Daniel Ellsberg died last Friday at age 92 after having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February. His extraordinary life had a lasting influence on many people, including me.
When Ellsberg, who worked for the RAND Corporation as a consultant to the Pentagon, photocopied the 7,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War and gave it to the press, I was a junior in college with a student deferment, contemplating the likelihood of being drafted after graduation.
I considered going to Canada rather than fight in an immoral war, and I went so far as to buy a share in a communal farm in Nova Scotia with a group of antiwar friends at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. A favorable number in the draft lottery kept me from leaving the country. I had been studying music at Harvard, but Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, which were published by the New York Times in 1971, and the events that followed set me on a different path, into journalism.
The exposure of the crimes of President Richard Nixon that led to his resignation is usually credited to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their investigations into the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel.
The so-called White House Plumbers who carried out that burglary were created not to damage Nixon’s political rivals but to destroy Daniel Ellsberg.
Nixon had ordered his thugs to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal his medical records. That was just one of the acts of official misconduct so egregious that the courts ultimately threw out the charges against Ellsberg for stealing government secrets.
The Pentagon Papers helped turn public opinion against the war, and the efforts of journalists who kept working after Ellsberg’s leak to expose government corruption and lies led me to start a small newspaper in 1973.
Why did Ellsberg do what he did, knowing that he could easily go to prison for decades? He was inspired by young people who resisted the draft and were jailed. “You didn’t have to have a Ph.D. in international relations to see the truth about the war in Vietnam,” Ellsberg told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now shortly before his death. “You don’t have to be an ichthyologist to know when a fish stinks. These young people said, ‘No, this is wrong. You have to do this over our bodies. We will not participate in this.’ ”
Our big national news outlets have changed profoundly in 50 years, losing much of their power to command respect and trust and to expose corruption. Some of them brazenly traffic in lies. But young people are still inspired by the promise of good reporting. Here at the Independent, we had dozens of applicants for our summer fellowships from students who see the connection between journalism and a just democracy. That gives us hope. I think Daniel Ellsberg would have agreed.
