Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, died on Friday at his California home at the age of 92, The Washington Post reports.
The family confirmed his death in a statement. Ellsberg announced in an email to friends and supporters on March 1 that he had pancreatic cancer and had declined chemotherapy. Whatever time he had left, he said, would be spent giving talks and interviews about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the perils of nuclear war and the importance of First Amendment protections.
Ellsberg was born in Chicago on April 7, 1931, and grew up in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, Michigan.
The so-called “Pentagon Papers” had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the Vietnam war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the US and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after.
The papers covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the US, including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson´s administration.
Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.
The papers documented that the US had defied a 1954 settlement barring a foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries and had plotted to send American soldiers even as Johnson vowed he would not.
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