Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-war activist who copied and leaked documents that revealed secret details of U.S. strategy in the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers, has died, his family confirmed in a statement to CBS News on Friday. He was 92.
Ellsberg died early Friday morning at his home in Kensington, California, of pancreatic cancer, his family said. He was diagnosed in February and revealed the diagnosis in March.
His family said he wasn’t in pain and was surrounded by loved ones when he died.
“Daniel was a seeker of truth and a patriotic truth-teller, an antiwar activist, a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, a dear friend to many, and an inspiration to countless more,” his family said. “He will be dearly missed by all of us.”
In a tribute on Twitter, his son Robert Ellsberg recalled how his father once said he would want his gravestone to say, “He became a part of the anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear movement.”
Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite.
He was a Harvard graduate and self-defined “cold warrior” who served as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances and came to be trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.
He was especially valued, he would later note, for his “talent for discretion.”
But like millions of other Americans, in and out of government, he had turned against the yearslong war in Vietnam, the government’s claims that the battle was winnable and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the U.S.-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region. Unlike so many other war opponents, he was in a special position to make a difference.
“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” “By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war.”
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
