Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who changed the tide of the Vietnam War by leaking what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, has died, according to a statement from his family. He was 92.
Ellsberg died Friday at his Kensington, California home of pancreatic cancer, his wife and children said. He announced his diagnosis earlier this year.
Ellsberg experienced a personal, highly emotional antiwar epiphany in a bathroom in 1971, and decided to disclose the corruption and deceit coming from Vietnam. Their publication in the New York Times and Washington Post led to a First Amendment showdown with the Nixon administration and is the subject of the 2017 Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep movie “The Paper,” in which Ellsberg is played by Matthew Rhys.
The Pentagon Papers contained 7,000 pages of classified documents with damning revelations about authority oversteps and lies from the Oval Office on down. Their publication sparked off a series of events that eventually led to the Watergate scandal and the ouster of President Nixon.
Ellsberg devoted much of the rest of his life to ending nuclear war, which he acknowledged in a message announcing his diagnosis.
“As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts,” he said. “I’m happy to know that millions of people … have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.”
