A Life of Powerful Choices: Remembering Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg speaking at a hunger strike in front of the White House in 2006 to bring US troops home from Iraq. (Flickr/Elvert Barnes)
In a time when we are cynical about the idea of heroes, Daniel Ellsberg has long been one of mine. On learning of his passing this week, I am moved, like so many, to share deep gratitude for a life lived so well.
I first met Dan when he was preparing to go to trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers. As part of a nationwide tour in the fall of 1972, he came to the University of San Diego, where I was a first-year student. After his talk to a large crowd at the law school, I slithered my way to the front and managed to ask him about the future of the policy. He was thoughtful and detailed and genuine.
Over the following decades I would see these qualities in action many times on various settings and contexts, especially after I plunged into the world of progressive political activism in the early 1980s.
While Ellsberg is often rightly remembered for risking 115 years in prison for releasing a top-secret study revealing the pattern of deception which a succession of US administrations perpetrated and that had fueled a long and costly war in Vietnam, I am most moved by the 50 years of activism that followed this historic act. He cashed in a considerable portion of his privilege as a man educated at Harvard and Cambridge, as the ultimate insider, to stand wholeheartedly against the systems of domination that threaten us all. He persistently brought his insight and passion to the vexing problem of the survival of the planet.
“After leaking the Pentagon Papers, you could have sat on your laurels,” I once said to him in an interview. “Why didn’t you?” He looked at me with bewilderment. Though such a thing might have occurred to someone else — taking such a dramatically risky step, after all, is trouble enough for a lifetime — for him the work wasn’t finished. In fact, releasing the papers seemed to release something in him, so that he plunged feet first into the roiling waters of nonviolent movements using the most powerful symbol he had at his disposal to back up his words and his analysis: his own vulnerable body.
The interview we did, for example, concerned his active participation in the waves of nonviolent action at the Nevada Test Site in the 1980s, as I recounted in an essay ten years ago in Waging Nonviolence:
The United States detonated nuclear weapons at the site north of Las Vegas on average once every 18 days beginning in 1951. Ellsberg took part in the nonviolent resistance organized by Nevada Desert Experience and other organizations to stop this, but he also participated in riskier actions than simply crossing the line at the facility’s entrance. In 1986 he and members of Greenpeace and the Nuclear Freeze drove deep into the site just before a nuclear device was scheduled to be detonated. Via walkie-talkie, they made contact with the test site authorities that they were in the area and that they should not follow through with the test. Not only was the test delayed, Ellsberg managed to communicate with some friends in Congress who used the news of this action to help pass a bill in the House calling for an end to testing. (It was killed in the Senate.) These actions contributed to those by many others in the United States and around the world to establish the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the early 1990s.
But there are so many other times when he was arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience: at an historic action when hundreds were arrested at the CIA headquarters; as part of the campaign at Concord Naval Weapons Station where his friend, Brian Willson, was run down by a train carrying arms bound for Central America; and innumerable protests against the Persian Gulf War and the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been arrested at the White House and at Red Square in Moscow.
One of my favorite examples is the yearlong campaign at Rocky Flats, the facility outside Denver that manufactured the plutonium pits used in nuclear arms. He and others took part in waves of resistance month after month. Dubbed the “Rocky Flats Truth Force,” the protesters sat on a strategic railroad spur to “stop the arms race in its tracks” and interfere with the smooth functioning of nuclear weapons assembly and production. Many were arrested and tried. A few years later the facility was shuttered.
“As a former official speaking on so many matters which so many officials have concealed, denied and lied about over the years, I was glad to have the opportunity in court to testify to my knowledge and beliefs,” Ellsberg wrote about his testimony in A Year of Disobedience, a book by Keith Pope about the campaign. “I revealed the Pentagon Papers because I believed that decades of secrecy surrounding official decision making in Vietnam, by promoting public ignorance and passivity, had prolonged a needless and wrongful war and threatened the survival of our democracy.”
Dan was arrested engaging in civil disobedience countless times in these and many other struggles. I was fortunate to be involved in some of theses efforts, in which I was able see up close his gifts of tenacity, intelligence, clear sightedness, and courage.
Here is one concrete example.
On June 20, 1983, Dan joined a thousand people in nonviolent civil disobedience at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This protest was organized by the Livermore Action Group or LAG as part of the “International Day of Nuclear Disarmament.” I took part in this action with my colleagues in Spirit Affinity Group.
Typically, if a thousand people get arrested, they’re usually not held very long. But In 1983, things were different. LAG had learned that the county prosecutor’s plan was to impose, not only jail time or fines, but two-years of probation on those found guilty. If people violated that probation, they could face heavy jail time. This plan was seen for what it was, by most activists: an attempt to impose a chilling effect to hobble the growing movement.
LAG therefore encouraged all those risking arrest to withhold their names while being booked. By not giving our names, the county had to hold us. LAG’s theory was that if most of us stayed in jail, the pressure would build for the sheriff and prosecutors to strike probation from the penalties.
Dan, like many of us, withheld his name. He, like the rest of us, was shuffled off to stay in what came to be called “the circus tent,” because the National Guard set up large tents to hold hundreds of men in one part of the jail and hundreds of women in another.
Three things stand out for me regarding Daniel Ellsberg during our incarceration.
First, Dan presented a series of lectures on the nuclear national security state. These were sparkling analyses that helped us understand more clearly the realities we were up against.
Second, as the days passed, the action we were doing by staying put drew more and more attention, including when ABC’s “Nightline” program decided to broadcast a debate from the jail between Dan and the local prosecutor. This happened, in spite of the fact that Ellsberg hadn’t given his name.
But the third thing I recall was Dan’s understanding of how important this kind of resistance is, which accounted for his willingness in this case, and about 90 other cases, to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. He had made this point in the book Protest and Survive, in 1981. In this book he made an analogy between public consent for nuclear weapons and the mass suicide that took place at Jonestown in Guyana in 1979. For Ellsberg, acceptance of hair-trigger, first-strike nuclear weaponry paralleled “what the Reverend Jim Jones wanted with his suicide drills in Guyana. … rehearsing his followers in the gestures of sacrificing their children and themselves, training them to react passively to his message…“Trust me. This time it’s only a drill…”
Ellsberg was convinced that it’s up to us to break the spell of this passivity and consent. But this depends on what he called “contagious courage.” His own experience of conversion after seeing, in real-time, people like Randy Kehler and Bob Eaton, deciding for jail instead of war, convinced him that acts of resistance were critically important in themselves and in empowering others.
This point was driven home to me at the end of this action.
After ten days, the district attorney threw in the towel and dropped the two-year probation penalty. There was a $240 fine, but that could be paid off by staying an additional six days in jail, which many people did, including Dan.
We still had to go to round-the-clock arraignments. I remember vividly the young man who was called up right before me. He said: Your honor, I did this action totally as a lark. I had never been political. I had never thought about nuclear weapons before. But now, after learning about this movement, after living with other men in a nonviolent way for two weeks, and especially by learning so much about the realities of our world from Daniel Ellsberg, I am now an antinuclear activist.”
The judge visibly blanched on hearing this declaration.