Watch Ellsberg’s conversation with Christiane Amanpour, “Speaking Truth to Power: Ellsberg’s Legacy of Courage and Conscience,” aired on CNN on 3/23/23.
Excerpts from the Interview:
Christiane Amanpour: The 20th anniversary of the Iraq War this week reminds us all of the critical importance of holding governments to account. Fast forward to today, and autocrats are waging wars around the world, from Russia’s latest year-long invasion of Ukraine to Iran’s battle with its own people.
The brave women and men taking to the streets there remind us of the power and value of speaking truth to power. Whistleblowing plays a crucial role in this pursuit. Without it, unjust wars begin and injustices go unchecked.
Daniel Ellsberg is probably the patron saint of them all. Anyone who knows anything about America’s misguided war in Vietnam knows his name to this day, because of one giant leap of courage and conscience. Leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, at great personal risk, changed the course of that history by revealing America secretly knew the war was unwinnable.
Fifty years later, Ellsberg is still deeply committed to peace and transparency. But this month, at almost 92, he revealed his latest personal battle after being diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. So when he joined me from Berkeley, California, we talked about his life, this farewell moment, and above all, how to save lives by speaking out.
Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to the program.
Daniel Ellsberg: Glad to be here, Christiane.
CA: Daniel, can you just tell me how you’re feeling?
DE: I’m feeling wonderful, as matter of fact. People say to live one day at a time, as though it were your last. I think that’s pretty hard to do. You’ve got appointments to keep, people to say goodbye to. But actually, one month at a time works very well, living as though it were my last. I’m having a very good time here, seeing relatives, seeing all my grandchildren, and eating food that I haven’t been able to eat for years because I had a salt-free diet, which I am now off.
CA: It is incredible to hear you saying you are having a wonderful time… You seem to be at peace with it.
DE: I’m not in a rush to leave. But it’s been a wonderful party, and it’s time to go home and go to bed.
CA: Wow. Well, part of the wonderful party is what you did with your life, right? You are the king of whistleblowers. Does that resonate with you?
DE: I don’t think we have a king. It’s a rather anarchic group, actually.
CA: Okay, the lead whistleblower of all time.
DE: As I.F. Stone, the journalist, used to say, “All governments lie, and nothing they say is to be believed.” That doesn’t mean that everything they say is a lie. It does mean that anything they say could be a lie, and it’s not the last word. You have to look for other sources of information and check it against your common sense.
By the way, one thing I’ve learned in my long life is: if a policy looks crazy, it probably is.
CA: Well, let’s talk about the policy that looked crazy to you. But before I get into the leak of the Pentagon Papers, let us just remember that you are not some long-haired anarchic lout. You were a Marine Corps veteran and a Harvard-educated former Defense Department official. You served with the State Department in Vietnam. So for you, what was the “aha moment” back then that made you need to put this out into the public?
DE: Like nearly all whistleblowers, the wrongdoing I saw inside was known to virtually all of my colleagues. Humans turn out to be very loath to be ostracized from their group, to lose status, to break the rules of their group. That can keep them quiet about virtually any wrongdoing by that group, any harm being done to others – something they wouldn’t do on their own.
But if their leaders call for it, virtues of obedience that we all regard as virtues – courage, patriotism, loyalty – can be harnessed to very bad causes. That’s true of at least one side, usually both sides in any war. You see courage on both sides. And yet, humans can be called on to do things with their group that they know are wrong, but they can tell themselves, “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe there’s some reason that explains all this.”
For me it was reading 7,000 pages of top-secret documents in the Pentagon Papers. I was one of the few who read them all. I’d worked on one of the volumes, the 1961 volume. Reading them all, I realized that people inside had known, year after year, that what we were doing, at the level we were doing it, was doomed to fail, to result in a stalemate — an escalating stalemate.
But in civilian life, it seems rare to see people risking their careers, their access, their jobs, their families. They are not willing to do it, no matter how many people are at stake.
So I’m back where I was in ‘62, in a way. The world has not gotten less dangerous. And yet, you don’t see people telling the truth, on either side, that might actually save a war’s worth of lives.
CA: Can I ask you something? Because speaking to you, and obviously reading all about you and the history… Do you feel at 92 now, and with your illness that you’ve gone public with, that you’ve accomplished your goals – that it’s been a life well lived, and you have done something more than maybe you could ever have imagined in terms of effectiveness?
DE: Look, I was part of a movement — the anti-Vietnam-war, the anti-intervention movement — that did contribute, thanks to the unforeseeable actions of multitudes of people, to shortening the war. That was a success. The millions who died in Vietnam — and 58,000 in this country — are testimony to unsuccess, year after year. But eventually, it showed that truth-telling, committed action, nonviolent actions actually do succeed (although with no guarantees.)
I was also part of an antinuclear movement that kept things from being worse than they are, that kept the nuclear threats from being (more than) just threats. These were being used; there was no taboo against threats. But the trigger hasn’t been pulled yet. I was part of that movement.
CA: Daniel Ellsberg, thank you so much for giving us the benefit of so much wisdom, and so much activism. We really appreciate it, and we wish you really all the very best.