Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg was born in Chicago, studied economics at Harvard, served as a marine officer and joined the RAND Corporation as a strategic analyst on nuclear war. In 1964 he went to the Pentagon, and in 1965 to Vietnam, where he spent two years travelling with troops and came home convinced that the war could not be won and that Washington knew it. He then worked on a secret Defense Department history of the war, 7,000 pages long, which showed that successive presidents had expanded the conflict while telling the public otherwise.

For more than a year he tried to get the study into the open through official channels, offering it to senators who declined to release it. In the autumn of 1969, with a colleague, Anthony Russo, he began smuggling volumes out of RAND's offices each night and photocopying them, sometimes with his teenage children helping to cut off the classification stamps. He expected to go to prison for the rest of his life.

The New York Times began publishing in June 1971. The Nixon administration obtained an injunction, lost at the Supreme Court, and charged Ellsberg under the Espionage Act with offences carrying up to 115 years. It also set up a unit, later known as the plumbers, which burgled his psychiatrist's office looking for material to discredit him. When that came out in court in 1973, the judge dismissed the case for government misconduct.

He spent the next fifty years as an anti-nuclear campaigner, arrested dozens of times at protests, and wrote a book on the dangers of nuclear war planning. He died in 2023.