Remembering Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked Pentagon Papers

Fresh Air

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🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

We remember Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, in hopes they would help end the Vietnam War. He died last week at the age of 92. We'll listen to our 2017 interview with him. "I identify more with Chelsea Manning and with Edward Snowden than with any other people on earth," he told Dave Davies. "We all faced the same question which is, who will put this information out if I don't?" Also New York Times correspondent Charlie Savage shares a story about Ellsberg continuing to battle government secrecy when he was 90.

Also, David Bianculli reviews the new reality TV competition show Morimoto's Sushi Master on the Roku channel.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst and activist,
0:06.7	known for leaking the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers,
0:11.4	died last week of pancreatic cancer. He was 92. As a young man, Ellsberg earned degrees at Harvard
0:18.3	and the University of Cambridge in England before serving in the Marine Corps in the 1950s. He then
0:24.2	earned a doctorate from Harvard and went to work for the Rand Corporation as a military analyst.
0:29.7	His time in Vietnam as an analyst eventually turned him against the war, and he laboriously
0:35.2	copied the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers and leaked them to the New York Times in the Washington post.
0:41.4	Ellsberg was arrested and tried under the Espionage Act, but in 1973, a judge dismissed the charges
0:48.4	when it emerged that officials in the Nixon administration had directed covert actions to
0:52.9	discredit or silence Ellsberg, including tapping his phone and breaking into his psychiatrist's
0:58.8	office, looking for compromising information. I spoke to Ellsberg in 2017 when he'd published a
1:05.5	book called The Doomsday Machine, about his days working on American nuclear war strategies in the
1:10.9	late 50s and early 60s. Ellsberg was appalled by much of what he found and wishes he'd been
1:16.8	able to leak those plans along with the Pentagon Papers. Well, Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to Fresh Air,
1:23.2	you became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other publications.
1:27.6	And you tell us at the beginning of this book that you copied not just the Vietnam study,
1:33.4	but a lot of other material from your safe at the Rand Corporation about US nuclear war plans.
1:41.2	What were you going to do with that material?
1:44.1	I planned to release that as soon as the Pentagon Papers, as they came to me known,
1:49.1	had had whatever effect they could have on the Vietnam War. The nuclear information I thought
1:55.2	then and now is actually more important, but the bombs were falling in Vietnam at that time,
2:00.4	and I wanted to shorten that war as much as I could. So I planned to put out the nuclear
	...

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