“[Daniel Ellsberg] He died of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed on February 17. He died without pain and surrounded by his beloved family,” said his wife and children.
Until the early 1970s, when this former military analyst turned out to be the source of the stunning media coverage based on the Department of Defense’s 47 volumes and 7,000 pages of the US role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a fixture among the government’s army. elite.
Like millions of other Americans, inside and outside the government, Ellsberg turned against the years of the Vietnam War, the administration’s claims that the battle could be won and that a North Vietnamese victory over the US-backed South 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.
“An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders was as disillusioned as I was by 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 defender of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the United States and Vietnam and help his successors correct the kinds of mistakes. avoid that he only admitted that he made 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 the bombings and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnson’s 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, along 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 allowed a foreign military presence in the United States. forbade. questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war into neighboring countries and planned to send U.S. troops even when Johnson swore he would not.
Source: DN
