Remembering Dan Ellsberg: Beyond the Pentagon Papers

A friend for forty years, an inspiration forever.

We knew it was coming, after he revealed the diagnosis several months ago, but still it was an immensely sad moment today when we learned that Dan Ellsberg had passed away at the age of 92. Dan was a friend for over forty years, dating back to my years at Nuclear Times magazine, which coincided with his immersion in raising alarms about the Bomb, the issue that would dominate the rest of his many years of activism. When I became editor of that magazine, one of my immediate goals was to secure a piece written by Dan. (The year before I had hailed him in my first book, which happened to be about “whistleblowers.”) But I was warned: Forget it, he has writers’ block and never, ever, finishes anything. Somehow I coaxed an essay out of him, perhaps his first in many years.

We remained in close touch after that, at antinuclear conferences and especially at my colleague Robert Jay Lifton’s annual seminars at Wellfleet, MA, where he became a fixture. Such a gentle, quirky, at times fun, guy and always worth a few hours of deep conversation. At the same time one might watch him strip to his undershorts on a Cape Cod beach in 50-degree temps and dive into the water (he loved the ocean and body surfing). Then speak with steely resolve to a room full of admirers before dissolving in tears because in his mind he had not done enough to end the Vietnam war or reveal nuclear threats when he was still an insider.

Then there were the many phone calls from him in Northern California seeking my advice on some sort of protest or media campaign—often concerning his relentless encouragement of national security whistleblowers—and vice versa. And, of course, he strongly informed my 1995 book with Lifton, Hiroshima in America, as well as my later book, Atomic Cover-up, and my 2021 documentary of the same name. Few knew the extent of his civil disobedience in attempting to end or at least contain the nuclear arms race, as he was marched off to jail numerous times, from the Nevada Test Site to Washington, D.C., usually with little or no media attention. Looking at an email to me from Dan three years ago, I am reminded that even at the age of 89 he was vowing to get arrested at the Livermore Lab at the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima. It didn’t happen because the action got called off due to the lab deciding to close for the day.

When I was editor of Editor & Publisher we became one of the few national publications to persistently raise red flags about Bush’s single-minded lies for an invasion of Iraq. Again, I desperately wanted Dan’s input, and so I conducted a lengthy interview with him—he was so prescient about how the invasion would lead to disaster—and it was later re-published in my book about media failures on Iraq, So Wrong for So Long. Brief excerpts, as Dan speaks:

I'm not sure if the press learned from Vietnam how to do better. In any case, the press as a whole is not doing it better now….They are not doing the job that should be done on informing themselves, Congress, and the public on the decision-making process, the dissenting positions within the government, and the real considerations in the decision. Without that, Congress and the public cannot bring pressure to bear, before the bombs drop….

And, as in past, the foreign press is reporting much more adequately than the U.S. press -- and the U.S. press, as before, is largely ignoring that….I suggest that, just as in Vietnam, when the bombs start dropping, the American public will be entering this war with a very limited understanding of why we are at war and what the consequences will be in both the short and long terms...

The first lie is: Saddam represents the No. 1 danger to U.S. security in the world. To allow the president and Rumsfeld to make that statement over and over is akin to them saying without challenge from the press that they accept the flat-earth theory.

This government, like in Vietnam, is lying us into a war. Like Vietnam, it's a reckless, unnecessary war, where the risks greatly outweigh any possible benefits.

People forget that for much of the time that I knew him, before his profile was raised again in the past 15 years, Dan was often in the media wilderness. He was treated as kind of a relic or even, by some, a bit of a kook. Then came his well-regarded and long overdue memoir, books about him by others, a TV movie, Spielberg’s The Post film, and much else. Now he was lionized by many. We appeared together on several programs discussing the early WikiLeaks releases and the fate of Chelsea Manning. In fact, Dan’s most persistent plea in his later years was (as he told me):

I'd make this argument to insiders: Don't do what I did. Don't keep your mouth shut when you know people are being lied to. Tell the truth before the bombs are falling, while there's still a chance to do something about it.

There’s much more to feel, and say, but for now: Below, my most recent piece, published on Bill Moyers’ site, about Dan when I previewed his important “nuclear” book in 2017. Rest in peace, Dan, and thanks for never giving the bastards any lasting peace for more than half a century. (His family’s reflections today.)

Avoiding Doomsday

November, 2017

For most people, Daniel Ellsberg is known mainly for — or only for — the Pentagon Papers he leaked in 1971. And that’s plenty. It set in motion a landmark First Amendment case and led to shifts in public opinion that helped quicken the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the end to that war. Ellsberg was back in the public eye recently in relation to the epic 10-part PBS series on Vietnam, which included a lengthy segment on the Pentagon Papers — but his absence from the series as an interview subject drew criticism.

But, for me, the name Ellsberg does not immediately evoke “Vietnam” but rather “anti-nuclear.” And now he has written a book titled The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, to be published by Bloomsbury in December. In it he reveals that the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers that he copied from his office at the Rand Corporation in 1969-70 were only “a fraction” of what he had borrowed from office safes. Much of the rest amounted to the “other” Pentagon papers — secret documents on US nuclear war plans and capabilities.

In Doomsday Machine — the title taken, of course, from Dr. Strangelove — he discloses that he intended to release all of these copies at the same time but became convinced that it was vital to first concentrate on a war already raging rather than on one that was even more deadly but not at hand (although the threat certainly was). His story of what happened to the nuclear papers is almost worth the price of the book, as they are hidden in a compost pile, then at a garbage dump, before the outer fringes of a hurricane scatter them to history. Ellsberg has since obtained some of them again via FOIA requests and other means.

While I wrote about the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s, my close connection with Ellsberg began only in the 1980s after I became the editor of Nuclear Times magazine. Ellsberg, then (and still) living in the San Francisco area, had started appearing at antinuclear protests — the “freeze” campaign was in full swing across the country. Naturally I wanted him to write an essay for the magazine on this subject but I was warned that while he often tried to write articles he “never finishes them.” When he completed a column for us, it drew wide attention as his first published piece in many years.

And so began our friendship. His anti-nuclear activism only increased, leading to his arrest at numerous protests, including at the Nevada test site, over the next decade. Most of the world still knew him only for the Papers, but he had become a hero in anti-nuclear circles. We had long talks, in person or over the phone, about nuclear issues and about Hiroshima, a subject I had written about for dozens of newspapers and magazines after my visit there in 1984. He took particular interest in the book I was writing with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, and attended with me several of the annual gatherings at Lifton’s summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. At those retreats he would talk about his anti-nuclear civil disobedience and grow quite emotional discussing his little-known work on nuclear war plans that preceded his months in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. But he had not written widely about that.

In recent years, Ellsberg has been hailed by many and decried by some as “the world’s most famous whistleblower,” often interviewed for his early support for WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. But his passion — and my own — surrounding nuclear threat has never faded. I wrote a book, Atomic Cover-Up, on the US suppression of film footage from Hiroshima that he deeply appreciated.

In my current book, The Tunnels, peak nuclear dangers during the Cold War play a key role as I cover escapes under the Berlin Wall and how the Kennedy White House tried to kill US television coverage of them. This happened in 1962, at a time when Ellsberg was intimately involved in nuclear theorizing and “game” play. One reason JFK did not support tunnel escapes and publicity about them, was fear that it might spark a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. He managed to scuttle Daniel Schorr’s CBS coverage and delay an NBC primetime special, The Tunnel, but when the latter finally aired it would stand as a landmark in TV history and profoundly influence a generation of broadcast journalists (including Bill Moyers).

So, for all these reasons, I was particularly pleased to read Ellsberg’s upcoming The Doomsday Machine, already hailed in blurbs by everyone from Edward Snowden to Arundhati Roy.

Ellsberg, now 86, wrote an autobiography about 15 years ago, but this is his first book tracing his full encounter with nuclear weapons. It goes back to his teen years in the postwar 1940s when he read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which would inform his nuclear views for the rest of his life. In the book, even though I thought I knew Dan well, I was surprised to read that he belatedly learned that his father, a builder, had top-secret clearances and refused to work on the hydrogen bomb project on principle — and cited Dan introducing him to the Hersey book as a turning point.

Part I of the book, making up about two-thirds of the pages, is titled “The Bomb and I,” and kicks off with the chapter, “How Could I: The Making of a Nuclear War Planner.” We follow his early career, which included stints in the US Marines and at Harvard, to Vietnam and to Rand, with nuclear risk always in the background, if not the foreground. I was surprised to learn that as an avowed Cold Warrior he had played a key role in drafting one of the key documents in my Tunnels book, the official, step-by-step US war plan for initiating a first-strike nuclear attack. Then his book moves on to two subjects at the heart of my Tunnels: the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile showdown.

On Cuba he reveals in a straightforward fashion his intimate involvement as an adviser to White House insiders before and during the October 1962 episode. Ellsberg was in the “dovish” camp, advising those around Kennedy to first try blocking Soviet shipments to Cuba instead of following the Joint Chiefs’ urgings to bomb and/or invade the island. We all know the happy ending to that crisis, but in the following chapter Ellsberg covers what he, and the public, did not know at the time: the full extent of how close we came to World War III, not because of actions by Soviet or American leaders but the dangers posed by trigger-happy Cubans manning anti-aircraft batteries and Soviet officers in submarines. But, as in so much of the book, it’s not merely “history” but a warning for today with many of the same technological — and human — elements still holding sway.

In the final third of the book, Ellsberg goes beyond his personal experiences to tackle the track record and philosophy of what he calls “bombing cities,” “burning cities” and “killing a nation” before concluding with the real driving force of this book, and why it’s so significant today: a close study of US “first-use” policy. Yes, no matter the president, from Truman and Ike to Obama and Trump, it has been American policy to launch a nuclear first-strike even if we have not yet been attacked.

It is Ellsberg’s belief that multiple presidents have used nuclear weapons in threatening other nations since Nagasaki. He presents a long list of such moments, and along with many, he is particularly worried about Trump’s recklessness toward North Korea. He recalls Trump asking an adviser about nuclear weapons, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” Trump also wondered if our allies, Japan and South Korea, should consider designing their own nukes.

But he also argues that accidental nuclear war is a real threat, and that the final decision to fire weapons may be delegated to subordinates in the US and Russia and probably in other nuclear nations. Vital information about all things nuclear, meanwhile, has been kept from the public for decades: “Like discussion of covert operations and assassination plots, nuclear war plans and threats are taboo for public discussion by the small minority of officials and consultants who know anything about them.” Few in Congress even know much about them.

This “systematic official secrecy, lying and obfuscation” guarantees that “most aspects of the US nuclear planning system and force readiness that became known to me half a century ago still exist today” and are “as prone to catastrophe as ever.” Ellsberg calls this “the hidden reality” he hopes to expose in his book — and in my view, he succeeds at that.

At a time when nuclear dangers grow, along with activism to combat them — elevated just this week by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — Ellsberg’s book is a timely reminder of the nuclear threat and essential reading in the Trump era.

Note: My new PBS film, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, is now easy to watch by all, online or streaming, at 27 minutes, and also—there’s a companion book. Narrated by Josh Charles, produced by Lyn Goldfarb.