Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon Papers exposing Vietnam War secrets, dies at 92

Daniel Ellsberg, the history-making American whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 about the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 92.

Daniel Ellsberg, the history-making American whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, has died at the age of 92. By leaking the Papers, he revealed longtime government doubts and deceit about the Vietnam War and inspired acts of retaliation by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation.

Ellsberg, who announced in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, died Friday morning, according to a letter from his family released by a spokeswoman, Julia Pacetti.

Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite. He was a Harvard graduate and self-defined “cold warrior” who served as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances and came to be trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.

He was especially valued, he would later note, for his “talent for discretion.”

But like millions of other Americans, in and out of government, he had turned against the yearslong war in Vietnam, the government’s claims that the battle was winnable and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the U.S.-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region. Unlike so many other war opponents, he was in a special position to make a difference.

“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. “By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war.”

As much as anyone, Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience — who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. David Halberstam, the late author and Vietnam War correspondent who had known Ellsberg since both were posted overseas, would describe him as no ordinary convert. He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious and profoundly sensitive, a born proselytiser who “saw political events in terms of moral absolutes” and demanded consequences for abuses of power.