Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg Says He Has Terminal Cancer

"I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts," he reflected on his life.
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Daniel Ellsberg, one of the most significant anti-war whistleblowers in American history, revealed Thursday that he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has about six months to live.

Ellsberg ― who rose to prominence after leaking the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, revealing that multiple U.S. presidents had systematically lied to Congress and the American people about the circumstances around the Vietnam War ― shared his inoperable pancreatic cancer diagnosis in a lengthy letter on Twitter.

The soon-to-be 92-year-old also reflected on his role in the historic leak, saying that when he clandestinely made copies of the Defense Department’s documents, he “had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars.” Though he was charged under the Espionage Act and faced a potential 115 years behind bars for his actions, he was ultimately spared from any punishment because of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering.

“I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance,” he wrote, making a nod to his activism against the Iraq War, U.S. military action against Iran and, most recently, U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“There’s tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you’ll be hearing from me as long as I’m here,” he vowed.

Ellsberg was once a staunch supporter of American military intervention in Vietnam, leading him to work in the Pentagon in 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He also represented the State Department on trips to the country for several years. Later, while working as an analyst at the defense think tank the RAND Corporation, he helped work on a highly classified, McNamara-commissioned study on U.S. conduct in Vietnam ― a set of documents that would eventually come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

“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,” Ellsberg said.
“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,” Ellsberg said.
ARNO BURGI via Getty Images

But by the late 1960s, Ellsberg began mingling with anti-war activists and felt a shift in his worldview as he processed how many American soldiers were dying each year. So in 1969, after leaving RAND, he and another former employee secretly photocopied top-secret documents showing that U.S. authorities had known for a long time that the U.S. had no chance of winning in Vietnam.

After failing to get any war opponents in Congress to release the documents on the Senate floor, Ellsberg shared the papers with The New York Times, which published nine excerpts from them over the course of 15 days in 1971. Forty years later, in 2011, the government officially declassified them and released them to the public.

“As I look back on the last sixty years of my life,” Ellsberg said Thursday, “I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts.”

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