RIP Daniel Ellsberg: "Most Dangerous Man in America" on Leaking Pentagon Papers, Exposing Gov't Lies

this is democracy Now democracynow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman today we spend the hour remembering the Life and Legacy of one of the world's most famous whistleblowers Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg he died Friday at the age of 92 just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer his family said he died peacefully at his home in no pain and released a statement that

quote Daniel was a seeker of Truth and a patriotic truth teller an anti-war activist a beloved husband father grandfather and great-grandfather a dear friend to many and an inspiration to countless more unquote his son Robert Ellsberg shared how his father once said he would want his gravestone to say he became a part of the anti-vietnam and anti-nuclear movement in 1971 Dan Ellsberg been a top military

strategist working for the Rand Corporation risked life in prison by secretly copying and then leaking 7 000 pages of top secret documents outlining the secret history of the U.S war in Vietnam the leak would end up helping to take down President Nixon helping to end the war in Vietnam and would lead to a major victory for press Freedom Henry Kissinger once called Ellsberg the most dangerous

man in America in 2009 a documentary of the same name told his story which Dan Ellsberg narrated we are quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspaper hundreds of thousands we were killing was unjustified homicide and I couldn't see the difference between that and murder murder had to be stopped this weekend portions of a highly classified Pentagon document

came the light for all the world to see brought cries about rage from Washington we gotta get this son of a yes Kennedy did send and troops in violation of the Geneva Accord Johnson did start the build up before he said he was going to these guys were lying through their teeth when they were talking to us and here it is in black and white there's

no way of denying it the Times building is encircled words we are printing tomorrow a top secret government document my name has now come out as the possible source of the times Pentagon documents it is out of Daniel Ellsberg the top policy analyst for the defense and state department and prepared to answer to all the consequences of these decisions Henry Kissinger said that Daniel Ellsberg was

the most dangerous man in America and he had to be stopped the study was 47 volumes 7 000 pages [Music] we've dropped another 200 000 tons of bombs on end of China That's ten hiroshimas one Hiroshima a week what has remained significant about the release of the Pentagon papers is the decision by a public official to give priority to conscience as compared to Career Daniel Ellsberg

whatever his intentions gave Aid and comfort to the enemy the start carried out by four presidents and now a fifth president was doing the same I'm not going to be part of this system of lying anymore importantly we were on the wrong side we were the wrong side that's the trailer for the most dangerous man in America Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers the Nixon Administration

went to extraordinary lengths to silence and punish Ellsberg including breaking into his psychiatrist's office he was charged with violating the Espionage Act and faced over a hundred years in prison but the government's misconduct led to charges against him and Anthony Russo being dismissed Dan Ellsberg said he'd been inspired to leak the documents by anti-war protesters in fact shortly before the times first reported on the Pentagon

papers Ellsberg took part in an anti-war protest in Washington D.C on May Day 1971 as part of an affinity group with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn over the past five decades Dan Ellsberg remained a leading critic of U.S militarism and U.S nuclear weapons policy as well as a prominent advocate for other whistleblowers he wrote A Memoir Secrets A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon papers as

well as the 2017 book the Doomsday Machine Confessions of a nuclear war planner today we'll feature our interviews with Dan as over the years about Vietnam as well as Ukraine China and the threat of nuclear war we begin with our most recent interview which was April 27th when Dan joined us from his home in Kensington California he had just been recently diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer

Dan talked about he went from being a military analyst to a whistleblower and why he risked going to jail in an effort to end the Vietnam War just yesterday was my wife's birthday and we recalled that it was on April 17 1965 not everyone can remember their first date like that but that was the first SDS March against war and I was working in the Pentagon

on the war pursuing the war she was going to interview people in a nationwide interview program she had and she induced me to carry her you were heavy phonograph around with her tape recorder to interview people and I marched up to the White House hoping carrying that recorder and hoping that I would not be in any picture of the Washington Post where my colleagues at the

Pentagon would say what he's protesting the war on my one day off from the war during this but the next day I induced her to go to the cherry blossoms and that was our first date and we've been together ever since so that was 57 years ago she really was the one who exposed you is this right to um The anti-war Movement by forcing you to

carry her tape recorder I mean you were protesting right outside where you worked you'd gone from Rand Corporation to the Pentagon actually it was around southern Lincoln Memorial where we heard the speeches and then we marched toward the White House and around the White House I went back that evening to the Pentagon where I was working having gotten her to promise to meet me the next

day to go see the cherry blossoms but I was very much in sympathy with what I was hearing on that uh Stadium from if Stone and others about the war I felt at that time as a cold warrior that we were picking the wrong place to plant the flag on this one this was a loser and I was not enthusiastic about our getting involved in it

but that was my job and I did it all too well if I were asked what regrets I have today they would have to do with doing a job I was asked to do that I knew was wrong for the country and I did it to the best of my ability the war was carried on by people who acted like that so I want to talk

about what you decided to do and how seminal how key the anti-war movement was to your thinking not only meeting Patricia but also seeing those War resistors uh what were called draft Dodgers the drafter sisters who said they'd rather be in prison than uh on the front lines in the war in Vietnam well many many people when Pentagon papers came out a lot of people on

the Eddie War movement said what's new about this is what we've been saying all along which was true which was we had taken up of a French a French neocolonial role an imperial role essentially against the self-government of Vietnam the sovereignty of Vietnam and we're doomed to suffer the same fate as the French essentially to keep killing people and losing people until we finally decided to

go home and leave them ruling their own home well that was known inside the Insiders who were pursuing the war and dropping the bomb with millions of tons of bombs it came to be even later than this knew the same thing and we're doing it uh likewise the question was what to do about it all the people I was working with in the government by that

time felt everyone I could think of felt the war was hopeless essentially it was hopelessly stalemated and there was no coming out the words hope stalemate was taboo on the year I came back from Vietnam with hepatitis in 1967 after two years here Lyndon Johnson had said no official is to use the word or hunted the word stalemate and yet that's what it was so the

war continued people did their jobs and it went on as though that judgment had not been made and eventually what I really noticed was that there were people who felt much as I did and who were doing an awful lot more about it than I was doing namely these were young people who you shouldn't have to be an expert you didn't have to have a PhD

in international relations uh as somebody uh to to see the truth about the war in Vietnam and somebody said you don't have to be an ichthyologist to know when a fish stinks and these young people refused to go to be drafted uh to uh when they could have gone to Canada or Sweden or gotten a deferment or joined the Air Force National Guard like George W

H W bush somehow gotten under the fighting but no they chose to give it a strong a resistance as they could non-violently in the footsteps of Rosa Parks in the South and Martin Luther King and others and to say no this is wrong you have to do this over our bodies we will not participate in this because it's wrong and I realized when I met young

men like this like Bob Eaton and Randy Keeler were on their way to prison simply to make the strongest message they could which I believed as well that the war was wrong I realized I could think of doing what they did too instead of just talking to insiders who felt as I did but agreed there was just nothing you could do about it as long as

the president wanted to carry on the war and his subordinates wanted to keep their jobs under their president uh that they could in fact dissociate themselves Road and denounce the war openly very recently we've seen uh very many comments that the what the Pentagon paper showed was that the war was not winnable actually that had and that's why I gave the Pentagon papers and that was

the effect of them actually none of the people who went to prison to protest the war did so because they thought the war was not winnable they did it because they thought they thought the war was wrong and that's something I think that people have not succeeded have not been willing to recognize all these years not just to the war not just that the US had

taken on some Noble measure that wasn't quite energetic enough to pursue or had others or was easily distracted from or something like that but then our country was like so many other countries capable of doing wrong and killing people without good reason and uh in effect an imperial kind of operation like that of the Japanese or they're French after the Japanese or the Chinese before either

of them and those are the footsteps we were walking in well I think to this day the very idea that the U.S is in some ways comparable to those Empires that it is an Empire is it to move and a very unfortunate one because it makes it impossible to understand what's going on why are we doing this what's what's happening uh why in the world are

we in this position of every time after time of fighting against the self-determination or the nationalism of other countries and taking on those uh murderous tasks as opposed to dealing with problems at home I think of our country as a covert Empire where covert is a term of Art in the Pentagon and the CIA in particular and I worked with CI people in Vietnam my immediate

boss there was a retired CIA General Edward Lansdale and the word covert means plausibly deniable it means not just secret I'm doing something that I don't tell you about but that I plant evidence suggests that I'm doing something different and I'm not doing it somebody else is doing it and the person above me is somebody else layer after layer to prevent the president from holding any

accountability for what's happening I think we not only feel we need and do be able to plausibly deny that we are an Empire that we run other people's governments other people's police Fords that we decide who goes to jail and who gets shot in that country and second we deny the means we do to keep it a covert Empire assassination is paramilitary military buildups and even

overt Wars in some cases as in Vietnam or Iraq Dan I wanted to go to that decision you made after giving your 13 year old son Robert a copy of throws essay on civil disobedience the Civil Disobedience you engaged in this is a clip from that 2009 documentary the most dangerous man in America Dan Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers the evening of October 1st 1969 when

I first smuggled several hundred pages of top secret documents out of my safe at the Rand Corporation [Music] the study contained 47 vitamins seven thousand pagers plan was to Xerox the study and reveal the secret history of the Vietnam War to the American people the I was trying to find out who gave the New York Times a copy of a pentagon's secret study how like a

like a Thunderclap you get the New York Times publishing the Pentagon papers and the country is panicking an attack on the whole Integrity of government and his whole file cabinets can be stolen and then made available to the government anymore a name has now come out as the possible source of the times Pentagon documents it is that of Daniel Ellsberg the top policy analyst for the

defense and state department I think it is time in this country to quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspaper and the first year of marriage we're talking about him going to prison for the rest of his life [Music] we felt so strongly that we were dealing with a national security crisis Henry Kissinger said that Dr Daniel Ellsberg

was the most dangerous man in America and he had to be stopped so that a clip from the most dangerous man in America by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith I remember when we had you on Dan so many different times beginning 27 years ago you were one of our first guests on democracy now but when this documentary came out you and Patricia your wife came on

the show with the directors this goes to that point where you understood the stakes of what you were going to do you brought your two little kids 13 year old Robert 10 year old married to help you not that they completely understood what you were doing Xerox the 7 000 pages of the secret history of Vietnam U.S involvement in Vietnam that's right I hadn't really meant

to bring my my daughter but on the second occasion at all she was only 10 but she had complained about being left in the car when I went up to do some last minute xeroxing with Robert and once she was up there she complained about being given nothing to do so we gave her scissors and win by mistake the police came to the door for the

second time during this project because the owner of a shop had not turned the key correctly and it set off an alarm in the police station so when the police arrived at the door they found my son who was 13 at that time Mike Robert was running the Xerox machine and I was collating on the floor or various copies we were making and Mary who was

10 was cutting top secret off the tops and bottoms of the pages with the scissors kind of a family project so they uh innocent it was and they they left but my objective with my son in particular was to let him see that there were times when the best thing you could do you really needed to say no to a government policy even at the risk

of prison and I wanted him to see that I had not gone off my nut as I would be described uh shortly I was sure that I was not acting as a traitor or fanatically or hysterically I was just assuming something in a business-like way that I felt had to be done even though it had a risk I wanted to plant that idea in his life

and it took hold as it did with my daughter son is the editor-in-chief of orbus books the Catholic Seminary Liberation theology publishing house and my daughter is head of violence against women project a worldwide project at American University both of them having been arrested at various times we wanted them to know this because you reckon recognized be among the last last were spending yes I thought

they'd otherwise just see me through heavy glass you know in a prison and would have the the way that Julian Assange has had to grow up with his young sons in his Total Security Prison in belmarsh for having facilitated truth-taking of the same kind that I've done as a matter of fact his is the first prosecution of a journalist for putting information out and it will

not be the last if he successfully extradited over here so he has a couple children who've seen him literally only in prison and better than not seeing him at all that's certainly the case but what he uh I reveal this year that I had the information from Julian Assange essentially that Chelsea Manning had given Assange and which was later put out in the papers I had

that before the papers before the newspapers had the meaning that I was as in right now as I'm talking to you as any of the people who've been indicted by this justice department because they're working with a law whose plain language is on the one hand unconstitutional from the point of view of the First Amendment but red properly just says that Anyone who reads or handles

or stores a piece of paper that has been marked to be protected are classified by the government is subject to imprisonment that implies even to readers of the New York Times and very definitely to journalists like Charlie savage or the Publishers or Julian himself in other words in that respect we've gone backwards since that day that was after all mine was the first prosecution of anyone

foretelling the truth to the American people and there have been several dozen since and the first one of a journalist actually is I think just preceding the first one of a reader before we get there so this this law the Espionage Act very much needs to be repealed or rescinded in such a way that it does not serve like a British official Secrets act which was

a perfect law foreign Empire Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers whistleblower speaking in April he died Friday at the age of 92 just months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer