Daniel Ellsberg was a co-founder of Freedom of the Press Foundation. He was best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg was also the author of four books: “Papers on the War” (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” (2002), “Risk, Ambiguity and Decision” (2001), and “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” (2017). In December 2006, he won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”
Ellsberg passed away on June 16, 2023.
These two pieces, the first by Marcy Wheeler, in part commenting on the second by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker (along with Snowden himself, in his interview with Bart Gellman) are the first I've seen making a point I've been making for years: contrary to the frequent …