01/02/2026
In the fall of 1969, Daniel Ellsberg began doing something that could destroy his life.
Night after night, he drove to a small advertising agency in Los Angeles. Inside, there was a Xerox machine. And in his briefcase, there were classified documents—pages from a 7,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War that the government had hidden from the American people.
Ellsberg wasn't a radical. He was a former Marine who had served as a rifle platoon leader. He held a PhD from Harvard. He had worked in the Pentagon as a trusted analyst, helping shape the very war strategy he was now determined to expose.
But he had read the documents. And what he found shattered everything he believed.
The papers proved that four consecutive presidents—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson—had systematically lied to the American public about Vietnam. They knew the war was unwinnable. They knew it early. They sent young men to die anyway.
By 1969, over 30,000 Americans had been killed. And the documents in Ellsberg's safe proved that every administration had known, privately, that it was all futile.
He had a choice: keep the secret, or risk everything.
For months, Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo copied the documents by hand—one page at a time. The work was agonizingly slow. The Xerox machine belonged to a friend's advertising agency. They worked through the night, then Ellsberg would smuggle the originals back to his office before anyone noticed they were gone.
Then he made a decision that would haunt him for years.
He asked his children to help.
Robert was 13. Mary was 10. On one occasion, Ellsberg brought them to the office. Robert helped with the copying and collating. Mary sat on the floor with a pair of scissors, carefully cutting the "TOP SECRET" stamps off the tops and bottoms of each page.
Years later, Ellsberg recalled the weight of that moment: "I wanted them to know that their father was doing something in a calm, sober way that I thought had to be done. And I did let my older son know that it would probably result in my going to prison."
He asked Mary not to tell her mother what they had done.
For two years, Ellsberg tried to do this the "right" way. He approached senators and congressmen, begging them to make the Pentagon Papers public through official channels. They all refused. Even anti-war politicians were too afraid.
So in March 1971, Ellsberg gave the papers to the New York Times.
When the Times began publishing on June 13, 1971, the country exploded.
The Nixon administration sued to stop publication—the first time in American history the government had sought prior restraint on a newspaper. When the Times was blocked, Ellsberg gave the papers to the Washington Post. When they were threatened, he gave them to seventeen other newspapers.
The truth flooded out faster than anyone could contain it.
Nixon was furious. He formed a secret unit called "the Plumbers" to destroy Ellsberg by any means necessary. They broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for damaging personal information. They discussed drugging him at public events. They plotted to discredit him.
Ellsberg was charged with espionage, theft, and conspiracy. He faced 115 years in federal prison.
But then the government's crimes started unraveling.
The break-in became public. Evidence of misconduct piled up. The judge discovered that Nixon had offered him the directorship of the FBI while the trial was ongoing—a blatant attempt at bribery.
On May 11, 1973, all charges against Daniel Ellsberg were dismissed due to "improper government conduct."
And the Nixon administration's crimes against Ellsberg? They were part of the pattern that led to Watergate. The same unit that broke into the psychiatrist's office later broke into Democratic Party headquarters. Nixon's paranoia, triggered partly by his obsession with destroying Ellsberg, ultimately destroyed his own presidency.
One man, armed with nothing but a conscience and a Xerox machine, helped end a war and topple a corrupt president.
Ellsberg never stopped. For the next fifty years, he became one of America's most prominent anti-war activists and whistleblower advocates. When Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents in 2013, Ellsberg publicly defended him, saying Snowden had done exactly what he had done—risked everything to tell the truth.
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023, at age 92.
His daughter Mary grew up to become a public health expert fighting gender-based violence. His son Robert became the editor-in-chief of a publishing house devoted to social justice.
They never forgot sitting on the floor of that advertising agency, doing something they barely understood—helping their father tell the truth, even when telling the truth could cost him everything.
Sometimes courage isn't about grand gestures. Sometimes it's about a Xerox machine, a pair of scissors, and the willingness to lose everything for what you believe is right.
-Soulfeedzz