This commentary is by John Steen of South Burlington, who began as a scholar and teacher of philosophy, had a 20-year career in health planning, health regulation and public health, was a professor of health policy, and is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association. He is now retired.
We mourn the death of Daniel Ellsberg on June 16.
Between 1969 and 1971, Ellsberg was one of dozens of analysts at the Pentagon-connected Rand Corp. studying and writing about the decisions behind U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commissioned the secret report, and the Rand Corp. was charged with producing it. Ellsberg was appalled to learn that government leaders knew the U.S. could not win that war and yet sent its citizens to kill and die.
Ellsberg and a Rand colleague, Anthony Russo, had access to a 47-volume, 7,000-page study of classified documents and historical narrative in the Rand report on the Vietnam War. This study went all the way back to the Truman administration, when the United States had funded French attempts to recolonize the country. It proved that, across two decades and multiple administrations, the U.S. government had lied to the people about the war. It would soon become infamous as the Pentagon Papers.
Beginning in 1969, they photocopied them at night, one page at a time over a period of months. Ellsberg initially attempted to give the Pentagon Papers to members of Congress, but they (including Sens. William Fulbright and George McGovern) were unwilling to accept the papers, so he contacted The New York Times. Neal Sheehan at The Times wrote that the U.S. warred not to save the Vietnamese from “communism,” but to maintain “the power, influence and prestige of the United States … irrespective of conditions in Vietnam.”
News of the Pentagon Papers broke on June 13, 1971. On Aug. 1, 1971, Ellsberg took part in an antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., as part of an affinity group with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. He and Zinn were among the over 12,600 protesters arrested that day, the largest mass arrest of protesters in U.S. history. It was his first arrest, but it wouldn’t be his last.
Publication of the Pentagon Papers by The Times and The Washington Post (as well as 18 other U.S. papers) became litigated before the Supreme Court. In his opinion on that case, Justice Hugo Black declared that a free press has “the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
About the First Amendment, Black wrote, “The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.” The revelations in The Pentagon Papers fully documented what Martin Luther King said in “Beyond Vietnam,” his landmark speech at NYC’s Riverside Church in 1967.
Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, in January 1973 Ellsberg became the first whistleblower charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 (originally used against Eugene Debs) along with charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a maximum sentence of 115 years. President Richard Nixon had sent CIA men, E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, to find incriminating evidence on Ellsberg at his psychiatrist’s office. Nixon had said, “Let’s get the son of a bitch into jail.” Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.”
Because of “gross prosecutorial misconduct” so severe as to “offend the sense of justice,” Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg in May 1973. He did so despite a government bribe offering him the directorship of the FBI.
Since then, Ellsberg had dedicated his life to struggles for world peace, an end to nuclear weapons, and active support for Chelsea Manning (Ellsberg spoke out on behalf of Manning and attended her court-martial) and Edward Snowden as newer whistleblowers. In 2017, he told The Washington Post why he did it. And over two years ago, he identified Greta Thunberg as his hero. He has demanded freedom for Julian Assange, who is also charged with violating the Espionage Act.
Over half a century ago, The Times decided that publishing the Pentagon Papers was in the public interest and that the First Amendment protected the right to do so. Shouldn’t we be uniquely outraged now that Julian Assange (who received classified material from Manning via his WikiLeaks) has been faced with prosecution and persecution for doing the same thing?
The chilling effect of the Espionage Act on potential whistleblowers makes it ever less likely that Americans will know what their government is doing, much less be able to do anything about it. The just conclusion of this would be Congress’s abrogation of the Espionage Act. To honor all that Ellsberg has done, we must now continue and expand upon his work.
How fitting it is that Kissinger’s label is now the title of a fine documentary about Ellsberg. It would be a terrible mistake to see him only as an artifact of the Vietnam War era, for the political wisdom he left us is needed now more than ever: In his own words: “We need the courage to face the truth about what we are doing in the world and act responsibly to change it.”
