The American Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 revealed confidential documents on the planning of the Vietnam war, a situation known as the ‘Pentagon Documents’, died this Friday at the age of 92, his family announced in a statement.
“[Daniel Ellsberg] He died of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed on February 17. He died painlessly and surrounded by his loving family,” his wife and children said.
Until the early 1970s, when this former military analyst revealed that he was the source of the Department of Defense’s astonishing 47-volume, 7,000-page media reports on the US role in Indochina, Ellsberg he was a highly respected element in the government’s military elite. .
Like millions of other Americans, in and out of government, Ellsberg opposed the years-long war in Vietnam, the administration’s claims that the battle was winnable, and that a North Vietnamese victory over the US-backed South America would lead to the spread of communism. throughout the region.
Unlike many other opponents of the war, this American was in a unique position to make a difference.
“A whole generation of insiders of the Vietnam era was as disillusioned as I was with a war they considered hopeless and endless,” Ellsberg noted in his 2002 memoir.
The ‘Pentagon Papers’ were commissioned in 1967 by then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the United States and Vietnam and help his successors avoid the kind of mistakes he made. He only admitted that he did it much later.
The documents span more than 20 years, from France’s failed colonization efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to increasing US involvement, including bombing and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during the Lyndon Johnson administration. .
Ellsberg was among those invited to work on the study, which focused on 1961, when newly elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.
First published in The New York Times in June 1971, with The Washington Post, Associated Press and more than a dozen others, the classified documents documented that the US had defied a 1954 agreement that prohibited foreign military presence in US Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries, and planned to send US troops even when Johnson swore he would not.
Source: TSF
