That convulsive chapter in the history of the United States that goes from the Vietnam War to the resignation in 1974 of President Richard Nixon due to the Watergate scandal came a little closer to its closure this Friday with the death at the age of 92 of Daniel Ellsberg , legendary leaker of the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg died at his home in Kensington, California, his family confirmed in a statement.. In March he had made public that he had incurable pancreatic cancer.
In 1971, he shared with Neil Sheehan, editor of The New York Times Died in 2021, a voluminous dossier that told the story of the United States’ involvement in Indochina from World War II to May 1968. Its preparation was commissioned in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. His idea was to compile a compendium of warfare wisdom so that those who came after him would learn from the mistakes he had made. The pentagon papers They served to open the eyes of Americans by demonstrating that the Administration of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson had consciously lied to public opinion, as well as to Congress, about the true role of power in the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg, a former defense consultant who was working in the private sector at the time of the leak, participated in that report with 36 other experts. The more than 7,000 pages of it ended up being declassified in 2011. He made a copy of the papers in 1969 in the hope that if they saw the light it would hasten the end of the war, which he had begun to strongly oppose. For the leak, he was charged with conspiracy, espionage and theft of government-owned documents, charges of which he would later be exonerated.
That decision to throw in the blanket was made, he later explained, out of pacifist conviction years after having spent 18 months accompanying soldiers on the ground in Vietnam, where he was able to verify the brutality of the war. The epiphany finally came to her after attending a meeting of anti-war activists. “I left the auditorium and went into the bathroom, which was empty,” she wrote in 2002 in her memoirs. “I sat on the ground and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. It’s the only time in my life that something like this happened to me.” In those pages, she also recalled the disappointment of “an entire generation” in the face of a “desperate and endless” war.
The leak had enormous and varied consequences. He made history of freedom of expression in the United States, when President Richard Nixon, who had been president since 1969, obtained a court order to stop the publication of the Times, that he began dedicating front pages to the phenomenal exclusive on June 13, 1971, arguing that national security was at stake.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
That sparked a heated First Amendment debate that ended up in the Supreme Court. On June 30, 1971, its nine members decided by a vote of six to three to allow publication. As he Times as the washington post, to which other media were later added, they were then able to continue with the dissemination of these revelations. The coverage earned the New York newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Nixon was not overly concerned at first with the Pentagon Papers; after all, his revelations stopped before he took possession. Even so, it ended up spelling the beginning of his end when, egged on by Henry Kissinger, he took it personally to punish Ellsberg and offer a deterrent example to those tempted to take his path. He decided to form a team of “White House plumbers” to whom he provided secret funding to get to work. “You can’t let the Jew [por Ellsberg] steal those things and get away with it. Do you understand? ”, he told his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, in the illegal recordings of the president’s conversations in the Oval Office that would be key in his collapse.
“Nixon understood that winning or losing his presidency [en las siguientes elecciones] depended on his foreign policy,” writes Garrett M. Graff in Watergate: A New History (2022). “The pentagon papers They threatened his entire plan in that matter.” The undercover espionage apparatus snowballed, ending with the raid on the Democrats’ office at the Watergate apartments in Washington. That event gave rise to another great story of modern American journalism, told by, among others, Bob Woodward and Leonard Bernstein, reporters for The Washington Post. Caught by his lies, Nixon would eventually resign in 1974.
How did the leak occur? pentagon papers It was a matter that remained for half a century protected by the confidentiality agreement between the journalist and his sources, until Sheehan died a couple of years ago. He left instructions that his journal of his entire life publish an interview made six years earlier in which he finally told his story. Ellsberg, fearful of the consequences of his decision, only allowed him to read the papers, but not take them with him. Taking advantage of an oversight of this, the reporter ended up taking them out of the leaker’s apartment in Boston, and assembled a growing team of journalists in a New York hotel to comb the reports to make them news.
Sheehan was not the one who revealed the identity of Ellsberg, who ended up turning himself in to the authorities. National security adviser Henry Kissinger, who was once his friend and who survives him, called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
Nixon’s anger ended up being a boon for Ellsberg, who was facing up to 100 years in prison. They tried him in Boston and Los Angeles. In the first city, the trial was annulled when it was learned that the government had tapped telephone conversations between a defense witness and his lawyer. The Los Angeles judge dismissed the charges after learning that Gordon Libby and Howard Hunt, the most notorious White House plumbers, had stolen the defendant’s psychological reports from his psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills.
Converted after that feat into a writer and activist, Ellsberg announced on March 1 in an email to his inner circle that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer and that he was not going to go through the trance of chemotherapy; the doctors had offered him no guarantee of success. He also detailed how he planned to spend what time he had left: giving talks or interviews about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about the dangers of atomic weapons, and about the importance of protecting the First Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression.
In that letter, which he later made public on Twitter, he wrote: “When I copied the pentagon papers In 1969, there were plenty of reasons to think that I would spend the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate he would have gladly accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, something that seemed (and was) unlikely then. However, and in ways that were quite unpredictable for me, that was what ended up happening (…) and I was able to spend the last 50 years with my wife, Patricia, with my family, and with you, my friends”.
During that half century, Ellsberg was an activist for free speech and against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and was a staunch opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also advocated for the defense of other leakers, for whom he was always a role model; from the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, who revealed secrets of the United States surveillance program.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
#Daniel #Ellsberg #Pentagon #Papers #leaker #dies