Daniel Ellsberg; Man Behind Pentagon Papers Leak, Dies At 92

Henry Kissinger, US President Richard M. Nixon's national security adviser privately branded Daniel Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America"

Image credit: Twitter

Washington: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked sensitive information about the history of the Vietnam War, which was known as the 'Pentagon Papers', died on Friday (Local Time) in his home in Kensington, California. Taking to Twitter, Robert Ellsberg, Daniel's son said, "My dear father, #DanielEllsberg, died this morning June 16 at 1:24 a.m., four months after his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. His family surrounded him as he took his last breath. He had no pain and died peacefully at home." The family confirmed his death in a statement.

After Ellsberg disclosed the document, Supreme Court passed the order on press freedoms and enraged the Nixon administration -- serving as the catalyst for a series of White House-directed burglaries and "dirty tricks" that snowballed into the Watergate scandal. 

pic.twitter.com/9O9zkNt83N — Daniel Ellsberg (@DanielEllsberg) June 16, 2023

Earlier, on March 1, Ellsberg announced in an email to his friends and supporters that he had pancreatic cancer and had declined chemotherapy, reported The Washington Post. Whatever time he had left, he said, would be spent giving talks and interviews about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the perils of nuclear war and the importance of First Amendment protections.

Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated Midwesterner with a PhD in economics, was in some respects an unlikely peace activist. He had served in the Marine Corps after college, wanting to prove his mettle, and emerged as a fervent cold warrior while working as an official at the Defense Department, a military analyst at the Rand Corp. and a consultant for the State Department, which dispatched him to Saigon in 1965 to assess counterinsurgency efforts, as per The Washington Post.
Crisscrossing the Vietnamese countryside, where he joined American and South Vietnamese troops on patrol, he became increasingly disillusioned by the war effort, concluding that there was no chance of success.

He went on to embrace a life of advocacy, which extended from his 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers -- a disclosure that led Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon's national security adviser, to privately brand him "the most dangerous man in America" -- to decades of work advocating for press freedoms and the anti-nuclear movement.