The whistleblower’s plight
By Lawrence Davidson
Daniel Ellsberg’s farewell message
In the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg worked for the US State Department. It was at this post that he gained access to the “Pentagon Papers” – 7,000 pages of “top secret” documents on the history of US involvement in Vietnam. It showed in great detail how the government had spent decades lying to the American public in order to sustain an ultimately unwindable war. After some hesitancy, Ellsberg decided that this amounted to the history of mass murder and decided to leak the information to the press. By doing so, he risked life in prison.
Shortly before he died on 16 June 2023, at the age of 92, Ellsberg recorded a farewell message. In that message he confessed that he had delayed for several years before he made public the...










