Historian Peter Kuznick looks at the significance of Daniel Ellsberg's fight against America's insane nuclear war strategy, his exposure of the lies of the Viet Nam War, and his continuing fight against the American war machine.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, please don't forget the donate button and the YouTube subscribe button.

April 7th is Daniel Ellsberg's 90th birthday. Ellsberg is the original whistleblower. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger called him the most dangerous man in America, but not as we have mistakenly believed for many years because he was about to pull back the curtain on U.S. policies in Vietnam. Kissinger was terrified that Ellsberg was about to reveal an altogether different set of papers. The other Pentagon Papers, ones that would reveal the extent and sheer madness of U.S. nuclear war plans to the public.

Dan Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931 after graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in economics.

He studied for a year at King's College Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship between 1954. In 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps serving as a rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation and a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision making.

His book, Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, revealed what he called the institutional madness of American nuclear war planning. Edward Snowden said this long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistleblowing is both an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public that has grown dangerously habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on a hair-trigger alert. Ellsberg's book exposes much of the mythology that was the basis of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and was used to justify the creation of a massive military-industrial complex.

In 1967, Ellsberg worked on a top-secret study with Defense Secretary McNamara U.S. Decision Making in Vietnam 1945 to 68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and 17 other newspapers. Ellsberg's subsequent trial on 12 felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on the grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers was an important contribution to the pressure on Nixon to end the Vietnam War. Now, joining us to talk about the extraordinary life of Daniel Ellsberg is historian Peter Kuznick. Peter is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He's the author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activist in 1930s America. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the 12 part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States. Thanks very much for joining me, Peter.

Peter Kuznick

Happy to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So this is Daniel's 90th birthday, and I have to say he's still active as hell and still campaigning against nuclear weapons and speaking out on so many issues. I wish I had his energy now,