Daniel Ellsberg Dies

Daniel Ellsberg and his wife Patricia Marx at Cinema for Peace Gala 2019

by Jaka Bizilj

CALIFORNIA — Daniel Ellsberg, the godfather of whistleblowers and a dear friend of Cinema for Peace has passed away at 92 due to cancer.

Nicknamed "the most dangerous man in America" by his Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger, who was the US secretary of state, Daniel ended the Vietnam war and Nixon's presidency by leaking the 7,000-page study called "The Pentagon Papers" in 1971 to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news organizations.

After being a nuclear war planner for the USA and being involved in the Cuban crisis, Daniel works as a U.S. State Department analyst with the American troops in the Vietnam War to document military progress. Being on the ground in Vietnam with the troops, he learns firsthand how casually the military and political officials have been systemically lying to the public as well as the congress, that the war was winnable. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who commissioned the Pentagon Papers, privately agrees with him that the war is hopeless, but continues to publicly justify further deployments of American troops.

After his mission ends, he leaks the 47-volume papers to the press, which gets him initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property. Daniel Ellsberg ends the Vietnam War by publishing the truth, which led to Nixon losing his presidency. The prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that so-called “White House Plumbers" had first failed the instruction to 'incapacitate' Daniel, and then caused "Watergate". The charges against Daniel were soon dismissed - even though Nixon tried to bribe the Judge by offering him the top job at the FBI - and in June 2011, the documents forming the Pentagon Papers were declassified and publicly released.

Daniel Ellsberg is the Godfather of whistleblowers. The likes of Manning, Assange, and Snowden followed his example, obviously with different reasons and different levels of legitimacy and moral justification. Steven Spielberg was so fascinated by Daniel that he told him that he wanted to make a film only about Daniel after making "The Post".

We honored Daniel Ellsberg and Steven Spielberg at Cinema for Peace in Los Angeles and in Berlin. When we were visiting Berlin Checkpoint Charlie for a SPIEGEL story, I started telling Daniel about the tank confrontation between the US and Soviet tanks and how humanity had been on the verge of World War III. He was swift to correct my narration, as he was directly involved in the Pentagon on this.

When we picked him up for dinner at the hotel lobby with his wife, he introduced me to the Wikileaks gang in Berlin. You could feel that he was a role model for them who they admired.

When we arrived at the dinner and I introduced him and his wife to my little daughter in simple terms as an “evil man who became a good man”, she asked him why he had been "evil" first. Even though this was a very simplified question by a child in very casual surroundings, it touched him unexpectedly strongly; it took a while to cheer him up again; you could feel how conscience was working on him.

Daniel called me some four weeks ago and explained that he will die in the next few weeks. I opposed, I contacted the likes of George Church and David Sinclair - godfathers of modern molecular genetic medicine -, and suggested a documentary about all his conversations he was having these days, with the filmmaker Mads Brugger and the title "The Final Truth", but Daniel was too weak and had come to terms with his fate. He said: "I have such fond memories of our time together, Cinema for Peace and especially being the 'Greta Thunberg' of the Munich Security Conference,  but I don't know if I have enough energy left for a final film." We agreed to speak two or three days later, but he could not be reached anymore: his family had taken him off the phone and emails, as his assistant wrote to me after George Church had replied to my medical question about what to do to try to stop his pancreatic cancer.

The most valuable conversations we had were about the paradox of how we all fought for a nuclear missiles-free world, but the world's greatest danger for humankind is also the most powerful tool for security and peace. If Ukraine would have not given up its nukes, there would have been no invasion. Ellsberg disclosed in 2021 that the Chinese attacks against Taiwan territory in 1958 were stopped by the US with the threat of a nuclear missile attack against China. Ellsberg kept warning of nuclear Armageddon until the end of his life.

Daniel Ellsberg's greatest achievement was to strengthen the United States Constitution to prevent dictatorship and crimes by Presidents. His legacy helped on January 6, 2021, and will hopefully help to keep the USA also in future times democratic with a free press to report "the truth, and nothing but the truth."

Click to watch the trailer for "The Post" by Steven Spielber

Click to watch the trailer for "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith