Daniel Ellsberg (7 April 1931-16 June 2023) was an American activist and former military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. He was sentenced to 115 years in prison, but the charges against him were dropped in 1973 due to governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering.
Biography[]
Daniel Ellsberg was born in Chicago, Illinois on 7 April 1931 to Ashkenazi Jewish parents who had converted to Christian Science. He graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1952 and enlisted in the US Marine Corps two years later, being discharged in 1957 as a first lieutenant. In 1958, he became a strategic analyst for the RAND Corporation, and, in his 1962 dissertation from Harvard, he created the "Ellsberg paradox", which stated that decisions influenced by uncertainty or ambiguity may not be consistent with subjective probabilities. From August 1964, he worked in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and he worked in South Vietnam for the State Department for two years. From 1967 to 1968, he worked on the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which had been commissioned by McNamara to evaluate the conduct of the Vietnam War; the papers revealed that the war was unwinnable.
By 1969, Ellsberg had begun to attend anti-war events while still working for RAND, and, in late 1969, he secretly made several sets of photocopies of the classified documents to which he had access. He failed to convince Democratic Party senators to release the papers on the US Senate floor (as Senators could not be prosecuted for saying anything on record before the Senate), so he instead sent the papers to several newspapers. On 13 June 1971, The New York Times published the first of nine excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, but it was later ordered to halt their publication in the first governmental censorship of a newspaper since the American Civil War. On 28 June 1971, Ellsberg turned himself in in Boston, and he was tried for espionage before the charges were dropped in 1973 as a result of the Watergate scandal.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg continued to be an activist, opposing the Iraq War and military action against Iran, while supporting whistleblowers, WikiLeaks, and the Occupy movement. He died in 2023 at the age of 92.