Hard To Believe Daniel Ellsberg Is Gone

No, Not Some Tawdry Politician-- One Of The Great People Of Our Time

Last night I marked the passing of one of my heroes, Kenneth Anger. I spent all morning watching his films— Scorpio Rising at least a dozen times. He had a profound impact on my life. When I was watching Jesus curing the blind, my friend Dorothy called. One of her heroes had passed too and she offered to write an obituary. It was Daniel Ellsberg who died Friday, aged 92. I know he was an important figure— but just second-hand. I was cut off from “the world,” traveling for 2 years in India and the surrounding countries, when he released the Pentagon Papers in 1971. By the time he had come to realize that AMerican fioreign policy and the people who made it were profoundly evil-- that wass already so deeply ingrained in my that it was part of my DNA. I missed that whole real time controversy around him, so his story was always kind of after-the-fact for me. Not so for Dorothy, who was moved to tears when she told me about his death and whose reminiscences about him moved me to tears yesterday. I wish I had taken the trouble to know him. Too late now.

Daniel Ellsberg, RIP

-by Dorothy Reik

For those of us of a certain age, Daniel Ellsberg, like Tom Hayden, was a constant presence in our lives. From his release of the Pentagon Papers, the threat of life imprisonment, the dismissal of his case and his continuing opposition to war he was always on our minds as we tried to free the world from war, prevent nuclear annihilation and work towards a more just world. I first met him in person at a Progressive Democrats of America national confab in Cleveland. He was excited to hear I was from Topanga, one of his favorite haunts when he worked at RAND. Over the years, whenever things seemed too hard to bear, he would write an OpEd or show up TV or the radio— usually on Democracy Now— to remind us that there was goodness in the world even as it seemed that evil was winning the day— imploring us to never give up. In spite of all he knew it was obvious (at least to me) that he believed humanity would come to its senses and survive— if we kept on working.

Dan loved to talk. When PDSMM gave him our Lifetime Achievement Award (sadly on Zoom) our meeting ran way over time as we clung to every word and peppered him with questions for which he always had a thoughtful answer. The last time I saw him was on a PDAmerica Sunday Townhall. He was as loquacious as ever, making the best of his diagnosis by eating all the foods he had been denied for years and warning us, yet again, that nuclear was a possibility and that even a limited use of nukes would cause untold suffering and must be prevented at all costs. We could not believe he was even sick— let alone dying! His life force was still so strong.

He is survived by his children and, of course, his wife Patricia, whose anti-war efforts turned a creation of the war machine into a warrior for peace.

Dorothy recommended reading Norman Solomon’s tribute to him. Solomon noted that while Ellsberg “is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War to the world, he went on for 52 years to expose other types of secrets— including hidden truths about the psychology and culture of U.S. militarism. His stunning intellect and vast knowledge of the American warfare state were combined with great reservoirs of emotional depth and human compassion, enabling him to lay bare the social pressures and fear operating within the media and politics of a country addicted to waging aggressive war. After his disclosure in early March that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, media coverage of him and his life was extensive. Yet the public discourse scarcely touched on core aspects of the ongoing “war on terror” that he explored when we spoke for an interview that appears in my new book, War Made Invisible.”

Looking back at patterns of American attitudes toward war deaths, Ellsberg was not optimistic: “It’s fair to say, as a first approximation, that the public doesn’t show any effective concern for the number of people we kill in these wars. At most, they are concerned about the American casualties, especially if they’re too many. They will put up, to an almost surprising degree, [with] a considerable level of American casualties, but especially if they’re going down and especially if the president can claim success in what he was trying to do. But in terms of people killed in the course of that, the media don’t really ask the question, the public doesn’t ask the question of the media, and when it does come out, one way or another, occasionally, nothing much changes.”

After the Iraq War began, Ellsberg had an idea: “Imagine if the Times were to run a page or two of photographs of the people who burned on the night of ‘shock and awe.’ … It wouldn’t be that hard, if you were on the ground, we weren’t then but we were later, to find the people who were relatives of those people. And say, look, each one had friends, had parents, had children, had relatives — each one had made their mark in some little way in the world until that moment when they were killed — and these were the people we killed, and these were the people who were dying under the bombing, exactly as in our case, where two planes filled with gas burned two buildings.” But such U.S. media coverage was unthinkable. “Of course it’s never happened — nothing like it,” Ellsberg noted.

What is concealed from Americans, he went on, “is that they are citizens of an empire, they are in the core of an empire that feels itself as having the right to determine who governs other countries, and if we don’t approve of them because of their effect on corporate interests, or their refusal to give us bases, or through pipelines of a kind that we need, we feel absolutely right and capable of removing them, of regime change.”

Ellsberg added, “Virtually every president tells us, or reassures us, that we are a very peace-loving people, very slow to go to war, very reluctant, perhaps too slow in some cases, but very determined once we’re in, but it takes a lot to get us to accept the idea of going to war, that that’s not our normal state. That of course does go against the fact that we’ve been at war almost continuously. … That there is deception, that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game, in the approach to the war, in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war, is the reality. How much of a role does the media actually play in this, in deceiving the public, and how difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Chip Gibbons wrote yesterday that “Few people can say their actions helped to strengthen press freedom, end a war, and bring down a presidency. Daniel Ellsberg... the first whistleblower indicted under the Espionage Act… did just that.”