Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who made the historic decision to reveal the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of American lies and deceit in Vietnam, in 1971 passed away on Friday at his home in Kensington, California at 92.
Announcing the development in a statement, his wife and children revealed that the former military expert died of pancreatic cancer.
In an email to his friends and supporters in March, Mr Ellsberg disclosed that he had learned he had pancreatic cancer that was incurable and that his prognosis was three to six months.
In 1971, Mr Ellsberg made thousands of papers available to U.S. media, exposing successive U.S. governments’ deception of the public regarding the Vietnam War.
Contrary to what U.S. authorities claimed publicly, the 7,000 classified papers concluded that the fight could not be won.
However, Mr Ellsberg was put on trial in federal court in Los Angeles on charges of espionage, conspiracy, and other offenses. However, the judge dismissed the case on the eve of the jury’s deliberations due to government wrongdoing.
He enlisted in the Marines in 1954, breezed through officer candidate training, and then extended his enlistment so he could travel to the Middle East with his battalion in 1956 for the Suez crisis. He didn’t participate in any combat, but he mustered out as a first lieutenant with strong opinions about using the military to resolve international issues.
After receiving his doctorate at Harvard, he joined the RAND Corporation and started researching the use of game theory in nuclear conflict and crisis circumstances. He discussed with others Washington’s responses to the attacks on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s.
Mr. Ellsberg was an adviser to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara by 1964. As the United States’ participation in Vietnam expanded, he traveled to Saigon in 1965 to assess civilian pacification initiatives. He joined General Edward Lansdale’s counterinsurgency team and followed combat patrols into the forests and villages for 18 months.
