Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to Speak at Goucher

Release date: February 02, 2010 |

Prior to Ellsberg's vist, Goucher will present three viewings of the film The Most Dangerous Man in America in Kelley Lecture Hall on Saturday, February 27, at 4 p.m.; Sunday, February 28, at 4 p.m.; and Monday, March 1, at 7 p.m. Please see http://www.goucher.edu/x38896.xml for more information.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who precipitated a national political maelstrom in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, will appear at Goucher College on Tuesday, March 2. He will discuss his decision to give the New York Times the top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making leading up to the Vietnam War.

The event will be held at 8 p.m. in the Hyman Forum of the Athenaeum and is free and open to the public. Tickets must be reserved, however, by calling 410-337-6333 or by e-mailing boxoffice@goucher.edu.

Ellsberg was born in Detroit in 1931. After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a bachelor of arts summa cum laude in economics, he studied for a year at Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg served in the U.S. Marine Corps as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.

In 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research and analysis firm, and he served as a consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making.

Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 and worked on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, where he became convinced that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

He returned to the RAND Corporation in 1967 and worked on a top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

By 1969, Ellsberg had become disillusioned with the war and quietly began attending anti-war events. After contemplating what he could do to help end the war, he decided to secretly make several sets of photocopies of the Pentagon Papers and give them to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When the committee members failed to act, Ellsberg gave the papers to the New York Times in 1971.

On June 13, 1971, the Times published the first of nine excerpts and commentaries on the 7,000-page collection. For 15 days, the newspaper was prevented from publishing its articles by court order requested by the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, Ellsberg leaked the documents to the Washington Post and 15 other newspapers. On June 30, the Supreme Court ordered publication of the Times to resume without restraint.

Although the Times did not reveal Ellsberg as its source, he knew the FBI would soon determine he was the source of the leak, and he went underground until he decided to surrender publicly 16 days later.

Ellsberg was placed on trial on 12 felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, but the case was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him. The trial helped lead to the convictions of several White House aides and figured into the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer, and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions, and the urgent need for patriotic whistle-blowing.

He is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden.

He is a senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that supports worldwide efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, to strengthen international law and institutions, and to inspire and empower a new generation of peace leaders.

Ellsberg’s appearance is being sponsored by Goucher College’s Peace Studies Program and the Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center.