CounterSpin interviewed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg many times over the years; in the wake of Ellsberg’s recent death, Janine Jackson revisited some of those interviews for the June 23, 2023, episode. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New York Times (6/16/23)
Janine Jackson: Daniel Ellsberg died June 16, aged 92. The New York Times obituary, by Robert D. McFadden, used its first establishing sentence to reference Ellsberg’s “sobbing anti-war epiphany on a bathroom floor.” And it ended that lead with the statement that “the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.”
You don’t have to be a linguist to sense the suggestion that the disclosure did the plunging, and not the crimes themselves.
Elite media’s respectful obituaries of Ellsberg have had something just a bit off—allowing, if not encouraging, the idea that Ellsberg somehow, however well-intentioned, made a bad thing worse.
It’s anyone’s guess how elite media square their supposed honoring of Ellsberg with their hagiography of undying goblin Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg, based on the exact actions the press now suggest they salute, the “most dangerous man in America.”
And certainly don’t ask how their respect for Ellsberg relates to their collective sniffing at living whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.
Corporate media would like you to glide past their not-coherent stance on whistleblowers, how they can accept trophies for printing their revelations while consigning them to invisibility, and worse, for revealing them.
Daniel Ellsberg had questions about that, and we should keep those questions alive.
Here’s Daniel Ellsberg on CounterSpin in September 2009. Host Peter Hart asked if having decided to risk his career and his life, he had tried going through political channels, and was it the blockage there that sent him to the press?
Time (6/28/71)
Daniel Ellsberg: That is why I went to the press. That was a mistake on my part, in a way, because I should have done that right from the beginning.
But it seemed to me that congressional hearings were called for on this, in part because the Pentagon Papers don’t entirely speak for themselves, or don’t tell the whole story, in the sense that what’s written down, even in top-secret form and in eyes-only memos and so forth, doesn’t represent, by any means, the whole truth that’s in the minds of the people who signed those reports. You really have to have interviews, or you have to talk to these people.
A lot of it doesn’t get written down, precisely because it might leak—and I don’t mean leak to the public; it might leak to the other service, or to Congress, or to people who controlled your budget…the real enemies, in some ways. So a lot of that doesn’t get written down at all.
I’m very aware, in other words, of the limitations of documents, even when it’s as extensive as the Pentagon Papers.
What I didn’t realize was that Congress just wasn’t going to grab that issue, perhaps even then, unless the public created a fire there, and there was a public interest.
I think Neil Sheehan, for example, was nervous, as late as 1971, in the spring, that I would insist on getting this material out first through Congress. And he felt that wouldn’t be the most effective way to do it, and he was right about that. Now, I would’ve deferred to that if he’d made it clear at the point.
But as it was, when the Pentagon Papers came out, on June 13, ’71, I was still in the process of trying to encourage Senator Gravel, or before him, Pete McCloskey of the House, Senator Mathias. I’d finally given up on Senator McGovern at that point, and Senator Fulbright.
My advice right now, for people who feel that we’re heading toward an abyss, for example, in Afghanistan, and if they know—I feel sure people do know in the Pentagon—that the 45,000 we’ve heard as the upper limit of what General McChrystal may ask for is by no means the ceiling on the numbers that the president has heard.
That has not leaked to the public at all. No official, not even on anonymous sources, have said what I’m sure is being discussed right now in the Pentagon.
JJ: Let’s talk more about the current landscape, because certainly, for those who did not live through the history of the Vietnam War, I think they would be very struck by the press’s reaction at the time.
Seventeen papers picked up parts of the Pentagon Papers. It was featured on the evening newscasts for weeks. And I think, for many people, it would be almost impossible to imagine the media system of today reacting in quite the same way to a story of that magnitude. What do you think?
Attorney General John Mitchell with President Richard Nixon
DE: Nixon, of course, created what could be called a firestorm on that one, for about a month, by two unprecedented actions, mainly the first—it was the first injunction in our history. The First Amendment was actually written to prevent another Peter Zenger case, in the colonial administration, of prior restraint, of stopping a newspaper from actually printing news, for any grounds whatever.
And so no one had ever tried to do that before. In fact, when Nixon, on the tapes, we hear him asking John Mitchell, who wants an injunction, have we done this before? Mitchell says, oh, sure, lots of times. Which shows what you get when you make your campaign manager your attorney general. He was a bond lawyer, basically. So that was an incredible error on his part.
Well, by the injunction, challenging the press on this, that created the story.
Had I not had enough copies—which I’d made at my wife’s behest, actually, to get on with it, and to make enough copies so that the FBI couldn’t get all my copies away from me—that gave me extra copies, so that when there was one injunction after another, which actually I had not foreseen, I had extra copies to give other newspapers.
Washington Post (7/1/71)
So you then had an event, unprecedented, I think, not only in the press, but in any institution of any country, before or since: You had a wave of civil disobedience among major institutions, 19 newspapers, 17 after the Washington Post and the Times, defied the attorney general and the president, who were telling them that this wasn’t just an ordinary crime, they called it treason. They used the word “treason,” that it would damage our national security if they printed another page.
And publisher after publisher, following the lead of the New York Times and the Post, which gave them a strong feeling that they were on the right track here, but they followed their own judgment and said, we don’t think this will damage the national security, whatever the president says, and they defied him.
JJ: In 2005, CounterSpin‘s Steve Rendall talked to Ellsberg about Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, but also about the core role of whistleblowers.
DE: To the extent that sources can be punished, as was attempted in my case—or which Vanunu experienced here—obviously the intent of that is to close down information from people who are not authorized to give it, which is to say real news, real information. Otherwise you’re left with handouts and an account of government decision-making that is simply what the government wants you to know, or permits you to know.
Daniel Ellsberg: “Journalists and the public have an extreme interest in protecting the ability of people inside the government to give information without authorization.”
And that’s not a democracy. That’s basically, you’ve got a monarchy or a dictatorship in that respect in foreign affairs. And that’s pretty much what we would have if we had the total control over sources.
So journalists and the public have an extreme interest in protecting the ability of people inside the government to give information without authorization. That is, information that their bosses would find embarrassing because it would reveal crimes or errors or misjudgments or lies.
That’s mainly the kind of thing that they’re above all interested in keeping secret. And it’s what the public needs to know in order to hold them accountable and to exert any real democratic control over foreign policy.
JJ: In an article for CounterPunch in 2006, Daniel Ellsberg said:
I would not have thought of copying the Pentagon Papers, risking a possible lifetime in prison, without the example of thousands of young Americans who were doing everything they could to oppose a wrongful, hopeless war. They showed civic courage.
And, Ellsberg added, “Courage is contagious.”
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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.