Overused and belittled by being misused, the expression “whistleblower” has an original incarnation in modern democracies. A man with an exemplary career, strong convictions and certain courage.
Died at the age of 92, Friday, June 16, following pancreatic cancer, Daniel Ellsberg entered the military, political and media history of the United States, by deciding to reveal what should be kept quiet, provoking the most important and devastating leak of classified archives.
In 1971, after ending an exemplary career as a private consultant and adviser to the federal government, he released copies of nearly 7,000 pages of “top secret” documents to the press, exposing the lies and cover-ups. of four successive administrations regarding the war in Vietnam. A total of 58,000 Americans perished in this conflict. These “Pentagon papers” were the result of an order made in 1967 by the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who wanted to document the history of this war and the commitment of the United States in the region from 1945 onwards. attention of his successors.
After having unsuccessfully alerted senators, Daniel Ellsberg had acted as a strategist, allowing a first salvo of revelations in the New York Times- the paper was quickly hit with a Supreme Court injunction to cease publication.
Then it was the washington post and the Associated Press, followed by other dailies such as the Boston Globe, making unstoppable the updating of this confidential and damning documentation. At the end of June 1971, the same Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the publication of the documents, in the name of freedom of expression.
For Kissinger, “the most dangerous man in America”
While Ellsberg, hunted down by the police, became a hero of the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration and the supporters of a continuation of the conflict considered him a traitor to be chastised for example. For Henry Kissinger, the president’s diplomatic adviser, it was “the most dangerous man in America”. But the two trials against him, in Los Angeles and Boston, ended in a rout for the prosecution, due to procedural flaws and police abuse.
A clandestine team of former agents, disguised as false plumbers, had been dispatched to search the former office of the psychoanalyst of Ellsberg, in Beverly Hills (California). The goal was to find compromising notes on the patient.
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