June 17 2024 Watergate Anniversary, and In Memoriam Daniel Ellsberg

Fifty two years ago today the Watergate break in began the fall of Richard Nixon and his criminal regime of repression of dissent and sabotage of American institutions of government, ideals, and values, a horrific precursor of the Fourth Reich capture of our nation in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump.

Nixon’s carceral state of force and control, white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror, and the imperial Thousand Day Vietnam War began with his sidekick Joe McCarty and the Blacklist Era also called The Red Scare; and though exposure delegitimized Nixon and toppled him from his throne the Fourth Reich regarded his Presidency as an incremental victory which moved our nation closer to the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by a fascist cabal under the fig leaf of Pat Robertson’s Gideonite fundamentalism, the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Bush dynasty whose founder prior to the Second World War was the exclusive banker for Thysson Krupp and personally handed Adolf Hitler the money to fund the Beer Hall Putsch, and finally that of Donald Trump, heir to a fortune founded by a sex trafficker in the Klondike Gold Rush who abducted and sold Native American tribal women, chained like captive animals in horse stalls, similar to the origin of the word “crib” in Black slang to refer to one’s home as this was used throughout the Confederacy as well. John Hawkes wrote the iconic novel Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade about the Trump family in 1985; and people wonder why the Grabber, who once bought a beauty contest to peep at teenage girls in the changing room, is a rapist, misogynist, and sexual terrorist.

Herein I intend not to diminish the many crimes of Richard Nixon, but to place him in historical context as the first American victory of the Fourth Reich in capturing the state through the Presidency, and who opened the way for all that came later.

Nixon made an annual pilgrimage to Mexico City during his Presidency to meet with what he called his spiritual advisor, Josef Mengele. The results of that discipleship can be read in the methods of repression of dissent used in America against counterculture movements of all kinds and in Vietnam; methods later used in the imperial phase of our history after 911 to centralize authority in the counterinsurgency model of policing, which treats all suspects in a crime as terrorists, the militarization of policing, and the coordination of deniable assets like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Patriot Front, The Base, Atomwaffen Division, and other fascists with Fourth Reich infiltration agents within the police and Homeland Security in tyranny and terror, treason and the subversion of democracy.

Watergate was the birth of the January 6 Insurrection.

As written by the Spanish philosopher Santayana in the 1905 treatise The Life of Reason; “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Winston Churchill paraphrased this in a famous speech of 1948 as; “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

As written in The Washington Post, in an article entitled Transcript: 50th Anniversary of Watergate: Inside the Case:

“MR. BALZ: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Dan Balz, chief correspondent here at The Post. We are beginning our coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with two men who helped assemble the legal case against President Nixon. Richard Ben-Veniste was chief of the Watergate taskforce in the Office of Special Prosecutor. Secretary William Cohen was a freshman on the House Judiciary Committee, newly elected in 1972 from the state of Maine. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you both for being with us.

MR. COHEN: Good to be with you, Dan.

MR. BALZ: So, let’s begin at the beginning. June 17, 1972, the burglars are arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. Richard, how did you first hear about it, and what did you think about it?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: I first heard about it when I was a US attorney assistant in New York City, and thought it was a crazy intrusion. But before we get into the substance, let me just say, if I may be permitted, what a great honor it is to share this conversation with Bill Cohen, who is a great American patriot and defender of the Constitution.

MR. COHEN: Richard, thank you very much. And I would say the same. My admiration for you goes just as strongly in your direction.

MR. COHEN: Thank you.

MR. BALZ: Thank you, both.

Secretary Cohen, you were running for office that summer when the news broke about the break-in? How did you hear about it? What did you think about it? And frankly, did it ever come up in the context of your campaign?

MR. COHEN: It did not. I had just been elected to be the Republican nominee for the congressional district, and I had planned a 650-mile walk all the way from New Hampshire to Canada. So, my focus was on how was I going to conduct that walk, how would I be able to endure it physically, et cetera. And so my focus was just on relating to the people of Maine. I was staying at homes picked at random individually every night. And so my focus was on connecting to the people of Maine and my district. And the issue what happened, I hadn’t heard about it, read about it. But it really wasn’t central to anything I was thinking or saying. And, frankly, it was dismissed initially as just a, quote, “third-rate burglary.” And that’s what it had seemed–it had seemed to me at the time.

MR. BALZ: The investigation initially was under the auspices of the US Attorney’s Office with Judge Sirica presiding in the courtroom. Later, Elliot Richardson, newly appointed attorney general, appointed Archibald Cox as the special prosecutor. Richard, why the shift? What was the mandate for Archibald Cox? And how did that office get put together?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: The appointment of a special prosecutor I think flowed from the fact that Judge Sirica was very unhappy with the presentation before him in the Watergate break-in case, where the original burglars were being tried. He believed that there were higher-ups involved, and yet there was no questioning about higher-ups. There was no mention of anyone beyond the seven who were indicted. And therefore, there was a lot of political concern about whether things were being cabined that should not have been. And the Democratic majority in the Senate made clear to the president that in order to confirm his appointment of Elliot Richardson as attorney general, Richardson would have to agree to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate matter with a degree of independence that would allow for exploration of all the evidence, no matter how high it went.

MR. BALZ: And let me ask you both this question. There were ultimately multiple investigations. There was the special prosecutors’ investigation. There was the Senate Select Committee under Senator Sam Ervin, and then ultimately there was the House Judiciary Committee in the impeachment proceedings. To what extent did these investigations cooperate with one another, get in each other’s way? Richard, could I start with you? And then, Secretary Cohen, I’d like to ask you that and then follow up with another question to you.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, first, it started with the FBI, which did a remarkable job. The US Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia then continued the investigation and made a lot of progress. The problem was at the–at the very highest levels of the Justice Department the investigation had been compromised and information was flowing back to the White House about the investigation and instructions were given to the prosecutors that they could not go beyond the original authors of the break-in as far as those who were arrested. And so each of the institutions you’ve mentioned played an important role. There was no coordination between us as the special prosecutor who took over on the federal investigation side with the Senate committee. In fact, Archibald Cox was upset that John Dean was granted immunity by the Senate. But we managed to prosecute him anyway. And Dean, to his credit, despite the fact that he could have fought for years because of the various promises that had been made to him by others, agreed to plead guilty to one count felony and cooperate with the prosecution. And so he became our primary witness in the trial. And then, once we had the tapes, essentially, the matter was sealed, because no one could get away from their tape-recorded conversations showing their culpability in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.

MR. BALZ: We’ll get to the tapes in a minute. Secretary Cohen, so the special prosecutor is moving forward. At that point, the Ervin committee is starting to hold public hearings that were riveting the country that summer. What’s going on in the House, and particularly in the House Judiciary Committee at that point?

MR. COHEN: Well, it really didn’t start to get energized in the House until Saturday Night–the Saturday Night Massacre. There had been an impeachment resolution that had been introduced by Father Robert Drinan. But Tip O’Neill then said let’s not move on that. And so we really were not doing much of anything other than watching what was taking place on–during the Ervin committee hearings. But once the Saturday Night Massacre took place where Elliot Richardson resigned, Bill Ruckelshaus resigned, and Mr. Cox was fired, that set in motion, really the directive came to start looking into what an impeachable offense is. And so we really weren’t active until that moment. As far as I’m concerned, I was not.

MR. BALZ: You raised the next point that I was going to get to, which is the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon was obviously angry and frustrated at this point about the demands for the tapes, and decided to get rid of Archibald Cox. He asked Elliot Richardson to do it. Richardson declined and resigned. He asked Bill Ruckelshaus, who was the deputy attorney general to do it. He declined. He tried to resign but was fired before he could actually resign. It was left to Robert Bork, who was then the relatively new solicitor general to carry out the deed. As you mentioned this evening, the–October 1973 became infamously known as the Saturday Night Massacre. I’d like everybody to listen to how John Chancellor of NBC News reported the events of that day and evening.

[Video plays]

MR. BALZ: Richard, walk us through that moment. I mean, this is an extraordinary moment in the history of the country. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. We’re in the middle of a very, very fraught investigation. Suddenly the leader of this investigation, the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, has been fired. What’s going on in the office at that point? What’s the mood? How do you think you’re going to be able to go forward?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, we didn’t know how we would be able to go forward. In fact, while Archibald Cox was fired, we were not, because we were Justice Department employees and Nixon didn’t have the right to fire us. But he said that our office was disbanded. The FBI showed up in force, therefore trumping the rule of law with force. We’d never seen anything like this and–in this country, and we never expected to see anything like it again, until January 6th. And that was quite extraordinary. So the use of force instead of allowing a proper appointed special prosecutor to carry out his responsibilities–so the American public, the press, and the Congress–which had been interested to some extent, of course, in the Ervin committee hearings, were not galvanized by those hearings, and still continued to give the benefit of the doubt to the sitting president.

Now, with the resignation of two very important law enforcement officers in the country, and the firing of an independent special prosecutor, people began to ask quite, quite properly, what was Nixon hiding? And so there was a dramatic shift, in my view, following this Saturday Night Massacre where people began to suspect there was a whole lot more to the Watergate affair than had been led on, as Bill Cohen said earlier, this White House characterization as a third-rate break-in, was in fact a reflexive reaction by the government of Richard Nixon to cover up and to hide not only who was behind Watergate, but a variety of other violations of laws serious in nature, that even Attorney General John Mitchell characterized as the “White House Horrors.” These included the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the proposed firebombing of the Brookings Institution, the use of thugs to rough up anti-war demonstrators, the use of the IRS against political enemies of the president, the unlawful wiretapping of journalists. And the list went on and on and on with an enemies list compiled by the White House to use the power of government against individuals whose only offense was to oppose President Nixon politically.

MR. BALZ: Secretary Cohen, you indicated that this was a dramatic event. How did it affect attitudes inside the Congress? To what extent did it in fact move the investigation toward an impeachment in a significant way?

MR. COHEN: Well, the House Judiciary Committee was then charged with determining whether or not impeachment proceedings should be initiated against the president. If I can just add a personal note here, once Elliot Richardson resigned and a new prosecutor had to be appointed, Leon Jaworski was appointed by Richard Nixon. The Democrats, certainly on the committee, and I think representing a broader spectrum in the–in the House itself, were opposed to having Jaworski appointed, that Nixon should not have the right to appoint a special prosecutor. It should go through a court system. The Washington Post, by the way, was opposed at that time to having Jaworski appointed. And on a personal level, it was the very first op-ed I had ever authored to The Washington Post, and I wrote an op-ed saying that the Democrats were wrong; they should not interfere with Jaworski being appointed, because, as Richard just mentioned, the staff was not dismissed. The staff was still there, and Jaworski would beholden–be beholden to that staff. So, I wrote an op-ed and The Washington Post, I guess for one of the first times, reversed its editorial position and supported the recommendation I had made. And Dave Broder, the great Dave Broder came to me and said, how did you do that? And all I did was basically say that now Jaworski was a captive of Richard Ben-Veniste and the other staff members who were going to pursue that to the end. I haven’t discussed that before, but that’s how that came about.

MR. BALZ: That’s a fascinating story.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, I don’t know if he was my captive, but he was the captive of the evidence. And once we got not only a new special prosecutor, but before he arrived, we got the first tranche of tapes, because Nixon did a 180 and then said all right, I will give you the tapes. And he gave us most of them without 18 and a half minutes, which was deliberately deleted from one of them. But he gave us enough. And I sat down and listened, I think as the first person outside of a small coterie of folks at the Nixon White House, to what was on those tapes, and particularly the so-called cancer on the presidency conversation, where John Dean tried to convince the president to end the coverup and to allow people to come forward and take their medicine, but stop it before the president himself was engulfed by the cancer of the Watergate coverup. And yet, Nixon on tape in his own voice, irrefutable evidence, said, no, you need to continue to pay hush money to the burglars. And by the way, here’s how you can get away with lying under oath before the Senate and the grand jury.

MR. BALZ: Richard, there’s a vivid scene in Garrett Graff’s new book about Watergate, which is a wonderful, comprehensive history of the whole scandal, that you and a few others were gathered in your office listening to the tapes for the first time and struggling, I suspect, to actually hear them because they’re scratchy, and they’re not perfect audio. But it felt as though in reading about that that you were even more shocked than you thought you might be by what you were hearing and that you and others came out of that with a much firmer conclusion about what Nixon had done and his culpability. Is that right?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Absolutely. Absolutely right, Dan. We didn’t know what would be on those tapes, if anything. It could have all been a ploy to get rid of Cox and there would have been nothing there. And so we listened to those tapes. And as a federal prosecutor before Watergate, you know, I had heard surreptitious tape recordings, and they are of various different qualities. But the March 21 conversation was so explosive. It had Nixon saying, look, you need to continue paying hush money to the burglars so they don’t give up who was behind ordering the break-in in the first place and reveal all the other untoward things, illegal things that they had done.

And that night, a final payment to Howard Hunt, one of the burglars, in the amount of $120,000 I believe, was made. So Nixon at that point, as far as we know, there was no evidence of his ordering the Watergate break-in or anything other than what we could surmise from other people’s testimony. But nothing approached the fact that here is Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, ordering the continuation of an illegal obstruction of justice, and that obstruction of justice then goes forward. Not only that–and Jaworski, who we called in immediately to listen to the tape, and he sat there in stone silence, shaking his head from time to time–heard Nixon in the most cavalier way explain away how one might try to avoid a charge of perjury while still being untruthful before the grand jury and congressional committees. Never was there any conversation about doing the right thing other than Dean trying to end the conspiracy, in which he played an important role himself and had agreed that he would have to go to jail and take the consequences. But Nixon refused and the coverup continued. So, it was absolute evidence of Nixon’s active role, not only knowledge of but active role in continuing the obstruction of justice.

MR. BALZ: Secretary Cohen, how important were the tapes in affecting the attitudes and positions of people on the Judiciary Committee? And if the tapes had never been released, would Nixon have been impeached?

MR. COHEN: I don’t think so. Because if the tapes hadn’t been released, we would have been left with the edited transcripts. And so you had not only expletives deleted–by the way, which are important–it gives tone and texture to what was really being said–but also irrelevant portions being omitted. So, who is to decide what’s irrelevant? And at one point, President Nixon tried to get a deal worked out with the special prosecutor that John Stennis would listen to the tapes. Well, of course, John Stennis was hard of hearing for openers, and so that didn’t go down very well.

But ultimately, within the committee itself, it was still very divided. Republicans for the most part said this is just the Democrats trying to overturn the election because they lost so heavily. This is not something that hasn’t been done before. We’ve got to hang together. I think–well, we voted. Ultimately the Rodino letter that was approved voted to send a second letter to the president to get the tapes. And once we heard the tapes, I sat down, as other members did–I had the headphones on, as you pointed out, very hard to hear–and I went through the transcripts that we had and measured those against the words that we saw on the page. And it became very clear to enough of us on the Judiciary Committee, enough Republicans to make it bipartisan to say that impeachment proceedings should go to the House for a vote and then to the Senate.

But without that, I think there was enough doubt in the–on the Republican side. Certainly, there was still Tom Railsback, Henry Smith, Ham Fish Jr, et cetera, and Caldwell Butler in particular, members who were really concerned with the edited transcripts. But once the tapes came through, I think that pushed even the most conservative of the Republicans to say that they were impeachable offenses that we believe needed to be brought to the full House, and then to the Senate.

MR. BALZ: Before we get to the Articles of Impeachment themselves, Richard, there’s one other big event that happens in the spring of 1974, and that’s when seven senior members of the Nixon administration are indicted. HR Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Chuck Colson. What was the thinking about doing all of those as one big indictment as opposed to serial indictments? And what was the shape of the evidence that allowed you to go forward with such an impactful decision?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, our coverup indictment that charged a conspiracy to obstruct justice did in fact include the individuals that you mentioned. And the interesting part of it was that Leon Jaworski was very reluctant to name Richard Nixon. But we on the task force–and this may go back to Bill’s earlier point–said to Jaworski, that, look, the evidence is clear that Nixon has participated in the conspiracy actively. We can’t hide that. And indeed, these tapes might not be admissible as evidence in a court of law if the participants in the conversation, were not members of the conspiracy themselves. So, we need to do the right thing here. The right thing is to name Richard Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator, even though we had made the decision that with an active investigation in Congress, the more appropriate method of dealing with presidential criminality would be through the impeachment process. But as far as the criminal indictment of the others were concerned, these tapes were essential evidence. And I agree with Bill that if the tapes had not existed, if Nixon had not installed the taping system, if we had not found out about it through the testimony of one of Nixon’s aides, Alex Butterfield, if Nixon had destroyed the tapes rather than holding out, holding out and then ultimately capitulating, I believe he would have been able to serve out his term as president, a wounded president. Nevertheless, I don’t think there would have been the votes to remove him from office with a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

MR. BALZ: We’re nearly out of time, so I want to jump forward. Ultimately, the House Judiciary Committee votes three articles of impeachment. There’s a smoking gun tape released. Nixon resigns.

Secretary Cohen, let’s come up to the present day. We’ve had two presidents impeached since then, Presidents Clinton and Trump. Twice in all cases, they were acquitted by the Senate. We’re in a very polarized environment. Is the impeachment process any longer a viable tool to hold a president to account?

MR. COHEN: Well, I think the impeachment process itself is being invoked too frequently. I quoted Lord Chancellor Somers during the House investigation back in ’74. He said impeachment is like Goliath’s sword to be removed from the temple on great occasions only. And I think that when we start talking about Bill Clinton or the attempt to impeach Donald Trump, it’s just being used too frequently and not on great occasions. I think today, for example, the investigation underway against former President Trump is different. And ultimately, it comes down to the rule we tried to follow during the Nixon impeachment. The notion is power has to be entrusted to someone, but no one can be trusted with power. That is fundamental to our founding fathers, why they devised a system of checks and balances because they understood human nature, that power is pursued by ambitious people, that power that goes unchecked will be abused. And therefore, we have to find a way to check it as much as possible.

And so that was a lesson coming out of Watergate. You had President Nixon, who said I prefer–I want loyalty. Over competence, I want loyalty. You had president–former President Trump saying I want loyalty. Call me “You’re fired.” I wanted loyalty to me. And so the notion we have gotten away from is the commitment to the Constitution as opposed to the individual. And that I think is the lesson of Watergate. I think it’s a lesson that we could derive throughout. But really, impeachment has to be used on great occasions. And those occasions come when you absolutely pursue a policy, which not only tries to subvert the Constitution subtly, covertly, but to do it openly through the use of force, as we saw with the assault on January 6th. So, I think impeachment is a process that needs to be there. But we need to respect it and hold it for the really important occasions, which go to the central part of placing loyalty to the Constitution, not to any president.

MR. BALZ: That’s very helpful advice.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, I agree. There’s also–there’s also a criminal responsibility. And particularly after a president has left office, he is vulnerable to prosecution. Nixon, for all of his authoritarian tendencies and his criminality did not, in my view, pose an existential threat to our democracy. Donald Trump, on the other hand, does and did. And that’s a very significant difference. There’s a difference in 50 years gone by of our respect for the truth and the rule of law and the education of Americans, as to what it means to be a patriotic American. And we have lost a great deal there. And without getting into a long discussion of that, we were in danger, serious danger in the events leading up to January 6th. And if in fact a few things had gone the other way, we would have been in a horrendous mess. And we need to straighten that out through education and through individuals like Bill Cohen, who put America first, party second. That has to be the rule.

MR. BALZ: Well, we’ll see where the January 6th Committee ends up, and we’ll see where the Justice Department ends up in this current moment. Unfortunately, we are out of time. I want to thank both of you, Richard Ben-Veniste and Secretary William Cohen for being here on the first of three episodes that we’re going to be doing looking at the history of the Watergate break-in and the Watergate scandal. Gentlemen, thank you again very much for being with us.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Thank you so much.

MR. COHEN: Thank you, Dan.

MR. BALZ: Again, I’m Dan Balz. And thank you, all of you for watching and being with us today. To check out what future programming we have, go to WashingtonPostLive.com. You can look there and register and see what other events are coming up. Once again, thank you and good day.”

This year’s anniversary of Watergate falls within days of the death of the great truthteller Daniel Ellsberg, whose witness of history and courageous exposure of tyranny and state terror brought down the monstrous Nixon and his regime of war crimes and atrocities against our own citizens in the repression of dissent in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. To him and countless others like him in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, no matter the source or where it leads, we owe the endurance of our civilization and the ideas of universal human rights and citizenship in a free society of equals on which it is founded.

As memorialized by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An American; “In one of the quirky coincidences that history deals out, Daniel Ellsberg died today at age 92 on the eve of the fifty-first anniversary of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Ellsberg was a military analyst in the 1960s, disturbed by the gulf between what the government was telling the public about the war in Vietnam and what he was seeing behind the scenes.

After serving as a Marine, Ellsberg earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined the RAND Corporation, where he learned to apply game theory to warfare. By 1964 he was an advisor to Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, Ellsberg was part of the team tapped by McNamara to compile a history of the conflict in Vietnam to evaluate the success of different programs.

Ellsberg was concerned by investigators’ conclusions. The 7,000-page secret government study detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Harry Truman’s presidency to Lyndon Johnson’s. It outlined how successive presidents had lied to the American people, expanding the war with promises of victory even as the costs of the war mounted and the chances of victory moved farther and farther away.

Ellsberg copied the secret study and shared it with congressmen, who buried it. Finally, Ellsberg shared the report with a New York Times correspondent on the condition the reporter would only take notes and would not copy the pages. But the correspondent broke the agreement, believing the documents were “the property of the people” who had paid for them with “the blood of their sons.”

On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, showing how presidents had lied to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warned the New York Times that the publication was jeopardizing national security and warned that the government would prosecute. The editors decided to continue publication—the Supreme Court later agreed that the newspaper had the right to publish the information—while Ellsberg leaked the report to other newspapers.

The study ended before the Nixon administration, but the president was deeply concerned about it. The report showed that presidents had lied to the American people for years, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone looked at his own administration, they might well find evidence of his own secret actions in the Vietnam arena: the Chennault affair, in which a Nixon ally undermined peace talks before the 1968 presidential election in order to undercut Johnson’s reelection campaign, and what was then the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia.

News of either could, at the very least, destroy Nixon’s reelection campaign.

Nixon became obsessed with the idea that the Pentagon Papers proved that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection.

Frustrated when the FBI did not seem to be taking an investigation into Ellsberg seriously enough, in July 1971, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks?

Plumbers.

Officially known as the White House Special Investigations Unit, Nixon’s “plumbers” burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on September 9, 1971, hoping to find damaging information about him that would discredit the Pentagon Papers. (Their burglary, showing gross governmental misconduct, was later key to the dismissal of charges against Ellsberg for leaking the report.)

Some of the plumbers began to work with the Committee to Reelect the President (aptly called “CREEP” as its methods came to light) to sabotage Nixon’s Democratic opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, and planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns.

Finally, CREEP turned back to the plumbers.

Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.

The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.

The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. But the scandal erupted in March 1973, when one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for CREEP, and Sirica, known by reporters as “Maximum John,” later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”

Sirica made the letter public, White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing. On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.

Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers to alert the American people to the fact that their government was lying to them about the Vietnam War. But he helped set in motion a series of events that determined the shape of the political world we live in today.”

In his own words as interviewed by Davids Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘I’ve never regretted doing it’: Daniel Ellsberg on 50 years since leaking the Pentagon Papers; “When the police arrived, a 13-year-old boy was photocopying classified documents. His 10-year-old sister was cutting the words “top secret” off each page. It seemed their dad, Daniel Ellsberg, had been caught red-handed.

But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. “It was a very nice family scene,” the 90-year-old recalls via Zoom from his home in Kensington, California. “It didn’t worry them.”

So night after night the photocopying went on, the crucial means that allowed strategic analyst Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret report that exposed government lies about the Vietnam war. The New York Times began publishing excerpts 50 years ago on Sunday.

The papers, a study of US involvement in south-east Asia from 1945 to 1967, revealed that president after president knew the war to be unwinnable yet continued to mislead Congress and the public into an escalating stalemate costing millions of lives.

After their release Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and faced a potential prison sentence of 115 years, only for the charges to be dropped. Once branded “the most dangerous man in America”, Ellsberg is now revered as the patron saint of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

So, half a century on, is he glad he did it? “Oh, I’ve never regretted for a moment doing it from then till now,” he says, wearing dark jacket, open-necked shirt and headphones against the backdrop of a vast bookcase. “My one regret, a growing regret really, is that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.

“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.”

Ellsberg’s own experience in Vietnam was formative. In the mid-1960s he was there on special assignment as a civilian studying counter-insurgency for the state department. He estimates that he and a friend drove about 10,000 miles, visiting 38 of the 43 provinces, sometimes linking up with troops and witnessing the war up close.

“By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.

“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on [president Richard] Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.

“But the other side of it was that Vietnam became very real to me and the people dying became real and I had Vietnamese friends. It occurs to me I don’t know of anyone of my level or higher – any deputy assistant secretary, any assistant secretary, any cabinet secretary – who had a Vietnamese friend. In fact, most of them had never met a Vietnamese.”

Only recently, as he prepares for the 50th anniversary, has Ellsberg dwelled on how doubts about the war went higher in the political hierarchy than is widely understood. “The Pentagon Papers are always described as revealing to people how much lying there was but there was a particular kind of lying that’s not revealed in the Pentagon Papers.

“Yes, everybody was lying but for different reasons and for different causes. In particular, a very large range of high-level doves thought we should get out and should not have got involved at all. They were lying to the public to give the impression that they were supporting the president when they did not believe in what the president was doing.

“They did not agree with it but they would have spoken out at the cost of their jobs and their future careers. None of them did that or took any risk of doing it and the price of the silence of the doves was several million Vietnamese, Indochinese, and 58,000 Americans.”

But Ellsberg did break the silence. Why was he, unlike them, willing to risk life imprisonment for a leak that he knew had only a small chance of ending the war? He says he was inspired by meeting people who resisted being drafted into military service and, unlike conscientious objectors, did not take alternative service.

“They didn’t go to Sweden. They didn’t get a deferment. They didn’t plead bone spurs like Donald J Trump. They chose a course that put them in prison. They could easily have shown their protests in other ways but this was the strongest way they could say this war is wrong and it’s a matter of conscience and I won’t participate in it.

“That kind of civil courage is contagious and it rubbed off on me. That example opened my eyes to the question, what can I do to help end this war, now that I’m ready to go to prison?”

In 1969 Ellsberg was working as a Pentagon consultant at the Rand Corporation thinktank in Santa Monica, California, and still had access to the secret study of the war, which by this time had killed about 45,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. He decided to take the plunge.

“I said I’ve got in my safe at Rand 7,000 pages of documents of lies, deceptions, breaking treaties, hopeless wars, killing, et cetera and I don’t know whether it’ll have any effect to put it out but I’m not going to be party to concealing that any more.”

Ellsberg had a friend whose girlfriend owned an advertising agency with a photocopier, or Xerox machine. Over eight months he spent many nights making copies of the Pentagon Papers, twice with the help of his 13-year-old son Robert.

He explains: “He was going to hear that his father had gone crazy or was a spy or was communist and I wanted him to see that I was doing this in a businesslike way because I thought it had to be done. And also to leave him with the precedent in his mind that this is the kind of thing he might have to do some time in his life and that there were times you had even to go to prison, which I thought would happen shortly.”

The owner of the agency often mis-set the office alarm and so often the police would come, including twice when Ellsberg was at work. But he kept his cool. “The first time I was at the Xerox machine. I look up at the glass door, there’s knocking on it and two police outside. ‘Wow, these guys are good, how did they get on to this?’

“But I remember covering the top secret pages with a magazine and I closed the Xerox cover where I was copying these things and opened the doors and, ‘What can I do for you?’ But there were a few seconds there of thinking, ‘Well, this is over.’”

Ellsberg tried and failed to persuade members of Congress to put the papers in the public domain. On 2 March 1971 he made contact in Washington with Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter he first met in Vietnam. After Sheehan’s death aged 84 earlier this year, the Times published a posthumous interview with him suggesting that Ellsberg had felt conflicted over handing over the documents.

Ellsberg responds: “He seemed to believe, according to that story, that I had been reluctant to give it to the Times. It’s hard to imagine that he believed that but maybe so. At any rate, that was not the case. I was very anxious for the Times to print it.”

The New York Times did so on 13 June 1971. The night before, Ellsberg had gone to the cinema with a friend to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. “We stayed up and saw the early morning edition around midnight and so that was marvelous.”

The initial reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out

The Nixon administration obtained a court order preventing the Times from printing more of the documents, citing national security concerns. But Ellsberg leaked copies to the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers, prompting a legal battle all the way to the supreme court, which ruled 6-3 to allow publication to resume.

This stirring showdown over press freedom – retold in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, in which Ellsberg is played by the British actor Matthew Rhys – had a bigger impact that the Times’s first article. “The initial reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out,” Ellsberg says. “The Times was baffled and dismayed. Nobody reacted at all.

“It was Nixon’s fatal decision to enjoin them and the willingness across the country to commit civil disobedience and publish material that the attorney general and the president were saying every day, ‘This is dangerous to national security, we can’t afford one more day of it.’ Nineteen papers in all defied that. I don’t think there was any other wave of civil disobedience like that in any respect I can think of by major institutions across the country.”

But the government wanted revenge. Ellsberg spent 13 days in hiding from the FBI but eventually went on trial in 1973 accused of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property. The charges were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him – crimes which ultimately contributed to Nixon’s downfall.

The high-profile trial had ensured huge media coverage of the Pentagon Papers. But Ellsberg says: “The effect on Nixon’s policy was zero. The war went on: a year later, the biggest bombing of the war and then, at the end of that year, 18 months later, the heaviest bombing in human history.

“So as far as one could see, as I said at the time, the American people at this moment have as much influence over their country’s foreign policy as the Russian people had over the invasion of Czechoslovakia.”

Nixon resigned over Watergate in 1974 and the Vietnam war ended the following year. In the decades since, Ellsberg has continued to champion Manning, Assange, Snowden and others charged under the Espionage Act. The climate, he warns, has become more restrictive and punitive than the one he faced 50 years ago.

“The whistleblowers have much less protection now. [President Barack] Obama brought eight or nine or even 10 cases, depending on who you count, in two terms, and then Trump brought eight cases in one term. So sources are much more in danger of prosecution than they were before me and even after me for 30 years.”

Last month the nonagenarian Ellsberg returned to the fray by releasing classified documents showing that US military planners pushed for nuclear strikes on mainland China in 1958 to protect Taiwan from an invasion by communist forces, a scenario that has gained fresh relevance amid rising US-China tensions.

It is a dare for prosecutors to come after him again. If they do, he wants to see the Espionage Act tested by the supreme court. He argues that the government is using it much like Britain’s Official Secrets Act even though America, unlike Britain, guarantees freedom of speech through the first amendment to the constitution.

“We don’t have an Official Secrets Act because we have a first amendment but that has not been addressed by the supreme court,” says Ellsberg, still going strong after an hour-long interview. “So I’m willing to see this case go up to the supreme court. Not that I have any desire to go to prison or not. And it would have to move fairly fast to get me in prison in my lifetime.”

What does Ellsberg symbolize and mean for us as an iconic figure of what Foucault called truthtelling? As written by Erik Baker in The Baffler, in an article entitled Daniel in the Lion’s Den: On the moral courage of Daniel Ellsberg; “STEVEN SPIELBERG’S FILM The Post begins with Daniel Ellsberg in Vietnam. The year is 1966. The official story from the Pentagon, at that time largely unquestioned in U.S. media, is that the war is going well. That is a lie—the first of the many deceptions that will unravel spectacularly in the years to come. As Spielberg tells it, that thread begins to fray here, in the Vietnamese jungle, with an unassuming bureaucrat sent to survey the progress of the campaign against the Viet Cong. Ellsberg, played by a dashing Matthew Rhys, insists on accompanying a patrol on their nighttime exercises. The RAND wonk looks surprisingly comfortable in body armor, toting an automatic rifle. Then it all comes undone: a VC ambush, blood in the muck, muzzle flare from invisible enemies in the misty shadows. Our hero is shaken. On the plane home, he tells his boss’s boss, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, that the war is not going well at all, actually. McNamara agrees. But when the plane lands he disembarks and greets the press with a grin, continuing to lie through his teeth. A shaken Ellsberg returns to his office at RAND, opens his safe, and contemplates a thick stack of papers. Next, the Xerox machine.

It’s a compelling story, and it’s almost true. Ellsberg really was a high-ranking war planner before he copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers; he really did go to Vietnam and witness the quagmire firsthand; he delivered the bad news personally to McNamara on the flight back, who really did lie to the press on the tarmac. But that was not the moment that Ellsberg decided to become a whistleblower. I believe it is impossible to fully appreciate the profundity of Ellsberg’s subsequent heroism—and the magnitude of our collective loss, with his death on Friday at the age of ninety-two—without understanding the period of hesitation that preceded it. Ellsberg, always his own harshest critic, would call it moral weakness. Whatever you want to call it, the truth is this: After he returned from Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg went back to work. He didn’t photocopy anything. The most drastic action he took, in fact, was to call off his engagement with his future wife, Patricia, an anti-war journalist who refused to stop holding his feet to the fire.

Daniel Ellsberg never let anyone off the hook that easily, including himself.

“I’m trying to do the best I can to moderate the killing,” she recalls him telling her. Ellsberg had a better case than most. A PhD economist, Ellsberg was one of the world’s leading experts on decision-making under uncertainty; his research led him to an absolutist opposition to the atomic bomb that was not shared universally in the Pentagon—even before Richard Nixon, infamously cavalier about the prospect of a nuclear exchange, entered office. After learning more about the United States’ nuclear weapons protocols early in his career in the defense bureaucracy, Ellsberg became—and remained for the rest of his life—terrified that the risk of nuclear war was higher than almost anyone understood. And he told himself, quite persuasively, that the need to prosecute his nuclear safety campaign within official channels outweighed whatever moral compromises inhered in his continued cooperation with the machine waging immoral and unwinnable war in Vietnam.

Ellsberg’s great moral achievement was not turning against the Vietnam War. That was the bare minimum we could expect of a thinking, feeling person in those years. Rather, it was overcoming the seductive power of this story, the exculpation he initially furnished to himself and to his dovish friends: I can do more good from here, on the inside. There is a miraculous harmony between my career interests and the cause of harm reduction. What’s the alternative?

Ellsberg didn’t decide to exile himself from the elite circles in which he swam until he acquired an answer to this all-too-familiar rhetorical question. It came at a conference of the War Resisters League at Haverford College in August 1969, over two years after his return from South Vietnam and a year after the conclusion of the damning Pentagon study he would later release to the world. At the conference, Ellsberg heard firsthand from the draft resister Randy Kehler, who expressed his excitement that he would soon join his comrades in prison. Kehler’s testimony reconfigured Ellsberg’s mental universe. Here was living proof that there was an alternative after all: prison. The only honorable way to deal with an unjust government was to welcome its retribution. A more moderate slaughter wasn’t good enough, not if you were still responsible for pulling the trigger—behind the sandbags at Khe Sanh, or from your office in Arlington or Santa Monica.

Ellsberg left Kehler’s speech and shut himself in an empty campus restroom, where he wept on the floor for an hour. Then, and only then, did he open the safe that contained the Pentagon Papers.

Spielberg’s presentation is comforting because it allows viewers to imagine that we would have acted as Ellsberg did were we in his situation—because we, too, would have figured out that the war was bad, and that was all it took. But evidence to the contrary is all around, not merely ubiquitous but woven into the very fabric of life-making in our damnable society. We are all looking away from something. We eat our slave-labor chocolate; we pay our taxes to a state built on genocide that will without a doubt use some of those dollars to perpetuate atrocities we may never know about in far-flung corners of its empire. “You don’t want on this jury men of middle age,” advised a psychologist retained by the team that defended Ellsberg and his collaborator Tony Russo for leaking the Papers. “These are people who in the course of their lives might possibly have sacrificed principle for the sake of career, for the sake of family, and they lived with that compromise, and they will have a lot of disdain, even contempt for two men who did it for the sake of principle and took the risk.”

Ellsberg’s example is an enduring challenge not only to the resentful complacency of the Silent Majority but to a left that has come increasingly to tolerate middle-class careerist compromise in the half-century since Ellsberg’s prosecution. It’s not our fault, exactly. The unions were eviscerated; the Black revolutionaries were killed; the war resisters were jailed; academics and nonprofit executives filled the vacuum. That’s not to say that one can’t be useful to the cause with a PhD: as evidence, witness the life of one Dr. Daniel Ellsberg. But it requires an uncommon ethos of self-suspicion, as Ellsberg understood well. “I’ve come to realize the fear of being cut out from the group of people you respect and whose respect you want and normally expect keeps people participating in anything, no matter how terrible,” he reflected to a documentarian in 2009. Few of us are immune to that fear, and the rationalizations it brews in the professional mind. I teach at a university that accepted millions of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein, celebrates its relationship with Henry Kissinger, and has a pattern of insulating star faculty from accountability for sexual abuse. It’s a good job. I tell myself I can make things better.

To conclude that there is no choice but to cooperate with evil is always to overlook something, some false assumption, some value inaccurately taken to be paramount.

We shouldn’t begrudge most people for wanting to find a way to sleep at night, though surely some could stand a bit more tossing and turning. It is more problematic when those rationalizations begin to infect our collective reflection on matters of political principle and strategy. Perhaps it really is the case, as many on the left have come to believe since 2016, that the best way to advance the cause of socialism is to work to elect unusually noble Democratic politicians to Congress and the White House. But it is also awfully convenient, at least for those of us who could imagine ourselves staffing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s West Wing. Ellsberg’s fundamental insight was not that it is impossible in theory to use the machinery of the American state to effect positive change, but that people—smart, well-intentioned people especially—underestimate the moral confusion that festers in the corridors of power. D.C. bureaus are overflowing with backslappers happy to extol the bravery of the most craven political decision-making. The cafeterias all serve lotus flowers for lunch: soon you forget even that there is something you have forgotten.

Ellsberg had a particularly acute grasp of what the historian Garry Wills has called “Bomb Power,” the way that the very existence of the United States’ nuclear arsenal fundamentally constrains the possibility of exercising democratic oversight of the nation’s military. The power to annihilate all human civilization cannot sanely be disposed of by popular vote. The bomb is a weapon suited only to a benevolent dictator, and that is how the United States came to envision the presidency in the nuclear age—culturally, politically, and even legally. Autocracy, of course, was easier to produce than benevolence. The bomb demands secrecy; secrecy demands lying; and lying demands lawlessness. “The public is lied to every day by the president, by his spokespeople, by his officers,” Ellsberg once asserted. “If you can’t handle the thought that the president lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level.” He left the contrapositive unstated: anyone who remains in government after obtaining a reasonably high-security clearance is ipso facto comfortable with the systematic mendacity built into the institution of the modern presidency. Even the ostensible good guys.

And yet nuclear disarmament has more or less disappeared from the agenda of the contemporary American left. Four years spent shuddering at the thought of Donald Trump with his finger on the button did essentially nothing to make the issue an organizing priority for any of the nation’s major left-wing organizations. This disinterest tracks the broader marginalization of anti-war and anti-imperialist commitments on the left; even the Democratic Socialists of America is too often willing to tolerate elected officials who dutifully vote to fund the American war machine as long as they espouse the proper progressive positions on health care and tax policy. At its worst, some members of the “populist” left today sneer at past generations’ anti-war politics as an extravagance that alienated the left from the concerns of ordinary working people (a category whose membership seems so often to stop at the U.S. border). For those who experienced the crushing disappointment of Barack Obama’s reign, which entrenched the power of an imperial presidency he had sworn to dismantle, it is easy to become fatalistic—to treat the perpetuation of American war crimes as an inevitability, against which one can only hope to adduce some positive accomplishments on the domestic front. This way of thinking increasingly distorts even the way we narrate history: hey, Johnson and Nixon killed a lot of Vietnamese people and told a lot of lies about the war, but they gave us Medicare and the EPA, so that has to count for something.

Daniel Ellsberg never let anyone off the hook that easily, including himself. He never forgot the lesson he learned in the summer of 1969: there is always an alternative. To conclude that there is no choice but to cooperate with evil is always to overlook something, some false assumption, some value inaccurately taken to be paramount. “If we have the will and determination,” Ellsberg told protesters on the fifth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, we have “the power to change ourselves and history.” Most of us in the United States have been disempowered in a thousand ways large and small: as workers, as consumers, as citizens. But being disempowered does not mean that we are powerless, only that exercising our power will not be frictionless. It will hurt.

When it all seems too much to ask, we will always have the memory of Daniel Ellsberg. It’s a bright June day in Boston, 1971. The press swarms around Ellsberg outside of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where Ellsberg has come to turn himself in and face the wrath of the state for leaking the Pentagon Papers. One of the journalists asks him if he’s afraid to go to prison. Ellsberg smiles, as if he is grateful to the reporter for posing the question, the same question that set him to weeping in the bathroom at Haverford two years earlier at the start of it all. And he responds: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

The Post film trailer