In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg arrived at a federal court in Boston, a journalist asked if he was concerned about the prospect of going to prison for leaking a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responded with a question of his own: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”
The classified documents Ellsberg released to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers were quickly dubbed the Pentagon Papers. They exposed more than two decades of government deceit about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, from 1945 to 1968.
Ellsberg died June 16, 2023, three months after announcing that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. To millions of Americans who opposed the war, his whistleblowing was an act of patriotism – but millions of others regarded it as treason. In Ellsberg’s own papers at UMass Amherst, where I teach history and direct the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, you can read hundreds of letters to him from ordinary citizens expressing both extremes: the highest possible praise, and vitriolic, often antisemitic, hostility.
