Daniel Ellsberg
Political activist and military analyst
Daniel Ellsberg was an American military analyst and activist who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. He also studied nuclear weapons and nuclear policy in depth.
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American Born 1931 in Chicago, United States Died 2023
About Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg (1931 to 2023) was an American political activist, economist and military analyst. While working at the RAND Corporation, he gave newspapers including The New York Times and The Washington Post a secret Pentagon study of how the US government made decisions about the Vietnam War. This caused a national political controversy in 1971. In January 1973 he faced Espionage Act charges, along with charges of theft and conspiracy. That May the court dismissed every charge, citing misconduct by government officials and illegally gathered evidence. Ellsberg also devised the Ellsberg paradox, a well-known example in decision theory. He received the Right Livelihood Award in 2006 and the Olof Palme Prize in 2018. He wrote the memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and his book The Doomsday Machine is among the titles summarized here.