Among the exposés Anderson reported were the Nixon administration's investigation and harassment of John Lennon during its fight to deport Lennon; the continuing activities of fugitive Nazi officials in South America; and the savings and loan crisis. He revealed the history of a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro and was credited for breaking the story of the Iran–Contra affair under President Reagan. He said that the scoop was "spiked" because the story had become too close to President Ronald Reagan.
Anderson's aptitude for journalism appeared at the early age of 12 when he began writing the Boy Scouts Column for The Deseret News. He published his first articles in his local newspaper, The Murray Eagle. He edited his high school newspaper, The Granitian. He joined The Salt Lake Tribune in 1940, where his muckraking exploits included infiltrating polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sects. In 1944, he joined the United States Merchant Marine and served on cargo ships that went to New Guinea and India. In the spring of 1945, he resigned from the Merchant Marine, and became a war correspondent stationed in Chungking, China. Shortly after World War II ended, he was drafted into the United States Army, and served until the fall of 1946 as an armed forces newsman and radio broadcaster. While in the Army, Anderson worked on the Shanghai edition of Stars and Stripes, produced by troops and XMHA, the Armed Forces' radio station. After his stint in the Army, Anderson was hired by Drew Pearson
for the staff of his column, the "Merry-Go-Round". When Pearson died in
1969, Anderson inherited responsibility for this column and gave his
own name to it – Washington Merry-go-Round.
In its heyday, Anderson's column was the most influential and widely
read in the U.S.; published in nearly a thousand newspapers, he reached
an audience of 40 million people. He co-founded Citizens Against Government Waste with J. Peter Grace in 1984.
Muckraker
Anderson feuded with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, when he exposed the scope of the Mafia, a threat that Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover's retaliation and continual harassment lasted into the 1970s. Hoover once described Anderson as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures."
Anderson told his staff, "Let's do to Hoover what he does to others," and he instructed them to go through Hoover's garbage, a tactic the FBI used in its surveillance of political dissidents. Anderson's revelations about Hoover tipped the attitudes of the public and the press towards the FBI director.
Anderson grew close to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the two exchanged information from sources. When Pearson
went after McCarthy, Anderson reluctantly followed at first, then
actively assisted with the eventual downfall of his onetime friend.
In the mid-1960s Anderson exposed the corruption of Senator Thomas J. Dodd and unearthed a memo by an ITT executive admitting the company made large donations to Richard Nixon's campaign to so that Nixon would stymie anti-trust prosecution. His reporting on Nixon-ITT corruption earned him a place on the Master list of Nixon's political opponents.
Anderson collaborated with Pearson on The Case Against Congress, published in 1968.
Other topics that Anderson covered included organized crime, the John F. Kennedy assassination, Ted Kennedy's role in the drowning death of a staffer at the Chappaquiddick incident, the Watergate scandal, the 1970 meeting between Elvis Presley and President Nixon, fugitive Nazis, the white supremacist organization the Liberty Lobby and other far-right organizations, the death of Howard Hughes, the ABSCAM public corruption investigation, the investigation into fugitive financier Robert Vesco, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the activities of numerous Washington agencies, elected officials, and bureaucrats.
Retractions
Anderson's
column occasionally published erroneous information for which he issued
retractions. During the 1972 presidential race, Anderson retracted a
story accusing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton of multiple drunk driving arrests. But Eagleton's campaign was already severely damaged, and he was dropped from the ticket.
Targeted for assassination
In 1972 Anderson was the target of an assassination plot conceived by senior White House staff. Two Nixon administration conspirators admitted under oath that they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from senior White House aide Charles Colson.
White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with a CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging. The plot was aborted when the plotters were arrested for the Watergate break-in.
Nixon had long been angry with Anderson. He blamed the fallout from
Anderson's election-eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to
Nixon's brother for Nixon's loss of the 1960 presidential election.
Project Mudhen
Beginning
in February 1972, Anderson was the subject of a CIA project called
Project Mudhen (also referred to as Operation Mudhen) aiming to find the
sources of his articles.
Over the course of three months, ending April 12, 1972, the CIA
actively spied on Anderson, whose code name in the project was "Brandy".
The CIA ended Mudhen after being unsuccessful at finding his sources
and believing that Anderson was beginning to suspect he was being spied
on by the CIA, which was able to collect a large file on his personal
movements, his family, and the fact that he drove too fast occasionally.
He later used documents he had been given about the project as part of a
lawsuit against Richard Nixon and other government officials in 1977
claiming "that the agencies and officials committed various illegal acts
and violated his constitutional rights to free speech and privacy".
Anderson has been credited as breaking to a nationwide audience in 1975 the story of the Glomar Explorer, a ship constructed under tight security by the CIA to recover the lost nuclear-armed Soviet submarine K-129. Rejecting a plea from the Director of Central IntelligenceWilliam Colby
to suppress the story, Anderson said he published the story because
"Navy experts have told us that the sunken sub contains no real secrets
and that the project, therefore, is a waste of the taxpayers' money."
JFK conspiracy allegations
In November 1988 Anderson hosted a two-hour prime-time television special entitled American Expose: Who Murdered JFK?The program asserted that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a conspiracy involving an alliance between organized crime and the Cuban government, and that the Warren Commission did not publicly reveal the true findings. Anderson's theory was based on interviews with mobster John Roselli who – prior to his death 12 years earlier – said he learned of a conspiracy through mob sources. Anderson's conversations with Roselli were re-enacted with an actor portraying Roselli. According to Anderson, Cuban leader Fidel Castro wanted Kennedy killed in retaliation for CIA plots to kill Castro, and leaders of La Cosa Nostra in the United States opposed him due to his brother Robert F. Kennedy's efforts as US Attorney General against organized crime. He said that Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Jimmy Hoffa had the "motive and means to kill the president", and reiterated reports connecting Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to the mob.Anderson also alleged that President Lyndon B. Johnson covered up the conspiracy for fear that public knowledge of the CIA plots would trigger war with the Soviet Union.
According to Anderson's report, private photographic analysts
concluded that the shot that killed Kennedy came from the front, and
that E. Howard Hunt and James Earl Ray were depicted in photographs of the "three tramps". Hunt denied the charge on the program and said he had witnesses who could prove he was not in Dallas. An Associated Press (AP) writer described it as a "bizarre allegation," to which Anderson provided "no explanation of their alleged connection".
Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Daily
called the program "limp" and said Anderson's conclusion that organized
crime was responsible for the assassination was based "on
circumstantial evidence and the word of dead gangster Johnny Roselli." Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was "tawdry and strident" and said Anderson's "so-called evidence was unclear, unconvincing and untrustworthy." The Deseret News said Anderson was trying to "rewrite history".
Capitol security stunt
To demonstrate the weak security within the U.S. Capitol, in 1989, Anderson brought a gun to an interview in the office of Bob Dole, Senate minority leader. He was reprimanded and Congress passed a change of rules for reporters' access to the Capitol and politicians.
Legmen and alumni
Investigative reporter Les Whitten
shared the byline of Anderson's column in the 1970s. Anderson also used
a staff of "legmen" on his payroll, who earned little but gained
valuable reporting experience. Among Anderson's legmen—reporters who
went out into the field and gathered the information, forwarding it to
writers such as Anderson—was Brit Hume, later a television reporter for ABC News and Washington managing editor for the Fox News Channel.
Death and aftermath
Anderson was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1986. In July 2004, at the age of 81, Anderson retired from his syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease on December 17, 2005.
In April 2006, Anderson's son Kevin said that some FBI agents had
approached his mother (Jack's widow), Olivia, earlier that year to gain
access to his father's files. This was purportedly in connection with
the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal.
FBI spokesmen said that Anderson's archives contained classified
information and confirmed that they wanted to remove the papers before
they were made public. The agents claimed to be looking for documents pertaining to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as part of an espionage investigation. In November 2006, the FBI quietly gave up its pursuit of the archive. The Chronicle of Higher Education
reported that the archive contains Anderson's CIA file, along with
information he had compiled about prominent public figures such as
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Dodd, and J. Edgar Hoover.
In January 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917
along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a maximum
sentence of 115 years. Because of governmental misconduct and illegal
evidence-gathering (committed by the same people who would later be
involved in the Watergate scandal), and his defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg in May 1973.
Ellsberg was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 7, 1931, the son of Harry and Adele (Charsky) Ellsberg. His parents were Ashkenazi Jews who had converted to Christian Science,
and he was raised as a Christian Scientist. In 2008, Ellsberg told a
journalist that his parents considered the family Jewish, "but not in
religion."
Ellsberg grew up in Detroit and attended the Cranbrook School in nearby Bloomfield Hills. His mother wanted him to be a concert pianist,
but he stopped playing in July 1948, two years after both his mother
and sister were killed when his father fell asleep at the wheel and
crashed the family car into a bridge abutment.
Ellsberg completed a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1962. His dissertation on decision theory was based on a set of thought experiments that showed that decisions under conditions of uncertainty or ambiguity generally may not be consistent with well-defined subjective probabilities. Now known as the Ellsberg paradox, it formed the basis of a large literature that has developed since the 1980s, including approaches such as Choquet expected utility and info-gap decision theory.
On his return from South Vietnam, Ellsberg resumed working at
RAND. In 1967, he contributed with 33 other analysts to a top-secret
47-volume study of classified documents on the conduct of the Vietnam War, commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara and supervised by Leslie H. Gelb and Morton Halperin. These 7,000 pages of documents, completed in late 1968 and presented to McNamara and Clark Clifford early in the following year, later became known collectively as the "Pentagon Papers".
Disaffection with Vietnam War
By 1969, Ellsberg began attending anti-war events while still remaining in his position at RAND. In April 1968, Ellsberg attended a Princeton University conference on "Revolution in a Changing World", where he met Gandhian peace activist Janaki Natarajan Tschannerl from India, who had a profound influence on him, and Eqbal Ahmed, a Pakistani fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute later to be indicted with Rev. Philip Berrigan
for anti-war activism. Ellsberg particularly recalled Tschannerl
saying "In my world, there are no enemies", and that "she gave me a
vision, as a Gandhian, of a different way of living and resistance, of
exercising power nonviolently."
Decades later, Ellsberg described his reaction to hearing Kehler speak:
And
he said this very calmly. I hadn't known that he was about to be
sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock,
because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my
country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It
wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the
example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed
that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very
deliberate choice – because he thought it was the right thing to do.
There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an
unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young
men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted
men's room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing.
The only time in my life I've reacted to something like that.
Reflecting on Kehler's decision, Ellsberg added:
Randy
Kehler never thought his going to prison would end the war. If I hadn't
met Randy Kehler it wouldn't have occurred to me to copy [the Pentagon
Papers]. His actions spoke to me as no mere words would have done. He
put the right question in my mind at the right time.
After leaving RAND, Ellsberg was employed as a senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies from 1970 to 1972.
In a 2002 memoir, Ellsberg wrote about the Vietnam War, stating that:
It was no more a "civil war" after 1955 or 1960 than it
had been during the U.S.–supported French attempt at colonial
reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped and
paid by a foreign power – which dictated the nature of the local regime
in its own interest – was not a civil war. To say that we had
"interfered" in what is "really a civil war," as most American academic
writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply
screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier
official one of "aggression from the North." In terms of the UN Charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.
The Pentagon Papers
Ellsberg, speaking at a press conference, New York City, 1972
In late 1969, with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo,
Ellsberg secretly made several sets of photocopies of the classified
documents to which he had access; these later became known as the Pentagon Papers.
They revealed that, early on, the government had knowledge that the war
as then resourced could most likely not be won. Further, as an editor
of The New York Times was to write much later, these documents "demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance".
Shortly after Ellsberg copied the documents, he resolved to meet
some of the people who had influenced both his change of heart on the
war and his decision to act. One of them was Randy Kehler. Another was
the poet Gary Snyder,
whom he had met in Kyoto in 1960, and with whom he had argued about
U.S. foreign policy; Ellsberg was finally prepared to concede that
Snyder had been right, about both the situation and the need for action
against it.
Release and publication
Throughout 1970, Ellsberg covertly attempted to persuade a few sympathetic U.S. Senators—among them J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern,
a leading opponent of the war—to release the papers on the Senate
floor, because a Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said on
the record before the Senate.
Ellsberg allowed some copies of the documents to circulate privately, including among scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Marcus Raskin and Ralph Stavins.Ellsberg also shared the documents with The New York Times correspondent and former Vietnam-era acquaintance Neil Sheehan, who wrote a story based on what he had received both directly from Ellsberg and from contacts at IPS.While Ellsberg had asked him to only take notes of the documents in his apartment, Sheehan defied Ellsberg's wishes on March 2,
by frantically copying them in various Boston-area shops while Ellsberg
was vacationing in the West Indies. Sheehan then flew the copies to his
home in Washington and then New York.
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, The New York Times published the first of nine excerpts from, and commentaries on, the 7,000-page collection. For 15 days, The New York Times was prevented from publishing its articles by court order requested by the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, while eluding an FBI manhunt for thirteen days, Ellsberg gave the documents to Ben Bagdikian, then-national editor of The Washington Post and former RAND Corporation colleague, in a Boston-area motel. On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the resumption of publication by The New York Times (New York Times Co. v. United States).
Two days prior to the Supreme Court's decision, Ellsberg publicly
admitted his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the press, and
surrendered to federal authorities at the U.S. Attorney's office in
Boston.
On June 29, 1971, U.S. Senator Mike Gravel
of Alaska entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his
Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds—pages which he had received
from Ellsberg via Ben Bagdikian on June 26.
Fallout
The release of these papers was politically embarrassing not only to those involved in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but also to the incumbent Nixon administration. Nixon's Oval Office tape from June 14, 1971, shows H. R. Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon:
Duration: 14 minutes and 4 seconds.14:04Nixon Oval Office meeting with H.R. Haldeman, Monday, June 14, 1971, 3:09 pm. (Quote begins at about 7:30 into the recording) Transcript here
Rumsfeld
was making this point this morning... To the ordinary guy, all this is a
bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear
thing.... You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they
say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the—the implicit
infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in
America, is badly hurt by this, because It shows that people do things
the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can
be wrong.
John Mitchell, Nixon's Attorney General, almost immediately issued a telegram to The New York Times ordering that it halt publication. The New York Times refused, and the government brought suit against it.
Although The New York Times eventually won the case before the Supreme Court, prior to that, an appellate court ordered that the New York Times
temporarily halt further publication. This was the first time the
federal government was able to restrain the publication of a major
newspaper since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War. Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to seventeen other newspapers in rapid succession. The right of the press to publish the papers was upheld in New York Times Co. v. United States. The Supreme Court ruling has been called one of the "modern pillars" of First Amendment rights with respect to freedom of the press.
In response to the leaks, Nixon White House staffers began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young, under the supervision of John Ehrlichman, created the "White House Plumbers", which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries. Richard Holbrooke,
a friend of Ellsberg, came to see him as "one of those accidental
characters of history who show the pattern of a whole era" and thought
that he was the "triggering mechanism for events which would link
Vietnam and Watergate in one continuous 1961-to-1975 story."
In August 1971, Krogh and Young met with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt in a basement office in the Old Executive Office Building.
Hunt and Liddy recommended a "covert operation" to get a "mother lode"
of information about Ellsberg's mental state to discredit him. Krogh and
Young sent a memo to Ehrlichman seeking his approval for a "covert
operation [to] be undertaken to examine all of the medical files still
held by Ellsberg's psychiatrist", Lewis Fielding. Ehrlichman approved
under the condition that it be "done under your assurance that it is not
traceable."
On September 3, 1971, the burglary of Fielding's office—titled
"Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1" in Ehrlichman's notes—was carried out
by White House Plumbers Hunt, Liddy, Eugenio Martínez, Felipe de Diego, and Bernard Barker (the latter three were, or had been, recruited CIA agents).
The Plumbers found Ellsberg's file, but it apparently did not contain
the potentially embarrassing information they sought, as they left it
discarded on the floor of Fielding's office.
Hunt and Liddy subsequently planned to break into Fielding's home, but
Ehrlichman did not approve the second burglary. The break-in was not
known to Ellsberg or to the public until it came to light during
Ellsberg's and Russo's trial in April 1973.
Trial and dismissal
On June 28, 1971, two days before a Supreme Court ruling saying that a federal judge had ruled incorrectly about the right of The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston. In admitting to giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:
I felt that as an American citizen,
as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing
this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own
jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this
decision.
He and Russo faced charges under the Espionage Act of 1917
and other charges including theft and conspiracy, carrying a total
maximum sentence of 115 years for Ellsberg and 35 years for Russo. Their
trial commenced in Los Angeles on January 3, 1973, presided over by
U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr.
Ellsberg tried to claim that the documents were "illegally" classified
to keep them not from an enemy, but from the American public. However,
that argument was ruled "irrelevant", and Ellsberg was silenced before
he could begin. In a 2014 interview, Ellsberg stated that his "lawyer,
exasperated, said he 'had never heard of a case where a defendant was
not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did.' The judge
responded: 'Well, you're hearing one now'. And so it has been with every
subsequent whistleblower under indictment".
In spite of being effectively denied a defense, Ellsberg began to
see events turn in his favor when the break-in of Fielding's office was
revealed to Judge Byrne in a memo on April 26; Byrne ordered that it be
shared with the defense.
On May 9, further evidence of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg was revealed in court. The FBI had recorded numerous conversations between Morton Halperin and Ellsberg without a court order, and furthermore the prosecution had failed to share this evidence with the defense.
During the trial, Byrne also revealed that he personally met twice with
John Ehrlichman, who offered him directorship of the FBI. Byrne said he
refused to consider the offer while the Ellsberg case was pending,
though he was criticized for even agreeing to meet with Ehrlichman
during the case.
Artist David Rose's rendering of attorneys during the 1973 trial of Ellsberg and Russo in Los Angeles
Because of the gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson,
Judge Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo on May 11,
1973, after the government claimed it had lost records of wiretapping
against Ellsberg. Byrne ruled: "The totality of the circumstances of
this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice.
The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this
case."
It was also revealed in 1973, during Ellsberg's trial, that the telephone calls of Morton Halperin, a member of the U.S. National Security Council staff suspected of leaking information about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia to The New York Times, were being recorded by the FBI at the request of Henry Kissinger to J. Edgar Hoover.
Halperin and his family sued several federal officials, claiming the wiretap violated their Fourth Amendment rights and Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
The court agreed that Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, and H. R. Haldeman
had violated the Halperins' Fourth Amendment rights and awarded them $1
in nominal damages.
Plumbers' Ellsberg neutralization proposal
Ellsberg later claimed that after his trial ended, Watergate prosecutor William H. Merrill informed him of an aborted plot by Liddy and the "Plumbers" to have 12 Cuban Americans who had previously worked for the CIA
"totally incapacitate" Ellsberg when he appeared at a public rally. It
is unclear whether they were meant to assassinate Ellsberg or merely to
hospitalize him.
In his autobiography, Liddy describes an "Ellsberg neutralization
proposal" originating from Howard Hunt, which involved drugging Ellsberg
with LSD,
by dissolving it in his soup, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington to
"have Ellsberg incoherent by the time he was to speak" and thus "make
him appear a near burnt-out drug case" and "discredit him". The plot
involved waiters from the Miami Cuban
community. According to Liddy, when the plan was finally approved,
"there was no longer enough lead time to get the Cuban waiters up from
their Miami hotels and into place in the Washington Hotel where the
dinner was to take place" and the plan was "put into abeyance pending
another opportunity."
Activism and views
Ellsberg's first published book was Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1972). The book included a revised version of Ellsberg's earlier
award-winning "The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine", originally
published in Public Policy, and ends with "The Responsibility of Officials in a Criminal War".
After the Vietnam War, Ellsberg continued his political activism,
giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events. Reflecting
on his time in government, Ellsberg said the following, based on his
extensive access to classified material:
The public is lied to every day by
the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can't handle
the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of
reasons, you couldn't stay in the government at that level, or you're
made aware of it, a week. ... The fact is Presidents rarely say the
whole truth—essentially, never say the whole truth—of what they expect
and what they're doing and what they believe and why they're doing it
and rarely refrain from lying, actually, about these matters.
Release of classified documents proposing 1958 nuclear attack on China
On May 22, 2021, during the Biden administration, The New York Times
reported Ellsberg had released classified documents revealing the
Pentagon in 1958 drew up plans to launch a nuclear attack on China amid
tensions over the Taiwan Strait.
According to the documents, US military leaders supported a first-use
nuclear strike even though they believed China's ally, the Soviet Union,
would retaliate and millions of people would perish. Ellsberg told The New York Times he copied the classified documents about the Taiwan Strait crisis
fifty years earlier when he copied the Pentagon Papers, but chose not
to release the documents then. Instead, Ellsberg released the documents
in the spring of 2021 because he said he was concerned about mounting
tensions between the U.S. and China over the fate of Taiwan.
He assumed the Pentagon was involved again in contingency planning for a
nuclear strike on China should a military conflict with conventional
weapons fail to deliver a decisive victory. "I do not believe the
participants were more stupid or thoughtless than those in between or in
the current cabinet", said Ellsberg, who urged President Biden,
Congress and the public to take notice.
In releasing the classified documents, Ellsberg offered himself
as a defendant in a test case challenging the U.S. Justice Department's
use of the Espionage Act of 1917
to punish whistleblowers. Ellsberg noted the Act applies to everyone,
not just spies, and prohibits a defendant from explaining the reasons
for revealing classified information in the public interest.
Anti-war activism
In an interview with Democracy Now
on May 18, 2018, Ellsberg was critical of U.S. intervention overseas
especially in the Middle East, stating, "I think, in Iraq, America has
never faced up to the number of people who have died because of our invasion, our aggression against Iraq, and Afghanistan over the last 30 years, since we first inspired a CIA-sponsoredjihad against the Soviets there, and led to the invasion by the Soviets. What we've done to the Middle East has been hell."
Ellsberg was arrested, in November 2005, for violating a county ordinance for trespassing while protesting against George W. Bush's conduct of the Iraq War.
Ellsberg criticized the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq.
Activism against US military action against Iran
In September 2006, Ellsberg wrote in Harper's Magazine
that he hoped someone would leak information about a potential U.S.
invasion of Iran before the invasion happened, to stop the war.
In a speech on March 30, 2008, in San Francisco's Unitarian Universalist church, Ellsberg observed that House SpeakerNancy Pelosi does not have the authority to declare impeachment
"off the table", as she had done with respect to George W. Bush. The
oath of office taken by members of congress requires them to "defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic". He also pointed out that under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, treaties, including the United Nations Charter
and international labor rights accords that the United States has
signed, become the supreme law of the land that neither the states, the
president, nor the congress have the power to break. For example, if the
Congress votes to authorize an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation,
that authorization would not make the attack legal. A president citing
the authorization as just cause could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
In June 2022, he said that "The Russian invasion of Ukraine has
made the world far more dangerous, not only in the short run, but in
ways that may be irreversible. It is a tragic and criminal attack. We
are seeing humanity at its almost worst, but not quite the worst — so
far, since 1945 we haven't seen nuclear war."
Ellsberg speaking in 2008Ellsberg with Robert Rosenthal in 2008At San Francisco Pride Parade 2013
Support for American whistleblowers
Ellsberg said that in regard to former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, what she has is "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers". He also participated in the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition founded by Edmonds, and in 2008, he condemned many U.S. media outlets for purportedly ignoring articles about Edmonds's allegations regarding nuclear proliferation published in The Sunday Times.
On December 9, 2010, Ellsberg appeared on The Colbert Report where he commented that the existence of WikiLeaks helps to build a better government.
On June 10, 2013, Ellsberg published an editorial in The Guardian newspaper praising the actions of former Booz Allen worker Edward Snowden in revealing top-secret surveillance programs of the NSA.
Ellsberg believed that the United States had fallen into an "abyss" of
total tyranny, but said that because of Snowden's revelations, "I see
the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss."
In June 2013, Ellsberg and numerous celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning.
In June 2010, Ellsberg was interviewed regarding the parallels between his actions in releasing the Pentagon Papers and those of Manning, who was arrested by the U.S. military in Iraq after allegedly providing to WikiLeaks a classified video showing U.S. military helicopter gunships strafing and killing Iraqis
alleged to be civilians. Ellsberg said that he fears for Manning and
for Julian Assange, as he feared for himself after the initial
publication of the Pentagon Papers. WikiLeaks initially said it had not received the cables, but did plan to post the video of an attack that killed 86 to 145 Afghan civilians
in the village of Garani. Ellsberg expressed hope that either Assange
or President Obama would post the video, and expressed his strong
support for Assange and Manning, whom he called "two new heroes of
mine".
Democracy Now!
devoted a substantial portion of its July 4, 2013, program to "How the
Pentagon Papers Came to be Published By the Beacon Press Told by Daniel
Ellsberg & Others." Ellsberg said there are hundreds of public
officials right now who know that the public is being lied to about
Iran. If they follow orders, they may become complicit in starting an
unnecessary war. If they are faithful to their oath to protect the Constitution of the United States,
they could prevent that war. Exposing official lies could however carry
a heavy personal cost as they could be imprisoned for unlawful
disclosure of classified information.
In 2020, Ellsberg testified in defense of Assange during Assange's extradition hearings. Ellsberg spoke out vociferously against the threats to press freedom from such whistleblower prosecution.
In a December 2022 interview with BBC News, Ellsberg said that he was given all of the Manning information before it came out in the press by Assange.
In December 2017, Ellsberg published The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He said that his primary job from 1958 until releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was as a nuclear war planner for United States presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
He concluded that United States nuclear war policy was completely crazy
and he could no longer live with himself without doing what he could to
expose it, even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life in
prison. However, he also felt that as long as the U.S. was still
involved in the Vietnam War, the United States electorate would not
likely listen to a discussion of nuclear war policy. He therefore copied
two sets of documents, planning to release first the Pentagon Papers and later documentation of nuclear war plans. However, the nuclear planning materials were hidden in a landfill and then lost during an unexpected tropical storm.
His overriding concerns were as follows:
As long as the world maintains large nuclear arsenals, it is not a matter of if, but when, a nuclear war will occur.
The vast majority of the population of an initiator state would likely starve to death during a "nuclear autumn" or "nuclear winter"
if they did not die earlier from retaliation or fallout. If the
nuclear war dropped only roughly 100 nuclear weapons on cities, as in a war between India and Pakistan, the effect would be similar to the "Year Without a Summer" that followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, except that it would last more like a decade, because soot would not settle out of the stratosphere
as quickly as the volcanic debris, and roughly a third of the people
worldwide not killed by the nuclear exchange would starve to death,
because of the resulting crop failures. However, if more than roughly 2
percent of the U.S. nuclear arsenal were used, the results would more
likely be a nuclear winter, leading to the deaths from starvation of 98 percent of people worldwide not killed by the nuclear exchange.
To preserve the ability of a nuclear-weapon state to retaliate from a "decapitation" attack, every country with nuclear weapons seems to have delegated broadly the authority to respond to an apparent nuclear attack.
As an example of the third concern, Ellsberg discussed an interview he had in 1958 with a major, who commanded a squadron of 12 F-100 fighter-bombers at Kunsan Air Base, South Korea. His aircraft were equipped with Mark 28thermonuclear weapons with a yield of 1.1 megatons each, roughly half the explosive power of all the bombs dropped by the U.S. in World War II both in Europe and the Pacific. The major said his official orders were to wait for orders from his superiors in Osan Air Base,
South Korea, or in Japan before ordering his F-100s into the air.
However, the major also said that standard military doctrine required
him to protect his forces. That meant that if he had reason to believe
that a war had already begun when his communications with Osan and Japan
were broken, he was required to launch his dozen F-100s with their
thermonuclear weapons. They never practiced that launch, because the
risk of an accident was too great. Ellsberg then asked what might
happen if he gave such launch orders and the sixth plane succumbed to a
thermonuclear accident on the runway. After some thought, the major
agreed that the five planes already in the air would likely conclude
that a nuclear war had begun, and they would likely deliver their warheads to their preassigned targets.
According to Ellsberg the "nuclear football" carried by an aide near the U.S. president at all times is primarily a piece of political theater, a hoax, to keep the public ignorant of the real problems of nuclear command and control.
In Russia, this included a semi-automatic "Dead Hand"
system, whereby a nuclear explosion in Moscow, whether accidental or by
a foreign state or terrorists, would induce low-level officers to
launch ICBMs
toward targets in the U.S., presumed to be the origin of such attacks.
The first ICBMs launched in this way "would beep a Go signal to any
ICBM sites they passed over", which would launch those other ICBMs
without further human intervention.
Nuclear threats by the United States
Ellsberg wrote in his 1981 essay Call to Mutiny
that, "every president from Truman to Reagan, with the possible
exception of Ford, has felt compelled to consider or direct serious
preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or
strategic nuclear warfare".
Some of these threats were implicit; many were explicit. Many
governmental officials and authors claimed that those threats made major
contributions to achieving important policy objectives. Ellsberg's
examples are summarized in the following table:
To deter an attack on Chinese nuclear capability, 1969–70, or a
Soviet response to possible Chinese intervention against India in the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, or an intervention in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
North Vietnam
Secret threats of massive escalation of the Vietnam War, including possible use of nuclear weapons, 1969–1972.
Korean axe murder incident, in which two US army officers were killed while trying to trim a tree blocking open observation of the Demilitarized Zone. Two days later, the tree was cut to a stump 6 meters tall in a massive show of force that included a B-52 nuclear-capable bomber flying straight toward Pyongyang
escorted by high performance fighter aircraft, while a US aircraft
carrier task force moved into station just offshore. Ellsberg noted
that it might be more accurate to classify this incident not as "nuclear threat" but a "show of force".
The Carter Doctrine on the Middle East to deter the Soviets, already in Afghanistan, from moving next door into Iran to try to control the Persian Gulf, through which the majority of the world's oil flowed at that time.
Ellsberg was married twice. His first marriage was in 1952 to Carol Cummings, a graduate of Radcliffe (now Harvard College)
whose father was a Marine Corps brigadier general. It lasted 13 years
before ending in divorce (at her request, as he stated in his memoir Secrets). They have two children, Robert Ellsberg and Mary Ellsberg. In 1970, he married Patricia Marx, daughter of toy maker Louis Marx. They lived for some time afterward in Mill Valley, California. They have a son, Michael Ellsberg, who is an author and journalist.
In February 2023, Ellsberg was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three to six months to live; he publicly disclosed his diagnosis the following month. Ellsberg died at his home in Kensington, California, on June 16, 2023, at the age of 92.
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