Daniel Ellsberg, who became one of the most important anti-war whistleblowers in U.S. history when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, died Friday, according to a statement from his family.
The 92-year-old revealed in March that he’d been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer and had about three to six months left to live.
“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 wrote of his anti-war activism in a letter he shared to Twitter announcing his diagnosis.
“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars,” he wrote. “It was a fate I would have gladly accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was).”
The Pentagon Papers ― a highly classified study on U.S. conduct in Vietnam that Ellsberg helped work on ― revealed that multiple U.S. presidents had lied to both Congress and the American people about circumstances regarding the Vietnam War. The documents Ellsberg leaked showed that U.S. authorities had long known American forces had no chance of winning in Vietnam.
Ellsberg, who’d been a staunch supporter of military action in Vietnam until he began mingling with anti-war activists in the late 1960s, was charged under the Espionage Act and faced a potential 115 years behind bars for his actions. But due to governmental misconduct and illegal...
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