Daniel Ellsberg, Presente
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Daniel Ellsberg died the day before yesterday at the age of 92. He made public the “Pentagon Papers,” detailing the true negative assessments of US military and political leaders about the US War against Vietnam, even while they insisted on continuing the war.
For the sake of truth, justice, and life, Ellsberg took the chance of being sentenced to years in prison. His actions may have helped save the lives of up to a million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of US soldiers.
His courage so infuriated President Nixon and his close advisers that they violated laws so basic that Nixon was forced to resign just short of impeachment, and some of his aides ended in prison themselves.
Photo credit: Daniel Ellsberg in Dresden, 2016 by Dr. Bernd Gross, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
I am saddened by his death for his sake, for his family’s sake, and for the nation’s. I met him only once, on May 4, 1972, when I was one of the organizers of a demonstration against the war on one side of the Capitol and he was one of the speakers.
There was what seemed at the time a weird scuffle when some men attacked him. We later discovered they were among “the plumbers,” Nixon’s under-cover posse of bully-boys whose secret assignment was to harass and violate Ellsberg. In that moment, Ellsberg was as brave personally and bodily as he was politically.
I hunger for the emergence of many who can respond to their own lives as his did: whistle-blowers in the government and in the carbon-corporations, depositors in banks that invest in the carbon-corporations that are burning Earth, police officers disgusted by the racist violence of other officers, legislators revolted by their colleagues’ votes to deny women or young trans people life-saving medical procedures.
I append excerpts from an article embodying the last interview of Ellsberg before his death,
With blessings of shalom,
Arthur
By MICHAEL HIRSH
POLITICO MAGAZINE
06/04/2023 07:00 AM EDT
Michael Hirsh is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, and the former national editor for Politico Magazine.
Daniel Ellsberg hates the word “legacy.”
“I’m very put off by the word. It always throws me for a loop,” Ellsberg tells me when I ask him recently what he believes his legacy will be as one of America’s most iconic whistleblowers. “I didn’t plan on a legacy. I don’t know what a legacy is.” Ellsberg, who is dying of pancreatic cancer at age 92, says one reason he doesn’t think he’s really leaving any legacy is that the act he is famous for — leaking the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago — was highly unusual, if not unique. Despite the government-shaking magnitude of his revelation, he was one of the few whistleblowers who got away with exposing deception and wrongdoing in high places without turning the rest of his life into one long misery.
At the time, Ellsberg says, he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for handing over copies of the 7,000-page top-secret history of the lies and self-deceit that drew America into the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from [President] Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home near Berkeley, Calif. on May 8. “There was no way to predict that.”
Nor did leaking the Pentagon Papers, by itself, do anything to shorten the war, which was his intention, Ellsberg admits. What did happen is that Nixon erupted in outrage over the leak and created the “Plumbers” unit to discredit Ellsberg. The Plumbers’ first break-in was to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but that led later to the Watergate burglary, Nixon’s resignation and the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg on grounds of “improper government conduct.” Thus, indirectly, Watergate may well have prevented further escalation and shortened the war because it “undermined Nixon’s authority,” as Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and the war ended in April of that year with total victory by North Vietnam.
So Ellsberg has some parting advice to future whistleblowers: “Don’t do it under any delusion that you’ll have a high chance of ending up like Daniel Ellsberg.” This is especially true, he says, now the government is zealously prosecuting under the Espionage Act, which was first used in Ellsberg’s case. (Barack Obama later deployed it eight times, more than any other president, despite pledging to run “the most transparent administration in history.”)
Even if they escape prosecution, whistleblowers in high places face long odds against success in changing government policy — and yet at the same time Ellsberg says they are more necessary than ever. “I would caution people against thinking that any revelation by itself, no matter how spectacular — how amazing, how shocking, and extraordinary it is — would necessarily evoke a reaction, from the media or Congress, or that people will react to it,” Ellsberg tells me. “But it can work. My case shows that probably more than any other case.”