Ellsberg, who had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February, died at his home in Kensington, California, the family said.
Long before Edward Snowden and Wikileaks were revealing government secrets in the name of transparency, Ellsberg let Americans know that their government was capable of misleading and even lying to them. In his later years Ellsberg would become an advocate for whistleblowers and leakers and his "Pentagon Papers" leak was portrayed in the 2017 movie "The Post."
Ellsberg secretly went to the media in 1971 in hopes of expediting the end of the Vietnam War. It made him the target of a smear campaign by the Nixon White House. Henry Kissinger, who was then the president's national security adviser, referred to him as "the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs."
When he went to Saigon for the State Department in the mid-1960s, Ellsberg had an impressive resume. He had earned three degrees from Harvard, served in the Marine Corps and worked at the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, the influential policy research think tank.
He was a dedicated Cold War warrior and hawk on Vietnam at the time. But Ellsberg, in his 2003 book, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," said he was only one week into a two-year tour of duty in Saigon when he realized the United States was in a war it would not win.
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