Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst whose 1971 Pentagon Papers leak shifted public perceptions of the Vietnam War and set a vital precedent for free speech, has died, aged 92.
Ellsberg has been described as ‘the grandfather of whistleblowers’ by former chief editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger.
Rusbridger said Ellsberg’s intervention ‘radically changed the public opinion in the Vietnam War’, adding that the case against him set a precedent and ‘no US government has ever tried to injunct a paper on grounds of national security since’.
The Pentagon Papers created a First Amendment clash between the Nixon administration and the New York Times, which first published stories based on the documents. Government officials cast publication of the documents as an act of espionage that compromised national security. The US Supreme Court ruled in favour of the freedom of the press.
The BBC reports that Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to expose actions the US had taken in the Vietnam War. What Ellsberg learned during the sixties weighed heavily on his conscience. If only the public knew, he thought, political pressure to end the war might prove irresistible.
The release of the Pentagon Papers – 7 000 government pages that exposed deceptions by multiple US presidents – was a product of that rationale, the BBC reports.
The papers contradicted the government’s public statements on the war and the damning revelations they contained helped bring an end to the conflict and, ultimately, sowed the seeds of President Richard M Nixon’s downfall.