403 Minutes With... Daniel Ellsberg

Staring into the abyss with the famous Pentagon Papers leaker.

- Andrew Rice

KEEPING SECRETS was my career,” Daniel Ellsberg says. “I didn’t lose the aptitude for that when I put out the Pentagon Papers.” This might come as a shock, considering that the former Defense Department analyst is best known for leaking classified information nearly half a century ago, thus bringing about a landmark legal precedent in favor of press freedom and, indirectly, hastening the end of both the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. But for many years, even as Ellsberg beat prosecution, became a peace activist, and wrote an autobiography titled Secrets, he still had something remarkable left to disclose.

It turns out that Ellsberg also took many thousands of pages of documents pertaining to another subject: nuclear war. Ellsberg, a prominent thinker in the field of decision theory, had worked on the military’s “mutual assured destruction” strategy during the Cold War. Once a believer in deterrence, he now says he was a collaborator in an “insane plan” for “retaliatory genocide.” He wanted to tell the world decades ago; with nuclear threat looming again, he’s put the whole story into a new book, The Doomsday Machine.

“I expected to be in prison for the rest of my life,” Ellsberg says. Instead, at 86, he lives in a mid-century-modern home in the hills above Berkeley with his wife of many years, Patricia. When I visit him one sunny Sunday morning, he leads me onto a deck with a stunning view of San Francisco Bay. His office is crammed with boxes labeled with terms like first use threats and books arranged into categories: catastrophe, ethics, bombing civilians. “I’ve had a nice life, but I would rather have gotten this out,” Ellsberg says. “I shouldn’t have waited.”