Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers Whistleblower, Dies at 92

Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers and triggered a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedom, died Friday at his home in Kensington, California. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said in a statement.

Ellsberg became one of America's most famous whistleblowers in 1971 when he gave copies of the classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to the New York Times and other newspapers. The 7,000-page report revealed how four successive presidents, from Truman to Johnson, had lied to the public and Congress about the scope and prospects of the war.

Ellsberg, a Harvard-trained economist and former Marine officer, had worked for the Defense Department, the State Department and the RAND Corporation. He had initially supported the war but became disillusioned after witnessing its horrors firsthand in Vietnam in 1965.

He hoped that publishing the Pentagon Papers would expose the deception behind the war and hasten its end. He also wanted to challenge the Nixon administration's efforts to suppress dissent and intimidate the press.

His actions sparked a legal and political firestorm that reached the highest levels of government. The Nixon administration tried to stop the publication of the papers, claiming they would harm national security and diplomatic relations. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 in favor of the newspapers' right to publish.

The court's decision was a historic victory for freedom of the press and a blow to Nixon's attempts to expand executive power. It also fueled public outrage over the war and contributed to Nixon's downfall.

Ellsberg himself faced espionage and theft charges that could have landed him in prison for life. But his case was dismissed in 1973 after revelations of government misconduct, including illegal wiretaps and a break-in at his psychiatrist's office by Nixon's operatives.

Ellsberg remained an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and a champion of civil disobedience and whistleblowing. He supported other leakers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed U.S. war crimes and mass surveillance programs.

He also continued to advocate for nuclear disarmament and peace activism. In 2017, he published a memoir titled The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, in which he revealed that he had also copied thousands of pages of documents on U.S. nuclear plans and risks, but they were lost before he could release them.

Ellsberg is survived by his wife Patricia Marx Ellsberg, whom he married in 1970; his children Robert Ellsberg and Mary Ellsberg; his son-in-law Michael Waldman; his daughter-in-law Kate Edgar; and five grandchildren.

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