Daniel Ellsberg

His father fell asleep at the wheel in 1946 and drove the family car into a bridge abutment, killing Ellsberg's mother and his sister. His mother had wanted a concert pianist. In July 1948 he stopped playing. He had been born in Chicago in 1931 to Ashkenazi Jewish parents who converted to Christian Science, and raised in Detroit. Harvard took him on a scholarship, gave him a summa cum laude degree in economics in 1952 and a doctorate in 1962 on why people choosing under uncertainty do not behave as the mathematics predicts. In between he enlisted in the Marines and served as a platoon leader and company commander. From 1959 he was at the RAND Corporation, writing nuclear war plans for four presidents.

In August 1964 he went to the Pentagon under Robert McNamara, then spent two years in South Vietnam working for the war. In 1967 he was one of 34 analysts on McNamara's secret 47-volume history, 7,000 pages showing that successive administrations had known the war could not be won and had said otherwise. In late 1969 he photocopied it with his former RAND colleague Anthony Russo. The New York Times began publishing on June 13, 1971. The government enjoined the paper for 15 days, and on June 30 the Supreme Court let publication resume.

He did not drift into it. Ellsberg had planned nuclear war for a decade before a draft resister named Randy Kehler, speaking at Haverford in August 1969, said calmly that he was glad to be joining his friends in prison. Ellsberg found an empty men's room, sat on the floor and cried for over an hour. He copied the study knowing exactly what he was doing and expecting to spend the rest of his life in jail. He surrendered in Boston on June 28, 1971, and faced Espionage Act charges plus theft and conspiracy, a maximum of 115 years. At trial the judge ruled his reasons irrelevant and would not let him tell the jury why he did it. What ended the case was not a verdict. It was the discovery of what the government had done to him.

The unit the Nixon White House built to discredit Ellsberg broke into his psychiatrist's Beverly Hills office on September 3, 1971. Two of the same men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate the following June. That burglary and hidden FBI wiretaps are why Judge William Byrne dismissed all charges on May 11, 1973. Ellsberg spent the next 50 years getting arrested at protests, opposing the Iraq war, defending Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and publishing The Doomsday Machine in 2017. In 2021 he released nuclear-planning documents he had copied in 1969 and offered himself as an Espionage Act test case. Nobody charged him. He died at home in Kensington, California, on June 16, 2023, at 92.

Daniel Ellsberg's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms article
  The paper behind the Ellsberg paradox, still taught in decision theory 1961
• United States - Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967 other
  The McNamara study, 47 volumes and 7,000 pages, known since 1971 as the Pentagon Papers. He was one of 34 contributors and the man who released it. 1969
• Papers on the War book
  His first book, written between the leak and the trial 1972
• Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers book
  His own account. Wikipedia dates the Viking edition to both 2002 and 2003. 2002
• Freedom of the Press Foundation company
  Co-founded to fund and defend public-interest journalism 2012
• The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner book
  The second set of documents he copied in 1969, finally told. The papers themselves were hidden in a landfill and lost in a tropical storm. 2017

• April 7, 1931 aged 0 Born in Chicago and raised in Detroit His parents were Ashkenazi Jews who had converted to Christian Science.
• 1946 aged ~15 His father falls asleep at the wheel and hits a bridge abutment His mother and his sister were killed. He gave up the piano two years later, in July 1948.
• 1959 aged ~28 Joins the RAND Corporation full time as a nuclear strategist He worked alongside Herman Kahn and against the existing plans of the Strategic Air Command.
• 1965 aged ~34 Goes to South Vietnam for two years He worked for the retired general Edward Lansdale as a member of the State Department.
• August 1969 aged 38 Hears Randy Kehler say he is glad to be going to prison Ellsberg later said the example, not the argument, was what changed him.
• June 13, 1971 aged 40 The New York Times publishes the first of nine excerpts The Nixon administration obtained a court order and stopped publication for 15 days.
• June 30, 1971 aged 40 The Supreme Court allows publication to resume New York Times Co. v. United States, decided two days after he surrendered in Boston.
• September 3, 1971 aged 40 The White House Plumbers burgle his psychiatrist's office They wanted material to discredit him. Ellsberg later said a separate plot to have him incapacitated at a rally was aborted, and it is unclear whether it meant to kill him or hospitalize him.
• May 11, 1973 aged 42 Judge Byrne dismisses all charges against Ellsberg and Russo He wrote that the bizarre events had incurably infected the prosecution. Byrne had also met twice with John Ehrlichman, who offered him the FBI directorship. Byrne said he refused to consider it while the case was pending, and was criticized for meeting at all.

• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. prosecuted by
• Robert McNamara 1916–2009
  Secretary of Defense who applied systems analysis to the Pentagon and escalated the Vietnam War. commissioned the study he leaked
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. ordered the wiretaps that reached him
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. ran the war the papers documented
• Katharine Graham 1917–2001
  Publisher who strengthened The Washington Post and backed its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. published him when the Times was enjoined
• Bob Woodward b. 1943
  Investigative reporter whose coverage of Watergate with Carl Bernstein led to President Nixon's resignation. reported the burglary unit built to discredit him