Daniel Ellsberg’s ninth and final book, Truth and Consequence, was published this spring, three years after his passing, and this is a fitting moment—a time of political upheaval much like the one in which Ellsberg first made his mark—to commemorate this remarkable and neglected American hero.
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Ellsberg → publish → hero
The book is a collection of reflections and reminiscences lovingly assembled by Daniel’s son Michael Ellsberg and longtime aide Jan R. Thomas.
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book → assemble → son
Much of it pivots off his signature role in the 1971 leak of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the US war in Vietnam that he had helped write as a RAND Corp. analyst.
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he → pivot → analyst
The Pentagon Papers were a searing 20-year record of governmental incompetence and duplicity, and thanks to the ensuing Supreme Court battle between The New York Times and the Nixon Administration, their publication is remembered as a dazzling triumph of an independent press.
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publication → ensue → press
But as the new book shows, Ellsberg was always much more than a Vietnam-era renegade.
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Ellsberg → show → renegade
He also used his stature as an analyst and activist—he estimated he was arrested some 90 times—to call attention to the plight of the whistleblower and the looming menace of nuclear war, both immensely worthy causes that we have largely consigned to the outback of our national conscience.
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we → use → conscience
I got to know Ellsberg in the Teens, toward the end of his life, when I became dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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I → get → Journalism
I was surprised to discover that, although he lived not two miles from campus, this key figure in a defining moment of US journalism history had no relation to our program or anyone else’s, near as I could tell.
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I → discover → program
I still don’t know why that was, but he accepted my invitation to join the school’s advisory board and, even better, stepped up in successive years as a keynote speaker at our orientations for incoming master’s students.
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he → know → students
There, he shone.
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he → shine → ?
He was already well into his 80s, slender and straight-backed, and wearing a dark suit and tie—a rarity on the Berkeley campus.
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He → wear → campus
He spoke softly, without notes, recalling with precision events and names our students had no prayer of recognizing: Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the Tet Offensive.
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students → speak → prayer
Instead of heading for the exits when Ellsberg was done, they stayed behind to ask questions, and listened as he remembered.
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he → head → questions
He steered well away from claims that his Pentagon Papers leak hastened the end of the war, although that was a refrain in some of the obituaries that followed his death in 2023.
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that → steer → 2023
Ellsberg never believed any such thing.
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Ellsberg → believe → thing
The papers reflected a historical record that ended nearly three years before they were leaked.
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they → reflect → record
They didn’t cover the subsequent and no less disgraceful management, by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, of a war that wouldn’t end for nearly four more years.
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that → cover → years
The students were drawn, I believe, not by proximity to somebody who’d made journalism history, but to what they perceived as a man of humility and moral courage.
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they → draw → humility
Ellsberg’s explanations for his actions were always somber and self-effacing.
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explanations → efface → actions
He’d decided to leak the Pentagon’s mortifying secrets to follow the example of Bay Area antiwar activist Randy Kehler, who’d told Ellsberg he was going to prison rather than cooperate with the draft.
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he → decide → draft
That Ellsberg’s unprecedented disclosures prompted clandestine measures by the White House—which included creating the infamous “Plumbers Unit” that spawned the failed Watergate break-in and fatally undermined the Nixon Presidency—was a consequence he neither sought nor anticipated, and he never accepted credit for bringing Nixon down.
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he → prompt → Nixon
As he told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in 2019, “My message to [young people] is: Don’t do what I did.
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I → tell → what
Don’t wait until the bombs are actually falling or thousands more have died before you do what I wish I’d done years earlier, in ’64, or even ’61 on the nuclear issue, and that is reveal…the dangerous truths that are being withheld by the government at whatever cost to yourself, whatever risk that may take.
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that → wait → risk
Consider doing that because a world’s worth of lives may be at stake.”
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worth → consider → stake
The self-portrait that emerges from the essays and reflections in Truth and Consequence is of a man both brilliant and haunted.
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that → emerge → man
His parents, ethnically Eastern European Jews, became what he described as “fanatical Christian Scientists”—Ellsberg never saw a doctor until he went to boarding school at the age of 12.
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he → become → 12
He was a gifted musician, and his mother steered him with an obsessively heavy hand toward a life she imagined for him as a concert pianist.
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she → steer → pianist
From an early age she kept him home from school so he could devote his afternoons to practice, four to six hours a day, eight hours on Saturdays.
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he → keep → Saturdays
That was his routine for a decade until, at age 15, he performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with musicians hired for the occasion from the Detroit Symphony.
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he → perform → Symphony
His mother then moved him to a more demanding and knowledgeable music teacher who, after an introductory lesson and what seemed to be a careful inventory of his background, musical knowledge and performing skills, declared that Ellsberg had great talent but no future as a professional pianist.
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Ellsberg → move → pianist
He carried on playing for the new teacher, but his mother was devastated.
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mother → carry → teacher
Two months later, she and Ellsberg’s young sister were killed in a car crash, and his father, who was driving, was seriously hurt.
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who → kill → crash
After that, apart from a music theory class in college, Ellsberg didn’t touch the piano again for 25 years.
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Ellsberg → touch → years
He returns often to the legacy of his abandoned musical path, not with regret at having disappointed his mother but in wonderment at her coercive powers, which trapped him in a decade of servitude to her dream.
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which → return → dream
He was shamed by his compliance, a prelude to the eager obedience he would observe later in his career among people of dazzling intellectual capacity who nonetheless enthusiastically carried out policies they recognized were murderous, futile, and morally indefensible.
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they → sham → policies
Ellsberg graduated from Detroit’s prestigious Cranbrook School and majored in economics at Harvard before joining the Marines, where he served for three years, was commissioned a lieutenant, and rose to command a rifle company.
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he → graduate → company
After a year in England at Cambridge University, he returned to Harvard and finished his PhD in economics, distinguishing himself in the arcane field of game theory with a breakthrough concept now known as the Ellsberg Paradox, which describes the inclination of people to avoid choices whose odds of success are ambiguous.
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odds → return → success
I had never heard of the paradox until Ellsberg mentioned it in passing one day, noting that it was considered enough of a conceptual innovation to be the subject of scholarly conferences.
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it → hear → conferences
Still, his work and notable Harvard national security connections brought him to the attention of the influential think tank known as the RAND Corp., where he started as a summer consultant in 1958, soon after the Soviet sputnik launches triggered a panic over the intensifying nuclear rivalry and the incoherence of the strategic doctrine of deterrence.
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launches → bring → deterrence
Ellsberg divided his intellectual efforts for RAND, the Pentagon, and the State Department over much of the next decade between nuclear strategy and the deepening disaster in Vietnam.
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Ellsberg → divide → Vietnam
…and 57 more, not listed.
The Aporia
