Daniel Ellsberg, the man who in 1971 passed to the New York Times the “Pentagon Papers,” a series of secret Pentagon reports on US involvement in Vietnam between the end of World War II and 1967. Ellsberg was a former Marine and a military analyst at the RAND Corporation (one of the American studies) who during the 1960s had begun to nurture sentiments of opposition to the war. He was 92 years old and last February, according to what his family communicated, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Is dead at his home in Kensington, California.
The “United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945 – 1967″, subsequently renamed by the press “Pentagon Papers”, had been commissioned by the Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1967 and had been delivered to the US administration in 1968. It was a study that showed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had in fact lied to public opinion and had become more and more involved in a disastrous military campaign while hiding from the people and from Congress that the chances of victory were slim.
At that point Ellsberg, one of the compilers of the report, tried to convince some members of Congress to make the report public, but all refused. He then turned to reporter Neil Sheehan, who had covered Vietnam before and was critical of continuing the war. Ellsberg secretly photocopied the report, page by page, with the help of his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter: the report had a total of 7,000 pages.
The publication of the “Pentagon Papers” allowed public opinion to become aware of some military actions on which the administrations had never provided news: they concerned the bombings of Cambodia and Laos and the raids on the coasts of northern Vietnam. The publication of the material led to numerous protests and a series of lawsuits. Richard Nixon, who was president of the United States in 1971, accused Ellsberg and one of his associates, Anthony Russo, of treason. Ellsberg was later acquitted, after it became known that aides of President Nixon had illegally investigated him, to discredit him. In recent years Ellsberg has written a few books and has actively participated in a campaign in favor of government transparency and against nuclear weapons.
The story of the Pentagon Papers has also been told in The Posta 2017 film directed by Steven Spielberg.
– Read also: Fifty years ago the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” began