American Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 released confidential planning documents for the Vietnam War, a situation known as the Pentagon Papers, died this Friday at the age of 92, his family said in a statement.
“[Daniel Ellsberg] He died of pancreatic cancer diagnosed on February 17th. He died without pain and surrounded by his beloved family,” his wife and children said.
Until the early 1970s, when this former military analyst turned out to be the source of mind-boggling media reports based on 47 volumes and 7,000 pages of the US Department of Defense about the US role in Indochina, Ellsberg was an integral part of the government military. elite.
Like millions of other Americans in and out of government, Ellsberg opposed the decades-long Vietnam War, the administration’s claims that the battle was won and that a North Vietnamese victory over the US-backed South would spread communism. throughout the region.
Unlike many other opponents of the war, this American had a unique opportunity to make a difference.
“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders were just as frustrated as I was about a war they thought was hopeless and endless,” Ellsberg noted in his 2002 memoir.
The Pentagon Papers was commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate for the war, who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the United States and Vietnam and help his successors avoid the mistakes he only admitted to making much later. .
The documents span more than 20 years, from failed French colonization efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to increased U.S. involvement, including bombing and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops under the Lyndon Johnson administration.
Ellsberg was among those invited to work on the study, which focused on 1961, when newly elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.
Secret documents first published in The New York Times in June 1971, in association with The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and more than a dozen others, documented that the US had violated a 1954 agreement banning foreign military presence in the United States. . wondered if there was a viable government in South Vietnam, covertly expanded the war into neighboring countries, and planned to bring in US troops even when Johnson swore he would not.