What if you're convinced your country is in a war that's unwinnable? What if everyone in the Defense and State Departments believe there's no realistic chance of achieving any sort of victory? And what if, even though they know better, they continue to lie in public and state that conditions are improving and that victory is just around the corner? If you're a dissident of Daniel Ellsberg's stature, you risk life in prison to halt the unnecessary bloodbath.
Cold War Marine Commander Daniel Ellsberg grew up in Detroit, then graduated from Harvard with a Ph.
D.
in Economics in 1959.
He was a committed cold warrior.
Having served as a company commander in the Marine Corps, he became an analyst at the armed forces world policy think tank known as the RAND Corporation.
Then, he moved on to the Pentagon, working under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
At the Pentagon, Ellsberg saw a nonexistent Gulf of Tonkin attack used by President Johnson to launch a war against North Vietnam.
Ellsberg wanted to understand the war better, so he went to Vietnam in 1965 as a civilian working for the State Department.
In Vietnam, Ellsberg visited 38 of the 43 provinces evaluating pacification.
He used his marine training to work with the troops -- sometimes in significant combat.
After a few months, he was convinced that "nothing lay ahead for us but frustration and stalemate and killing and dying.
" Ellsberg came back to the U.
S.
where McNamara asked him to contribute to a Top Secret historical project titled "United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.
" The study -- a 47 volume Top Secret Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War -- would later become famously known as the Pentagon Papers.
The Pentagon Papers The Pentagon Papers revealed that the Vietnam War couldn't be won, and, if fighting continued, the conflict would cost many more lives than estimated in public.
In addition, the papers displayed the government's deep cynicism towards U.
S.
citizens, and its total disregard for the loss and suffering of U.
S.
troops.
Because Ellsberg knew releasing the classified Pentagon Papers might land him in prison for the rest of his life, he spent 1970 trying to convince a few Senators to release the papers.
It didn't work.
So, with the assistance of Anthony Russo, he leaked copies of the papers to Neil Sheehan at The New York Times.
Pissed-Off President Nixon On June 13, 1971, President Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times and saw the wedding picture of his daughter Tricia on the left-hand side of the front page.
On the right side, the headline read: "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.
S.
Involvement.
" The next day, an Oval Office tape recorded White House Chief of Staff H.
R.
Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon:

What it says is -- Rumsfeld was making this point this morning -- what -- what it says is -- to the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook.
But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment.
And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong.

President Nixon requested a federal court injunction to stop the Times from publishing excerpts of the report.
The Times appealed the injunction, but had to wait for the case to work its way through the court system.
FBI Manhunt While The New York Times was enjoined from publishing more of the papers, Ellsberg and his wife went underground.
Although he was the subject of the biggest manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping, Ellsberg distributed more copies of the papers to other newspapers.
Nixon filed more injunctions, but couldn't keep up.
Two weeks later, when he'd run out of copies, Ellsberg surrendered to arrest.
Charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage, he faced twelve felony charges and a possible 115 years in prison.
During the period of the trial, Nixon directed members of the White House Special Investigation Unit (the infamous White House Plumbers) to break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, where Nixon hoped to find information to discredit Ellsberg.
The exposure of the government's gross misconduct against Ellsberg led to the dismissal of all charges against him.
And, on June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon's injunctions were unconstitutional, allowing the presses to roll.
A Dissident Ride into the Sunset Daniel Ellsberg continued his life as a political activist, lecturer, and writer.
In 2004, he formed the Truth Telling Project, which called for insiders to leak documents that reveal deception regarding Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2004, Ellsberg was one of 100 prominent Americans and 40 members of 9/11 victims' families that signed the 9/11 Truth Statement.
The statement is an explicit call to examine evidence that suggests high-level government officials purposely allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur.
"The public is lied to every day by the president, by his spokespeople, by his officers.
If you can't handle the thought that the president lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn't stay at that government at that level, where you're made aware of it, a week.
" ~Daniel Ellsberg.