He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious and profoundly sensitive, a born proselytizer who “saw political events in terms of moral absolutes” and demanded consequences for abuses of power.Īs much as anyone, Ellsberg also embodied the fall of American idealism in foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the upending of the post-World War II consensus that Communism, real or suspected, should be opposed worldwide. David Halberstam, the late author and Vietnam War correspondent who had known Ellsberg since both were posted overseas, would describe him as no ordinary convert. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.Īs much as anyone, Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience - who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly-elected President John F. The papers covered more than 20 years, from France’s failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the U.S., including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the U.S. The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S.
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