Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and former United States Marine Corps officer whose career spanned more than six decades. Born on April 7, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, he grew up in Detroit, survived a tragic family car accident, and earned a summa cum laude A.B. in economics from Harvard in 1952 before completing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1962. He married Carol Cummings in 1952, with whom he had two children, Robert and Mary, and later married Patricia Marx in 1970, fathering a third child, Michael. After serving as a first‑lieutenant in the 2nd Marine Division from 1954 to 1957, Ellsberg joined the RAND Corporation, where he became a leading strategist on nuclear deterrence and contributed to the massive classified study later known as the Pentagon Papers. Disillusioned by the Vietnam War, he secretly duplicated the 7,000‑page study in 1969 and supplied the documents to The New York Times and The Washington Post, igniting a constitutional crisis that culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. United States. Although charged under the Espionage Act and facing a possible 115‑year sentence, the case was dismissed in 1973 after revelations of governmental misconduct, including illegal wiretaps and the infamous “Fielding break‑in.” In the decades that followed, Ellsberg became a vocal advocate for transparency, supporting WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, and co‑founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He authored several influential books, including The Doomsday Machine, and received numerous honors such as the Right Livelihood Award (2006) and the Olof Palme Prize (2018). Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 2023, he died on June 16, 2023 in Kensington, California, leaving a legacy of moral courage that continues to shape debates over governmental secrecy and the public’s right to know.