On Nov. 6, 1969, Daniel Ellsberg walked into Sen. William Fulbright’s Capitol Hill office, carrying two briefcases full of top-secret documents.
Inside the dim room, lit by lamps even in afternoon, Ellsberg sat down on a sofa near Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his aides. Ellsberg told them he wanted Congress and the public to see the documents he had brought with him. They were part of a classified defense study, a ruinous 47-volume history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
“This history showed a pattern,” Ellsberg, who died last week at 92, recalled explaining to Fulbright in his memoir, “of the same sort of deception, the same secret threats and plans to escalate, the same pessimistic internal estimates, and the same public reassurances, over four previous presidents.”
Today, Ellsberg is known for leaking the classified Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers in 1971, a radical maneuver that changed Americans’ understanding of the Vietnam War. But, before going to the press, the maverick defense analyst had spent a year and a half quietly leaking the papers to leading antiwar senators and representatives — in hopes they would publicize them, hold hearings and insert them into the Congressional Record.
The politicians all declined.
Ellsberg, once a committed Cold Warrior, had spent 1965 to 1967 in South Vietnam as a State Department employee. His in-person observations of the state of the war convinced him that the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries could not defeat the communist Viet Cong guerrillas. Back home, as an analyst for the Rand Corp., a think tank, Ellsberg worked on a secret study commissioned by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam since World War II.
Ellsberg and his co-workers, reviewing classified material, identified disturbing trends. Presidents from Harry S. Truman through Lyndon B. Johnson had escalated U.S. involvement in South Vietnam to prop up an anti-communist regime that had little public support. American officials had regularly misled the public, predicting victory despite private warnings that the war was stalemated or unwinnable.
