Daniel Everyman
For the betterment of America, the late Daniel Ellsberg didn’t do it alone.
‘As long as governments mislead their citizens and suppress information, there will be whistleblowers and journalists.’
-Daniel Ellsberg (1)
In the movie “Coming Home,” (1978, Hal Ashby, Director) there are two protagonists, both designated ‘war survivors’… one of whom is awarded a medal. The medaled one doesn’t survive the “coming home.” The other, confined to a wheelchair, survives to speak to refusing to accept the meaninglessness of military conflict.
Both are not alone, nor acted alone, though at the movie’s end, the viewer feels an inescapable solitary dread.
Daniel Ellsberg didn’t release — “leak” — the Pentagon Papers, alone.
Ellsberg had a chorus of accomplices.
Consider “Daniel Everyman.”
Confined to a cloud of infamy for the balance of his living days, Ellsberg ‘stood in’ for America, much like the wheelchair-bound protagonist in “Coming Home.”
America is well served by Ellsberg’s accomplices.
“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969,” he wrote in the email announcing his cancer diagnosis (2), “I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed.”
“…the criminal actions that the White House took against me … led to this absolutely unforeseeable downfall of a President, which made the war end able.”
“In the end…things couldn’t have worked out better.”
-“The Deceit and Conflict Behind the Leak of the Pentagon Papers,” Ben Bradlee, jr., The New Yorker, 2021
“I did it because of the draft dodgers.”
-cited by Ron Elving, NPR, June 17, 2023 (3)
Like Julian Assange who first attempted to convey the hacked files to the State Department, Ellsberg attempted to share Robert McNamara’s report, “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Viet Nam Task Force,” with US Senators. (4) After all, these institutions are tasked with accounting to the American people, for keeping the public informed, for acting responsibly.
Like whistleblowers before and after him, Ellsberg, rejected by these institutions, shared his copies with the press. He did not act alone. Exercising First Amendment rights which opposed the government’s argument of “prior restraint,” the New York Times, the Washington Post and twenty-odd newspapers published segments of Ellsberg’s copies.
Currently, the New York Times, the Washington Post and several other news organizations are petitioning the Biden Administration not to extradite Julian Assange on Espionage Act violations.
Members of the “fourth estate,” these organizations are doing their job.
No, Daniel Ellsberg didn’t do it alone.
History will recall the pardon by President Jimmy Carter of Viet Nam draft dodgers. (5)
History will recall Ellsberg’s exemplary participation in advocating for America’s freedom of speech and informed dissent.
June 18
Notes
1-Undated interview with Daniel Ellsberg, Ron Elving, NPR, cited June 17, 2023
2-March 1, 2023, cited in Harrison Smith and Patricia Sullivan, “Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2023
3-He was soon attending antiwar rallies and conferences, including a War Resisters League meeting where he met Randy Kehler, a Harvard student who was headed to jail for his failure to register for the draft.
The experience left Mr. Ellsberg shattered.
“A line kept repeating itself in my head: We are eating our young,” he recalled in “Secrets,” a 2003 memoir. For more than an hour, he sat on the floor of the men’s room, sobbing and thinking about Kehler’s antiwar activism and the sacrifices it entailed. “It was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open. But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.”
-Smith and Sullivan, ibid.
4-Smith and Sullivan, ibid.
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