This is an L.A. Times Studios podcast.

Daniel Ellsberg had been a Marine, a dedicated cold warrior, and a Pentagon consultant

advising the architects of the Vietnam War. He had bought into the premises of the American

military effort in Southeast Asia. He wanted to stop the advance of a

Stalinist dictatorship. But by October 1969, Ellsberg had become bitterly disillusioned with the war

effort, and his conscience was eating at him. He had helped to sell a war that he now believed was

fueled by lies.

President Richard Nixon had taken office that year promising peace with honor in Vietnam,

but there was no end in sight.

Half a million American troops were in Vietnam that year.

Tens of thousands of Americans had died in the conflict, and many more Vietnamese.

Ellsberg saw the war as a hopeless stalemate, which Defense Department officials refused to level what the American people about. Hopeless and interminable, he would call it.

Ellsberg was 38 and living in Malibu.

He was working as an analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica,

a think tank that advised the government.

His position gave him access to top secret documents.

One day, he opened the safe in his office and slipped a big stack of papers into his

briefcase. He knew there was a good chance that what he was doing would land him in prison.

He walked past the guards in the lobby, waving casually. This was the first batch of 7,000 pages

he would ultimately smuggle out. A 47-volume secret government-sponsored

study of the war that would become known as the Pentagon Papers. He thought that the American

people would demand an end to the war if they could only see them, and he was intent on finding a way

...