Extended Biography

Daniel Ellsberg: Biographical Statement
(written for Right Livelihood Award, 2006)

I was born in Chicago in 1931. I attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan on a full scholarship, graduating first in my class, and won a full four-year scholarship to Harvard. In 1952 I graduated from Harvard with a B.A. degree summa cum laude in Economics. My senior honors thesis on Theories of Decision-making Under Uncertainty: The Contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern resulted in articles published in the Economic Journal and the American Economics Review. I then studied economics for a year on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge University.

In 1953, I volunteered to enter the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates program, having previously been granted deferments for my studies. I spent three years (1954-57) in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. This included six months with the Sixth Fleet during the Suez Crisis, for which I had extended my tour of duty.

From 1957-59 I was a Junior Fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows, which provides three-year fellowships for independent graduate study. Later, while at the RAND Corporation in 1962, I earned my Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard, with a thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, which was later published in a Distinguished Theses series (Garland, 2002). An article presenting the core of the thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms, published in 1961 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, has given rise to an extensive literature on the so-called “Ellsberg Paradox.”

In 1959, I became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation under the delusion—acquired as a summer consultant at RAND the previous year, and shared by all my colleagues and most of those who had access to Top Secret intelligence estimates—that a “missile gap” favoring the Soviets made the problem of deterring a Soviet surprise attack the overriding challenge to U.S. and world security. This error, which was not exposed for me until late 1961 (and for colleagues without higher-than-Top-Secret clearances not till much later) was comparable to the illusion in 2002 about Iraq’s WMD’s, though fortunately it did not lead to a U.S. preventive attack.

I had been drawn to the RAND Corporation because it was in the forefront of the emerging field of “decision theory,” the focus of my academic interests. Once there, I chose to apply my own work on individual decision-making under uncertainty to the most fraught, and possibly final, such decision in human history: the choice by the President of the U.S. or the Soviet premier—or, as I discovered, conceivably by one of their many subordinates—of whether to initiate all-out nuclear war.

Knowledge of the process leading up to this decision and its execution was among the most highly-guarded secrets in the national security apparatus. My classified research eventually required, as mentioned above, clearances higher than Top Secret and almost unique knowledge, for a civilian, of our nuclear war plans: a burden of horrific knowledge that has shaped my life and work ever since.

As a RAND employee on Air Force contract, I became during 1959-60 a consultant to the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC), and during 1961-64, to the Departments of Defense and State and to the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making.

In 1961 I drafted the Secretary of Defense Guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. In October 1962, I was called to Washington at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and for the next week served on two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.

Following this last experience–which taught me that the danger of nuclear war arose not from the likelihood of surprise attack by either side but from possible escalation in a crisis–I spent a year studying past nuclear crises. I was named as sole researcher, with multiple high-level clearances, in an interagency study sponsored by the Policy Planning Council of the State Department.

In mid-1964 I joined the Defense Department as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John T. McNaughton, on his promise that this was my chance to study high-level decision-making from the inside—as a participant rather than as a researcher after the fact. I was hired to work for him principally on Vietnam, then a low-level American engagement that had appeared to me totally unpromising for the U.S. ever since I had visited Saigon in 1961 on a Defense Department task force. But as McNaughton held out to me: “You want to study crises; Vietnam is a continuous crisis.”

That was confirmed on my first day—and night—as a full-time employee in the Pentagon. By coincidence, it was August 4, 1964, the occasion of a supposed—actually, illusory—attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, and the beginning of our eight-year bombing campaign against Vietnam.

In 1964-65, by direction of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, McNaughton worked with my assistance on secret plans to escalate the war in Vietnam, although both of us personally regarded these plans as wrongheaded and dangerous. Unfortunately, by decisions of President Johnson and McNamara, these plans were carried out in the spring of 1965. With my country at war, I then volunteered to serve in Vietnam, transferring to the State Department in mid-1965.

Based at the Embassy in Saigon, I worked under retired General Edward Lansdale, and later Deputy Ambassador William Porter, evaluating pacification on the front lines throughout South Vietnam. I relied on my Marine training, walking with troops in combat to see the hopeless war close up. After contracting hepatitis, probably on one of these operations in the rice paddies, I left Vietnam in June 1967.

On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, I worked on the Top Secret McNamara study, U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. Having been authorized to have exclusive access to the entire 7000-page, 47-volume study for purposes of research on Lessons from Vietnam, I became the first person—other than the two project directors—to read the entire study.

In late 1968 and early 1969, I was a consultant to Henry Kissinger, National Security Assistant to President-elect Richard Nixon, organizing the first draft of his initial presentation to the National Security Council on Options in Vietnam. I then drafted questions from him to the bureaucracy about Vietnam realities, uncertainties and policy—National Security Memorandum No. 1 (NSSM-1)—and helped summarize the Top Secret answers to these questions for the President.

Later that same year, as I finished my reading of the McNamara Study—a continuous record of governmental deception and fatally unwise decision-making, cloaked by secrecy, under four presidents—I learned from contacts in the White House that this same process of secret threats of escalation was underway under a fifth president, Richard Nixon. The history reflected in the Pentagon Papers offered no promise of changing this pattern from within the bureaucracy. Only a better informed Congress and public might act to avert indefinite prolongation and further escalation of the war.

Just at this time, I met young Americans face-to-face—in particular, Bob Eaton and Randy Kehler­––who were choosing to go to prison rather than to cooperate with the draft system and to participate in what they—and now I—saw as a wrongful war.  I had sought to meet non-violent activists like this after spending a year reading Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, at the urging of a Gandhian activist I had met in 1968.  I felt they were acting rightly, and that what they could do, I should be ready to do.

Their example put the question in my head: What could I do to help shorten this war, now that I’m prepared to go to prison for it? In this light, which included a readiness to risk my clearances and career for actions that had some–not necessarily great–chance of being helpful, new approaches occurred to me. I embarked on several of these simultaneously. (See Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, chapters 17-20).

As one of these approaches, in October 1969 I began photocopying, with the initial help of my former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, the Top Secret 7,000-page McNamara study. I believed, as I set out, that I was almost sure to go to prison for the rest of my life for this. In November I began giving the study to the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright. Despite the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Senator Fulbright still held back from bringing out the documents in hearings, for fear of Executive reprisal. He asked Secretary of Defense Laird to give him the classified study officially, but was summarily denied it.

After still another invasion (of Laos in 1971), I gave most of the study to the New York Times. When the Times was enjoined from publishing it further after three installments—the first such prior restraint in American history and a clear challenge to the First Amendment—I gave copies to the Washington Post and eventually, when the Post and two other papers were also enjoined, to nineteen papers in all. For all these papers to publish these “secrets” successively—in the face of four federal injunctions and daily charges by the Attorney General and the President that they were endangering national security—amounted to a unique wave of civil disobedience by major American institutions.

Just before the Supreme Court voided the injunctions as conflicting with the First Amendment, I was indicted on twelve federal felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years in prison. My friend Anthony Russo, who had found a copying machine for me and helped with the initial copying, was charged on three counts. These criminal charges against a leak to the American public were just as unprecedented as the earlier injunctions. But after almost two years under indictment and over four months in open court, all charges against us were dismissed—“with prejudice,” meaning we could not be tried again—just before closing argument, on grounds of governmental criminal misconduct against me. That was another first in American jurisprudence.

What had happened was that when President Nixon learned, shortly after my first indictment, that I had also copied the Top Secret NSSM-1 from his own National Security Council and given it to Republican Senator Charles Mathias, Nixon reasonably—though mistakenly—feared that I had other documents from his own Administration, including nuclear threats and plans for escalation which had yet to be carried out. He secretly directed criminal actions to prevent me from disclosing such embarrassing secrets, including the burglary of my former psychoanalyst’s office in search of information with which to blackmail me into silence, and later an effort to have me “incapacitated totally” at a demonstration at the Capitol.

When these crimes became known, they led—besides the termination of our trial—to the criminal convictions of several White House aides. The same offenses, originating in the Oval Office, also figured importantly in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon that led to his resignation in 1974.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1973, in the political atmosphere accompanying these revelations of White House crimes and cover-up, Congress finally cut off funding for further combat operations in Vietnam: initially, in the House with respect to Cambodia, on May 10, the day before our trial was dismissed; and totally on August 15, 1973. Together, these developments were crucial to ending the war in Indochina in 1975.

Ever since 1969, I have pursued what amounted to two parallel careers, seeking as a researcher to improve understanding—my own and others’—of the very phenomena I and others were, at the same time, trying by our activism to change or avert: the dynamics and dangers of the nuclear era and of unlawful interventions, and abuses of the government secrecy system. Neither effort, it has seemed to me—of investigation or resistance—could safely be put aside to await the completion of the other.

I have given several courses on the nuclear arms race: at Stanford University, as Regent’s Lecturer at the University of California–Irvine, at Cambridge Hospital, and at Harvard Medical School. I have written many articles and have given hundreds of lectures on all of the subjects above at colleges and other venues, across the U.S. and globally. What I have to convey on all these occasions reflects not only my eleven years of government research and consulting but also thirty-six years since then of continuous study and reflection.

As I wrote in the introduction to Papers on the War, my book about the Vietnam War as of 1972: “This war, I believe, needs not only to be resisted; it remains to be understood.” I was referring to the fact that we had entered that war, and persisted in it (for what proved to be three more years,) for reasons that remained mysterious and controverted throughout the war and after it. Indeed, they remain so today, even to a reader of the Pentagon Papers, even somewhat to me after thirty more years of pondering them in the light of successive new revelations.

I have no doubt that my 1972 proposition has always applied to the nuclear arms policies of the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states as well. For thirty years, alongside the activism described below which remains a large part of my ongoing project, I have also kept up with the latest revelations and analyses on this subject. These have helped shape my own evolving interpretations.

I believe that the effort to reduce the dangers of nuclear war calls for every form of political and grassroots activity that helped shorten the Vietnam War—from letter-writing to Congress and editors to lobbying, political campaigning, lectures, teach-ins and demonstrations—in all of which I have participated. Likewise, I have sought to encourage and have participated in mass actions of non-violent civil disobedience, which had such a powerful effect on my own decision to release the Pentagon Papers.

As a result, I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to seventy times, probably fifty focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.

These many actions have resulted in scores of trials, in each of which we tried our best—with varying success­­—to use our defense to educate the public (as well as the jurors) on the policies we were protesting. I have also been an expert witness for the defense in a number of the Ploughshares actions–organized originally by the Berrigan brothers–and other trials—in support of a “necessity” or “justification” defense for an action, otherwise illegal, undertaken to avert a greater evil. This is the rationale for civil disobedience.

In 1992 I launched, in association with Physicians for Social Responsibility, a project called Manhattan Project II, aiming to achieve a consensus among anti-nuclear, arms control and disarmament groups on a comprehensive program of concrete steps to end the nuclear arms race and proliferation and bring about radical reductions in nuclear arms, ultimately leading to abolition. The title Manhattan Project II was meant to convey the possibility and desirability of acting to undo the legacy of the original Manhattan Project fifty years earlier—1942-45—with the same sense of urgency.  We did achieve consensus among virtually all experts and arms control/disarmament groups outside the government—including many recent disarmament negotiators—on a program that remains wholly and urgently timely today.

Along with my ongoing research and activism, I set about writing two books that could convey to others—who want to understand the past and present situation in order to change it—what I have learned so far. The first is the story of my journey from defense analyst to peace activist, entitled Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. It came out in 2002. The other will be a nuclear memoir, based on my insider’s knowledge of the dangers of our nuclear policies. I wrote part of this in 1995-98 and will now turn—along with my other activities—to completing it as a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Fellow. (Editor’s note: Ellsberg’s fourth book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, was published in 2017.)

Writing this retrospective summary has made me unusually aware of how much of a piece my professional life has been, with respect to my several ongoing concerns as they extend into the present and future. This really began fifty-five years ago, with my academic work on decision-making under uncertainty. Even my years in the Marine Corps played their part, re-directing my intellectual interest in decision theory toward questions of national security. That led me to the RAND Corporation and the Defense Department, where I became aware of the dangers of our nuclear posture in concrete, terrifying detail known to very few other civilians, including even high-level officials and dedicated anti-nuclear activists. And it led me to Vietnam.

Even if I had remained in universities, I would probably have come to oppose the war, as so many others did, and I would have been even more likely than I was as a “defense intellectual” to meet Gandhian draft resisters. But I would not have brought to that encounter the burden of knowledge and sense of responsibility from my experience in the Pentagon, in Vietnam, and the White House. I might not—indeed I could not—have responded to their example precisely as I did. As it was, their moral courage was contagious.

There has never been a greater need for such civil courage in our citizenry and officials. Will it, can it be evoked in time? To have a basis for hope, we must speak and act as if it can. That is what my life and work are about.

ellsberg cv, 1958 to 1970  >>