Dan Ellsberg Dies at 92, after a Life of Conscience

The publication of the Pentagon Papers shattered the post-World War II complacency of the United States and its reputation as the “good guys” in its struggle against the totalitarian Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union.

It was a 7,000 pages of historical study of the development of the war that revealed that three presidents and their administrations – of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon – had lied to the public about In the late 1960s, the United States was still in the victory trance of World War II. America and its allies had not only defeated the murderous regime of Hitler in Nazi Germany and liberated the death camps, but also it had established a new world order with the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the transatlantic defense pact of NATO and finance agencies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Since the U.S. was seen as  the dominant word power defending democracy against the totalitarian society of Stain’s Soviet Union, its “mistakes” and “excesses” were largely excused or overlooked. Most of the American public was unaware of, or sympathized with, the American overthrow of at least 11 to 14 foreign governments with as many as 70 attempts as part of the “Cold War” with the Soviet Union.

So when Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon aide, leaked 7,000 pages of a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War to the Washington Post, it was the first major revelation that the Pentagon had been lying to the public through three administrations – Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – and shattered the illusion of the U.S. as a moral, courageous force force for democray in the world, at least as far as the American public knew.

The Nixon Administration immediately 

who came to oppose the Vie  who leaked the voluminous, topsecret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, a disclosure that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on press freedoms and enraged the Nixon administration — serving as the catalyst for a series of White House-directed burglaries and “dirty tricks” that snowballed into the Watergate scandal — died June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92.