Remembering Daniel Ellsberg, Courageous Truth-Teller
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Daniel Ellsberg, an historic and courageous figure dedicated to public service, passed away on June 16, 2023. In his final years, Dan became a treasured part of our UMass Amherst community, passionately sharing his wisdom and commitment to truth-telling as one of our nation’s foremost political activists and whistleblowers.
Over the past four years, many in the campus community came to know Dan and his wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg, admiring their commitment to social justice and their genuine interest and care for everyone they encountered. That was especially true of students who had the extraordinary opportunity of studying in a seminar with the man who distributed the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing decades of deceit by American policymakers during the Vietnam War.
Earlier this year, UMass Amherst community awarded Dan an honorary degree. He truly demonstrated how dissent can be the highest form of patriotism and citizenship. Our deepest sympathies go out to Patricia and the entire Ellsberg family.
We are deeply fortunate that UMass Amherst will play a lead role in sharing Dan’s legacy with new generations of students and scholars. The Ellsberg papers, acquired in 2019 and housed at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, provide a plethora of material to explore topics such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, nuclear energy and policy, and antiwar and anti-nuclear activism.
In addition, led by historian Chris Appy, the university has launched the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy . The mission is to promote public awareness, scholarship and activism on the overlapping causes that define Ellsberg’s life and legacy—peace, truth-telling, government accountability, First Amendment rights, nuclear disarmament, and social and environmental justice. The events of recent years highlight the need for universities to engage students and the public in serious learning and discussion about the historical roots of our most pressing problems and the actions we might take now to resolve them. I encourage you to learn more and participate in this most important undertaking
In addition, the 2021 season of the GroundTruth podcast, which features five episodes, has been rebooted. The podcast series tells the life and times of Ellsberg and how he released 7,000 pages of classified documents that came to be known as The Pentagon Papers. The documents chronicled the lies and deceptions about Vietnam that were fed to the American public by four successive administrations from presidents Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson, and which served to plunge the United States into a war that government officials knew from the very beginning was a war that was immoral and not-winnable.
Let us all remember the life of Dan Ellsberg today, and for generations to come, as an inspiration that illustrates the power of truth and the value of selfless public service.