Echoes of Daniel Ellsberg

When I entered high school in the early 1970’s, in Clovis, California, the news was loaded with the name of a man, Daniel Ellsberg. The only reason that I, as a fourteen year old, paid attention was because I had a very interested Journalism teacher, Jerry MacDonald.

Jerry, who had served in the Navy, being stationed in D.C. at one point, had a keen interest in all things Washington, D.C. So he would stop at the local news stand on his way to school and pick up a Washington Post and then read the emerging Nixon scandal headlines to us each day at the beginning of class.

Jerry understood that an extraordinary history was unfolding day by day with every headline in the Washington Post.

Most of us teens were fairly sanguine about what he was reading to us, as teenagers our attitude was pretty much “What does this have to do with us?” I’m sure Jerry knew what we were thinking as he looked out at our glassy eyes but he persisted with the daily readings of the salacious headlines and stories.

And as it dragged on through most of my high school years, I and my fellow students began to understand the gravity of what Jerry was trying to tell us.

Ellsberg graduated from Harvard and gained a Commission in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1954. He left in 1957 as a 1st Lieutenant and went to work for the Rand Corporation focusing on Nuclear Strategy. No small feat as Rand is the gold standard of think tanks in Washington D.C. He went on to get a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and then to work for the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, also no small feat.

Ellsberg then went to South Vietnam to work for a general and then back to Rand where he did a study of top-secret documents regarding Vietnam at the behest of McNamara. His inside publication of analysis became the infamous Pentagon Papers.

In 1969, he began attending anti-war rallies, first as an intellectual curiosity and then as a gradual convert. He met people whose philosophy of life and the war were anathema to his own, but being open to new ideas, he listened to what they had to say. It seems he made friends who were polar opposite of his own politics and it shocked him to see them being sentenced to jail for opposing the draft and the war. He realized they were being silenced by a government he had always assumed was dedicated to free speech and the free flow of information.

One particular war resister, Randy Kehler, was sentenced to prison and it was that moment that turned Ellsberg. Ellsberg described how shocked he was. Ellsberg, a true patriot, felt that his country was betraying its promise of dissenting opinion and civil disobedience. His country that he had so valiantly served for so long.

“Randy Kehler never thought his going to prison would end the war. If I hadn't met Randy Kehler it wouldn't have occurred to me to copy [the Pentagon Papers]. His actions spoke to me as no mere words would have done. He put the right question in my mind at the right time.”

Ellsberg, in essence stole the very Pentagon Papers he himself had created. He became a “Whistleblower” in an age there were no legal protections for Whistleblowers, just ruin.

This is what Jerry MacDonald was trying to get us to understand. The Pentagon Papers blew open the myth that the United States government would always give the American people the truth and would never lie or misuse its own citizens.

We could just be Happy Yankee Doodle Dandies in the Freest, Most Transparent Country on the Planet!

Ellsberg, a once proud Marine, a believer in the Rand Corporation and its mission began sending copies of the document he created, the Pentagon Papers, to various news outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times and dozens of others and all hell broke loose.

President Nixon wasn’t fond of the American people knowing the war in South Vietnam was futile and unjustified and that the thousands of Americans soldiers dying on the battlefields over there was basically a government ordered slaughter of a generation. So Nixon did what Nixon was want to do, he set out to discredit Ellsberg.

In 1971, Using his favorite henchmen, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, they arranged a break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office by Cubans recruited to work for Nixon. Not having found much to discredit Ellsberg, the crew moved on to wiretapping his phone.

This became a headline in the Washington Post, I remember Jerry Mac (as we called him) being outraged that the government had tried to discredit a former Marine Officer, (Jerry had been a former Navy Officer and had served in Washington D.C. most likely at the Pentagon), in such a disgusting way, to intimate or outright say, that Ellsberg was crazy.

The leaking of the documents Ellsberg authored put him on trial for a crime which could have netted him a 115 year prison sentence. But as time went on, the defense for Ellsberg was able to prove gross government misconduct and even destruction of the evidence that would have proved the government’s case. The judge dismissed the case citing the above.

The recent revelations of the Department of Justice over the Biden investigations which include corruption, pay-for-play schemes, using a Vice President’s and then President’s power to shake down foreign leaders for cash and fundamentally change how the United States interacts with certain foreign powers and how it shapes our foreign policy, is a Pentagon Papers moment.

The revelation that our President’s entire family was engaged in the enterprise and enriched their personal fortunes by getting kick-backs and under the table packages of money is reminiscent of the great Mob Families. What did Hunter and Biden’s family front members do? Rub their fingers together and tell Xi Jinping “We need a taste?” “You gotta grease this palm?” “It’s a consideration.”

Further, the revelations of how the entire Donald Trump-Russia narrative was a lie. A lie created by the FBI and probably the CIA. The two agencies painted Ellsberg as a drugged up psych patient to discredit him, they painted Trump as a prostitute hiring, mattress pissin’ degenerate Russian tool.

And the media, in both cases ate it up, until they got egg on their face in the Ellsberg case and they still need a whole bucket-load of egg in their face on the Trump situation because it seems history has not been their guide when it comes to government agency planted propaganda.

What are we to do when our Constitutionally elected leaders lie to us in order to line their own pockets? Vote the “Sons of Bitches Out”, that’s one answer, the other is the equal application of prosecution and the law. The latter just failed us in the latest Hunter Biden verdict…so I implore you to do the former.

Vote the Sons of Bitches out.