dirtiest of dirty tricks proved highly consequential. It became the precursor to the Watergate break-in nine months later. And it played a major role in the ruling by Ellberg’s judge to dismiss the prosecution of him on the grounds of governmental misconduct (the government had also illegally wiretapped Ellsberg’s calls). Absent that break-in, there is a high likelihood that Ellsberg, who had admitted leaking the Pentagon Papers, would have spent decades if not his entire life behind bars. Ellsberg’s primary plan at trial was to argue to his jury that his leaking the Pentagon Papers was justified and morally necessary even if it were illegal. But that plan was quickly destroyed when the judge, during Ellsberg’s testimony, ruled that no such defense can be raised under the Espionage Act. Every time Ellsberg attempted to argue that he was morally justified in leaking these documents, the judge would interject before he could speak more than a few words and order him to stop. That adverse ruling — that the 1917 Espionage Act is a strict liability statute that requires conviction as long as an unauthorized leak can be proven, and that no “justification” defense or any other arguments about motive is permitted — led to an explosion of the use of this statute in the decades that followed. That blast reached its maximum radius in the 2010s, when President Obama oversaw the prosecution of eight whistleblowers under this law — more than all previous presidents combined. In 2013, the Obama DOJ brought charges under this 1917 law against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. While attempting to flee to South American to obtain asylum, Snowden was trapped by Obama officials in Russia, after they invalidated his passport and coerced the Cubans into withdrawing their guarantee of safe passage. Leaders of both parties dared Snowden to come back to the U.S. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry said Snowden should “man up” and argue to a jury of his American peers that he was justified in leaking the surveillance behemoth’s secrets. But Snowden knew, because of Ellsberg’s example, raising such a defense was impossible. He saw how Ellsberg was silenced at his trial every time he attempted to explain his actions. Under that 1917 law, no such defense of whistleblowers is permitted. For that reason, Ellsberg was scathing of Obama’s attacks on whistleblowers such as Snowden and Manning. He told The Washington Post in a 2013 interview that one of his secondary motives for leaking the Pentagon Papers was “the hope of changing the tolerance of executive secrecy that had grown up over the last quarter of a century both in Congress and the courts and in the public at large.” While he believes that the Pentagon Papers and the subsequent Watergate scandal partially ushered in reforms, he told the Post that most of those reforms designed to prevent the U.S. security state from abusing its secrecy powers and lying to the American public had crumbled, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Ellsberg assigned a significant amount of blame to President Obama for aggressively eroding many of those reforms. He argued in that interview that Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, should have been fired for illegally spying on numerous journalists including Fox News’ James Rosen. Holder’s firing, Ellsberg said, would be a “first step of resistance in the right direction, of rolling back Obama’s campaign against journalism, freedom of the press in national security.” And he scoffed at the idea that Obama was any better than Nixon when it came to press freedoms: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case,” he said. The interview itself was centered on Ellsberg’s vocal defense of Chelsea Manning, who provided tens of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Indeed, in all of Ellsberg’s actions and statements, one can find the hallmarks and motives of the next generation’s most famous and consequential whistleblowers and secret-spillers: Assange, Snowden, and Manning, who spent seven years in a military prison for exposing the inner workings of the American war machine in Afghanistan and Iraq and the corruption of other regimes around the world. There is little doubt that most if not all of them were inspired, directly or indirectly, by Ellsberg. And it thus makes complete sense that he regarded that trio in particular as his heroes, and spent the past decade of his life acting as one of their most vocal and steadfast defenders. Ellsberg said Snowden, by knowingly risking life in prison to prove that senior Obama officials had lied about NSA spying, “show[ed] the kind of courage that we expect of people on the battlefield.” When Snowden’s critics tried to use Ellsberg to attack Snowden’s decision to leave the U.S. rather than stay to fight, Ellsberg penned an op-ed for The Washington Post headlined: “Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S.” He argued that — unlike during the time when he leaked, when he was out on bail and was able to defend himself publicly in the media — those accused of national security crimes in the U.S. are now, even before trial, immediately imprisoned, held incommunicado, and treated like terrorists before they are found guilty: Ellsberg prepares to join a sit-in group in April 1978; he referred to Rocky Flats’ nuclear production as “a movable holocaust.” LYN ALWEIS/THE DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now, and close to no chance that had he not left the country he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Manning, incommunicado. Ellsberg similarly championed Assange, testifying in his defense in Assange’s U.K. extradition hearing in 2020 that Assange and Ellsberg’s actions were identical. He insisted that the WikiLeaks founder “cannot get a fair trial for what he has done under these charges in the United States.” While Assange has always been in a different position from the other three — given that he never worked for the U.S. government and thus had no legal obligation to maintain its secrets — Ellsberg always said he saw the four of them as kindred spirits. What united all of them, in his view, was that they faced the same adversary (a U.S. security state that chronically abuses it secrecy powers to lie to the American people); were confronted with the same dilemma (holding the proof of those lies in their hands but knowing that the proof had been classified in such a way as to make disclosure by them a likely felony); and ultimately all made the same remarkably courageous and self-sacrificing choice (knowingly risking life in prison, to no profit for themselves, in order to allow their fellow citizens to learn the truth about what the government is doing in the dark and in their name). Snowden told me in our very first conversation that he refused to remain anonymous after leaking NSA documents, and that instead he felt it was his moral duty to voluntarily identify himself and explain to the public his reasons for revealing the truth. As I struggled in that Hong Kong hotel room to understand why someone at the age of 29 was willing to go to prison for decades in order to reveal the truth — the outcome that was by far Snowden’s likeliest outcome, as he well knew — the only instrument I could find for understanding self-sacrifice of that magnitude was Daniel Ellsberg. That someone at the age of 40 would be willing to spend the rest of his life in prison for a political cause both mystified and excited me. Ellsberg occupied a central place in my childhood imagination about heroism, integrity, and courage. When Snowden told me that he could not live with himself if he knew he had the power to stop indiscriminate, secret, and unconstitutional NSA spying but was too scared to do so, one could hear the echoes of Ellsberg’s own explanation for his choice. And when I heard exactly the same retrospective resolve, expressed in the same unflinching ethical certainty, when speaking with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, I immediately recognized its genesis. The Pentagon Papers were so historically significant, and the aggressive courage of Ellsberg was so striking, that it will likely obscure many of his other consequential accomplishments. Last month, I interviewed the longtime Harvard economist and Washington insider-turned-dissident Jeffrey Sachs, and he admiringly mentioned Ellsberg’s work several times, none of which was related to the Pentagon Papers. That included Ellsberg’s dare in 2021 for the U.S. government to arrest him. In an attempt to warn Americans of the dangers of the U.S. role in Ukraine, which he vehemently opposed, Ellsberg released a top-secret document showing that the U.S. had intended in 1958 to launch a first-strike nuclear attack against China after it had seized several islands off the coast of Taiwan. He viewed the risk of nuclear confrontation from the war in Ukraine — an ever-escalating proxy war between the two nations with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles — as disturbingly high. He wanted to remind Americans that nuclear war is not some unthinkable, borderline-impossible outcome but one that has very realistically been considered many times during the Cold War, a species-terminating disaster that remains very present as long as countries remain nuclear-armed and engaged in conflicts. Given that the document had never been declassified, Ellsberg insisted that what he did was no different from what Assange, Manning, and Snowden had done, and wanted to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act at the age of 90 to highlight the injustices of those prosecutions. He was daring — even urging — the U.S. government to prosecute him under the same theories it is using for Assange and Snowden. Sachs also cited Ellsberg’s 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine, as one of the most important historical accounts of the U.S. nuclear program by someone who helped design it, all as a way of highlighting the very real and ongoing dangers of nuclear war. Ellsberg may have been most famous for his wilful defiance and dramatic encounter with the U.S. government 52 years ago. But his moral courage and tireless commitment to exposing the corruption and systemic deceit of the U.S. security state never even slowed down as he entered his nineties. I would listen to him for hours explicate with such precision and perfect memory the intricacies of nuclear policy from the 1960s, or be inspired as he urged us to take significant risks in pursuit of what he saw as just, or watched as he continued his tireless work in the same exact spirit that motivated the Pentagon Papers leak and his unblinking willingness to go to prison for it. As I did, I felt nothing but gratitude that I was able to meet my hero, and awe over the rich layers of his character, moral courage, and heroism that I could not possibly have known had he remained an abstraction or an image for me. One might assume that someone who came very close to spending the rest of their life behind bars — saved only by the particularly egregious conduct of the government they sought to expose — would harbor at least some doubt, some regret about their choice. Ellsberg did have one misgiving. It was this: “My one regret, a growing regret really, is that I didn’t release those documents much earlier, when I think they would have been much more effective.” Credit... Andres Gonzalez for The New York Times Opinion Daniel Ellsberg Never Ran Out of Secrets By Alex Kingsbury Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board. March 24, 2023 This article was updated after Daniel Ellsberg’s death. Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers and his activism against nuclear weapons, announced in March that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Mr. Ellsberg, who died on Friday at 92, copied the military’s secret 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War and gave it to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1971. The government sued to stop publication, but the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment right of a free press against prior restraint. The papers produced a wave of anger at the government for having lied about the conduct of the war, which was already unpopular. In 1971, Mr. Ellsberg faced numerous charges, including violating the 1917 Espionage Act, but charges were dismissed in 1973 because of government misconduct. In 2021, he revealed that the government had drawn up plans to attack China with nuclear weapons during a crisis over the Taiwan Strait in 1958. With tensions rising between the United States and China, public distrust of the government running high and nuclear threats being lobbed over the war in Ukraine, his life’s work seems as relevant as it ever was. Months before his death, Mr. Ellsberg agreed to speak with Times Opinion at his California home about the lessons he’s learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q. As you look around the world today, what scares you? A. I’m leaving a world in terrible shape and terrible in all ways that I’ve tried to help make better during my years. President Biden is right when he says that this is the most dangerous time, with respect to nuclear war, since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s not the world I hoped to see in 2023. And that’s where it is. I also don’t think the world is going to deal with the climate crisis. We’ve known, since the 2016 Paris agreement and before, that the U.S. had to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That’s not going to happen. Q. The number of people with the security clearances to view classified material has expanded, perhaps exponentially, since the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and I wonder, aside from a few people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, why haven’t there been more Dan Ellsbergs? Why aren’t there more people who, when presented with evidence of something that they find morally objectionable, disclose it? A. Why aren’t there more? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut. As Snowden said to me and others, “Everybody I dealt with said that what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting.” The same thing was true for many of my colleagues in government who opposed the war. Of course, people are worried about the consequences. Before my case and the Obama administration’s prosecutions of whistle-blowers, they needn’t have been worried about going to jail. But apart from that, they fear losing their jobs, their careers, risking the clearances on which their jobs depend. People who have these clearances have often invested a lifetime in demonstrating that they can be entrusted to keep secrets. That trust becomes a part of your identity, which it is difficult to sacrifice, so that one loses track of a sense of higher responsibility — as a citizen, as a human being. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, surrenders at the U.S. Courthouse in Boston on June 28, 1971, accompanied by his wife, Patricia. Credit... Donal F. Holway/The New York Times Q. We tend to think of the classification system as a system of protection. But you sometimes talk about it, and I think correctly, as a system of control. A. That is what it is. It is a protection system against the revelation of mistakes, false predictions, embarrassments of various kinds and maybe even crimes. And then the secrecy system in its application is predominantly to protect officials, administrations from embarrassment and from accountability, from the possibility that their rivals will pick these things up and beat them over the head with it. Their rivals for office, for instance. Q. How should the average reader understand the difference between the importance of a risotto recipe that was disclosed by the Russian hack of John Podesta’s email account and serious secrets like those disclosed by Snowden? Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, who studies secrecy, for instance, once called the indiscriminate disclosure of military files by WikiLeaks a kind of “information vandalism.” I disagree with Steve. I think he greatly underestimates the amount of overclassification. The media as a whole has never really investigated the secrecy system and what it’s for and what its effects are. For example, the best people on declassification outside the media, the National Security Archive, month after month, year after year, put out newly disclosed classified information that they have worked sometimes three or four years, 10 years, 20 years to make public. Very little of that was justified to be kept from the public that long, if at all. An expert estimated in Congress in 1971 that 5 percent of classified information met the criteria for secrecy at the time it was classified, and after a few years that decreased to half of 1 percent. Q. What’s it like to live surrounded by thoughts of nuclear war and unaccountable government? A. In my office, an assistant of mine once put up little labels to show parts of the bookshelves and especially the drawers in my files. And my wife came down and saw “genocide,” “torture,” “massacre,” “terrorism,” you know, “bombing civilians,” and she said, how can I be married to somebody who has files like this in the office? And so this is California, this is Berkeley, so a bunch of her friends came down with burning sage and exorcised my office. But that has been my life since I started work at the RAND Corporation in 1958. I think about nuclear war not because I find it fascinating but because I want to prevent it, to make it unthinkable, because I care about the world that it would destroy. Q. Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense during the Cuban missile crisis, once said, “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” Why haven’t we seen nuclear weapons used since 1945? A. We have seen nuclear weapons used many times. And they’re being used right now by both sides in Ukraine. They’re being used as threats, just as a bank robber uses a gun, even if he doesn’t pull the trigger. You’re lucky if you can get your way in some part without pulling the trigger. And we’ve done that dozens of times. But eventually, as any gambler knows, your luck runs out. For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine. We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I’m worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff. President Biden campaigned in 2020 on a promise to declare a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. He should keep that promise, and the world should demand the same commitment from Putin. Q. How are you feeling? A. Great. I was appreciating life even before the CT scan, and then a couple of weeks later had an M.R.I. and then a second CT and was told I have three to six months. It has been said that it’s good to live each day as though it were your last, but that’s not really practical. Living this month as though it is my last is working out very well for me, and I can recommend it. I thought it was pretentious to say publicly, you know, well, I have pancreatic cancer. But my sons both thought I should share the news with friends, and that was also an opportunity to encourage them to continue the work for peace and care for the planet. As I said, my work of the past 40 years to avert the prospects of nuclear war has little to show for it. But I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time and that as I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude. SCHEERPOST.COM Remembering The Legend: Indispensable Truth Seeker Daniel Ellsberg DANIEL ELLSBERG IN MEMORIAM Remembering The Legend: Indispensable Truth Seeker Daniel Ellsberg by EDITOR June 16, 2023 Remembering the legendary life of a rare legend in American history. ScheerPost publisher Robert Scheer and Daniel Ellsberg. By Diego Ramos / Original to ScheerPost It is with great sadness that ScheerPost has learned of the death of legendary American figure Daniel Ellsberg. His work as a whistleblower, activist and advocate for government transparency is irreplaceable and without him, the country would be missing a crucial part of its history. His courage, conviction and commitment to challenging government secrecy and ensuring accountability ushered in a lasting dialogue in American politics that led to the revelations of people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. We send our condolences and best wishes to Daniel’s family and friends. Feel free to explore this archive of Ellsberg’s appearances on Robert Scheer’s Scheer Intelligence podcast over the years as well as links to his other works on the site: Joe Lauria on Ellsberg calling to be indicted for having the same unauthorized possession of classified material as Julian Assange. Daniel Ellsberg’s address to the Belmarsh Tribunal. Norman Solomon’s tribute to Ellsberg’s impact. Dan Ellsberg Receives the Sam Adams Award. Patrick Lawrence on Ellsberg’s legacy. Maj. Danny Sjursen’s tribute to Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg reflection on life and career. Daniel Ellsberg on Nuclear War and Ukraine. Ron Kovic’s letter to Ellsberg. From November 2017: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner Scheer Intelligence Daniel Ellsberg: The Doomsday Machine Daniel Ellsberg talks about why he leaked the Pentagon Papers and why there aren’t more whistleblowers today, diving into the revelations from Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Ellsberg also discusses the beginnings of his career and the importance of nuclear deterrence for the future of the planet. To read the full transcript, click here. Some quotes from this episode: I waited almost 40 years for someone else to put a lot of information out, and that was Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning. And then three years later, Ed Snowden. Had there been a Chelsea Manning or Ed Snowden, both willing to risk their lives and certainly their freedom forever, in order to tell these truths about the war, which were–they were telling nothing that was unknown–what they were telling was known to hundreds to thousands of others, as you’ve said. That was also true of going into Iraq. Had they been at a high enough level to have that access–they didn’t have to be officials, they could be staff assistants, like myself, or researchers or whatever–or they could be officials who knew that we were being lied into a hopeless, desperate, aggressive war, as happened in 2002 to our attack on Iraq. Had they been at a high level and told us what was going on, I believe there would be no attack in Iraq, and the Middle East would look entirely different, and entirely less bad than it does now. But they don’t come very often. They do exist, and why not? People don’t ask themselves, what should I be doing about these lies that I know of? What should I be doing about this desperate–and they–should I be willing to risk my career? [W]ar with Russia, which is a real possibility over Ukraine, should not be on the table. Because war with Russia is very different from war with Vietnam or Iraq or Iran. It means almost surely escalation to nuclear war, which leads–and this is another factor in my book–we now know leads to nuclear winter. The diminution of sunlight by the smoke from burning cities, which will kill harvests and starve nearly everyone on earth. So what the book shows is that our leaders, one of the things that they have needed to keep secret is that they have been consciously gambling with the possibility of ending most life on Earth all this time. {W]e are, I think, a covert empire in the sense where “covert” means an operation that is not merely secret, but it’s plausibly denial. It is denied that we are an empire. The means we use are secret and denied; “We don’t torture, we don’t assassinate”; actually, we do. But we not only do that secretly, but we deny that we do it. And you produce evidence. By the way, it gets into what we’ve been talking, in a way–you deliberately arrange for evidence that will support your denial, which is untrue. Cover identities, cover actions of various kinds, that seem to be suggesting that you were something other than what you are, like a spy. In particular, to protect the president from being recognized as the author of any of these criminal, murderous, and often hopeless actions to protect him from accountability. To imply that if it’s not American, it’s not even happening; but if it is happening, it’s not by us; if it’s by us, it’s not by the defense department, it’s some rogue

The following are from books about I.F. Stone, the muckraking journalist and analyst of the 20th century. First, (D.D. Guttenplan. American Radical: the Life and Times of I.F. Stone.) Stone described Nixon as a “slick kind of Arrow-[shirt]-collar ad Fascist with a cynical contempt for the masses.” (xiii, 281) “There were moments [during the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960] when he tried to smile which were downright frightening; he looked like an undertaker congratulating a steady customer on another death in the family.” Stone also hated that Nixon authored the Internal Security Act and that he “was so ready for war over Indochina in 1954.” (349) Truman’s removal of Henry Wallace from his administration over how to deal with the USSR after World War II led to the Democratic Party defeat in the 1948 elections which gave us Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. (220) Vice President Nixon wanted to President Eisenhower to send troops to South Vietnam in 1956. (390) The following are from, Myra McPherson. “All Governments Lie” : the Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone. On his rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China, “Stone cheerfully noted that President Nixon dealt with the ruler who had been a convenient enemy for Congressman Nixon when he’d smeared Democrats for having lost China.” (255) McPherson notes that in the 1950s Richard Nixon was described as “middle-of-the-road” and “conservative papers like the Washington Star and The New York Times were being classified as part of the left wing press.” (330) “Stone gave his readers a history lesson when Nixon campaigned as a peace candidate 1968. Don’t be fooled, he said. Eisenhower and Nixon were elected as peace candidates in 1952 and . . . Eisenhower had hardly finished making peace in Korea when Nixon was ready to plunge the U.S. into war in Indochina. . . . He backed MacArthur against Truman over Korea and was for bombing Chinese bases, and unleashing Chiang Kai-shek. In 1960 Stone had headlined a warning, Nixon Was Wrong About Vietnam, when most Americans had no idea what was happening there.” (380) 1969 - “The Old Nixon Surfaces Again. No Communist regime ever rewrote history more blatantly than Richard Nixon in his November 3 speech on Vietnam. Nixon tried to blame Vietnam on the Democrats, but the truth is that 15 years ago Nixon [as vice president] was doing his best to prevent peace from breaking out in Vietnam and he failed because Eisenhower would not support him. . . . This has been Nixon’s war for a long time.” Stone believed that Nixon was “not averse to using nuclear weapons. Nixon still wants to contain China and to keep Vietnam as a base for that purpose. Vietnam’s self-determination had nothing to do with it.” (410) The anti-war protesters “ultimately did what the right said it did. It kept Johnson and Nixon from waging an intensely escalated nuclear war, which would have widened the conflict with disastrous global consequences.” (419) I.F. Stone knew of “Nixons’ curdling paranoia and secrecy before it became common knowledge.” (419) Nixon and his pro-Vietnam War cronies” tapped into an older generation’s anger, fear, and uncertainty about these kids with long hair . . . many of them were their own children.” (419-420) Stone “mocked his [Nixon’s] murky promises of troop withdrawal and peace talks. The firm withdrawal date was always Mañana. (427) Spring 1971 saw the largest antiwar demonstration with 500,000 people protesting. “Nixon had counted on apathy since replacing the draft with a lottery and promising to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese. The peace movement has risen bigger than ever, from the ashes of Vietnamization, wrote Stone, but he worried that the protesters were overwhelmingly white and middle class.” (428) Stone asked why the war should continue with peace made with China. After all, wasn’t the war justified to stop the spread of Chinese communism? (432)

Andy Borowitz wrote an excellent book with this title tracing our Trump affliction back to Reagan. He documents outright conservative lies.

Robert K. Brigham, professor of History at Vassar College and a specialist in American Diplomatic History including the Vietnam War, wrote an outstanding book, Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the tragedy of Vietnam. While Kissinger is touted in the media as a diplomatically astute statesman Brigham details what many people already knew: that he is an “egotistical and rash politician.” He had no “great master plan or Bismarckian theory that supported how the US continued the war or conducted peace negotiations. Its length was doubled for nothing but the ego and poor judgment of a single figure [Kissinger].

This posting is a cursory view with selected books on US History in general. I am interested in changes in historians’ points of view and things over the years. One of the books I am using is the New Deal: a modern history by Michael Hiltzik, published in 2011. Why did the Great Depression occur? He cites left leaning economic theorist Stuart chase as describing the cause of the Great Depression as “over investment in industrial plants and production during the 1920s. He surveyed possible remedies, rejecting violent revolution or the dictatorship of big business in favor of a third road; central regulation leading to a progressive revision of the economic structure, avoiding an utter break with the past.” (Michael Hiltzik. New Deal: a modern history. 2011. 2)

Taft Hartley Act The reason for the Taft-Hartley Act was the resurgence and power of labor unions not that they had been led or organized by communists. The whole concern about communist infiltration being a Soviet plot was a ruse to cut the power of the industrial worker in America. Intellectual and activist writer Chris Hedges, as well as long-time activist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, have pointed out in the last few years that the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 emasculated labor unions and is one of the causes of inertia in any left-wing resistance against the power elite. I similarly noticed that lacking of union activism after 1947 in 1988, and so wrote my Master’s thesis arguing that the Taft Hartley Act caused the conservatism in American labor unions as it forbade militants of the 1930s from serving as officers in unions. I was told that most historians would disagree; that is problematic. However, there is a lot more to the story than that. I have selected a few books and articles expressing different points of view and things about the subject. Labor resurrected its organizing in the 1930s during the Great Depression with sit-down strikes and more. Through President Roosevelt they were able to get Congress to pass the Wagner Act which allowed workers to organize into unions. The caveat was that now labor was dependent on the government for its legitimacy. But that’s another story. Following World War II much of the American public was furious at unions which went on strike during the war. And, so, were in no mood to see more strikes after the war. However, 1946 saw a “great strike wave.” This enabled those reactionaries who had opposed the Wagner Act to get traction and propose limits on the actions of unions. (Thomas R. Brooks. Toil and Trouble: a history of American Labor. 1971. 223; (Ronald W. Schatz. The Electrical Workers: a history of labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-1960. 1983. 178) However, the Taft-Hartley Act is described as punitive by Brooks. “The AFL attacked the new measure as a slave-labor bill.” United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis agreed. (Ronald W. Schatz. The Electrical Workers: a history of labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-1960. 1983. 179) The President of the United States can break a strike if he finds a strike detrimental to the interests of the country. Nevertheless, Brooks, and others, believe that the impact on “major unions was minimal.” The negative consequences are for the smaller unions and those wishing to organize unions. The employers are allowed to comment on union organizing in such a way as to combat it. (Thomas R. Brooks. Toil and Trouble: a history of American Labor. 1971. 225-226) In addition, the Act allowed for states to “pass legislation that could override provisions of the national law. [state’s rights] . . . The common feature of this legislation is the strong anti-union bias. The union-shop and maintenance-of-membership clauses in union contracts, as well as closed shop (forbidden by Taft-Hartley) are outlawed.” (Thomas R. Brooks. Toil and Trouble: a history of American Labor. 1971. 226) The legal process of filing an unfair labor practice lasts so long as to be ineffective. (Thomas R. Brooks. Toil and Trouble: a history of American Labor. 1971. 226) There was also the infighting among the unions over whether or not to allow communists in the unions and be officers. Anyone being a member of an organization espousing the overthrow of the American government could not be an officer in a labor union and, the union could not receive protection from the National Labor Relations Board. Communists were key organizers for unions in the 1930s especially in creating the CIO. It did not help that before World War II the Communists in America made understood their allegiance to the word of Josef Stalin. (Thomas R. Brooks. Toil and Trouble: a history of American Labor. 1971. 227) “AFL and CIO leaders were panicked and enraged by the law’s restrictions on union power.” (John E. Haynes. Red Scare or Red Menace?: American communism and anti-communism in the cold war era. 132) However, unions resisted expelling their best organizers, Communists. On the other hand, communists in the unions meant the unions were vulnerable. (Zeinert, Karen. McCarthy and the Fear of Communism in American History. 77) The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act allowed anti-communist CIO leadership to purge their unions. And, former supporters of communist membership in unions switched and became anti-communist. All this thought to benefit unions in the long run. (John E. Haynes. Red Scare or Red Menace?: American communism and anti-communism in the cold war era. 125) Philip Murray had tolerated communists in the unions from the 1930s but the post World War II period he was pressured to change his point of view. In addition, many leftists did not trust the communists. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union broke with the communists in 1947. The Maritime Union drove out their formerly popular communist members. (John E. Haynes. Red Scare or Red Menace?: American communism and anti-communism in the cold war era. 131) The Taft-Hartley Act played well for the anti-communist union leadership. (Ronald W. Schatz. The Electrical Workers: a history of labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-1960. 1983. 179) Chris Hedges writes that the Taft-Hartley Act was “the single most destructive piece of legislation to the union movement, was a product of anticommunist hysteria.” Union membership has dropped from about 50% of American workers to 12% now. “The Taft-Hartley Act . . . prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, and secondary boycotts-union strikes against employers who continue to do business with a firm that is undergoing a strike.” Also, prohibited were closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. All union officers were forced to sign noncommunist affidavits or lose their positions. . . . states were allowed to pass right -to-work laws that outlawed union shops. . . . The act effectively demobilized the labor movement. It severely curtailed the ability to organize and strike and purged the last vestiges of militant labor leaders fro the ranks of unions.” Labor leaders argued that Republican Party victories in 1948 would mean harsher laws against them. (John E. Haynes. Red Scare or Red Menace?: American communism and anti-communism in the cold war era. 132) However, the consequences of the Taft-Hartley Act are much more nuanced. For instance, Susan Dudley Gold writes in her young adult book, Taft-Hartley Act, on page 108, that section 14(h) was the most significant part of the Taft-Hartley Act because that provision allowed states to adopt right to work laws. Other Points Of View And Things of the affect of the Taft-Hartley Act That it was basically the beliefs of the National Association of Manufacturers. These beliefs “corrected” earlier labor legislation the business community thought too favorable to the unions. The changes were of the Wagner Act which allowed unions to form in the first place. The Taft-Hartley Act abolished the closed shop; prevent discrimination against an employee who had conflicts with previous unions; ending boycotts; charging excessive union initiation fees; and, “attempting to cause an employer to pay for work not actually performed.” (Joseph G. Rayback. A History of American Labor. 398) Employers could sue unions for breaches of “contract, illegal boycotts, and strikes.” The “attorney general of the United States could “secure an injunction prohibiting” a strike.(Joseph G. Rayback. A History of American Labor. 399) Not surprisingly, labor union leaders were furious. Philip Murray said the law was “conceived in sin.” William Green claimed the bill was vindictive. However, the egregious part of the legislation was the “anti-communist affidavits which, they claimed, made labor leaders into second-class citizens; to the clauses permitting use of injunctions and requiring strike polls at the end of cooling-off periods which, they charged would hamper collective bargaining; to the sections prohibiting a closed shop and employer discrimination against employees who were dropped from unions for reasons other than non-payment of dues which, they claimed, would make it difficult to maintain union discipline; and finally to Section 14(b) which permitted states to outlaw union shops even though the Taft-Hartley Act approved of them, which they alleged, was an open invitation to engage in union busting by law.” (Joseph G. Rayback. A History of American Labor. 400) The famed Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Clinton Jencks was targeted by the FBI for his work on the film Salt of the Earth. The charge was that he lied on the non-communist affidavit even though he was a “relatively minor functionary.” (336) The non-communist affidavits were designed to weed Communists out of the labor movement. Otherwise unions could not use the “services of the National Labor Relations Board.” (336) Interestingly, the concern was “about belief in and support for Communism” not just being a communist. This violated the first amendment. “Many noncommunist labor leaders-John L. Lewis and CIO president Philip Murray among them - refused to sign the affidavits. They saw them as both an attack on free speech and a special burden on labor.” Anti-communist unionists used the Taft-Hartley Act to expel leftists from power. (337) Some companies used their supposed fear of Russian domination as a “ploy to disguise their intransigence over wages and working conditions. They wrapped themselves in the flag and claimed that national security was at stake. . . Unable to rely on the NLRB, the noncomplying unions had to adopt more militant tactics . . . As a result, strikes became both more common and more bitter.” (337)

John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and said that, “there is nothing in South Vietnam . . . that realistically threatens the United States of America. . . . height of criminal hypocrisy. . . . arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.” The reality is that the United States does not want to admit that it made a mistake going to war in Vietnam and, so President Nixon won’t be the “first President to lose a war. . . . How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” The leaders of the United States who led the country into war in Vietnam have “retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude.” (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. 357)

Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. i. The Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular. In addition, despite some arguing otherwise, the war was “undeclared and therefore in the opinion of many citizens illegal and unconstitutional as well.” (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. (xi) ii. Zaroulis and Sullivan debunk the conservative propaganda that the antiwar movement was “inspired or led by foreign powers. It was a homegrown movement of the left which eventually encompassed the entire political spectrum.” The protestors believed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Despite U.S. government efforts, using police and intelligence agencies at all levels of government, to the contrary there was no proof that the peace movement was part of an “international Communist conspiracy.” Ironically, the Communists and Socialists who believed in overthrowing capitalism were not sanguine about the probability. (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. xii) The antiwar movement was not a violent movement of cowards afraid to fight for their country. It was begun and led by lifelong pacifists, many of them devoutly religious men and women who practiced nonviolence as part of their faith. Its membership was overwhelmingly peaceful. In addition, they “rendered years of harassment, surveillance, court trials, failings, and, in the case of armed forces deserters or draft refusers, long separation from home, family, and friends. (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. xii) The movement was led by people over thirty years of age. It was not a movement of sexually promiscuous young people. They were ordinary citizens. (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. xii)

Operation Dewey Canyon III was an event where nearly one thousand Vietnam veterans threw their medals over a fence. Most expressed enormous regret for what they had to do to get those medals. (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. 358) Vietnam Veterans Against the War protested the Miami Beach convention of the the Republican Party in 1972. Three veterans were in wheelchairs. One was Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July. Their hatred of Richard Nixon was palpable. (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. 391) Kovic recalled, as Nixon spoke at the convention the veterans who had obtained passes to enter”shouted at the top of our lungs, Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war . . . security agents immediately threw up their arms, trying to hid us from the cameras and the President. . . . Hundreds of people around us began to clap and shout, Four more years, trying to drown out our protest. . . . A short guy with a big four more years button read up to me and spat in my face. Traitor he screamed, as he was yanked back by police. . . . I served two tours of duty in Vietnam. . . . I gave three quarters of my body for America. And what do I get? Spit in the face. . . . I sat in my chair . . . and began to cry.” (Nancy Zaroulis and and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up?: American protest against the war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. 1984. 392)