June 16, 2023 – Ellsberg’s demise came about four months after he announced on Twitter that he had been diagnosed with “inoperable pancreatic cancer.”
“I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live,” he wrote on March 2.
Ellsberg’s family said in the statement that “he was not in pain, and was surrounded by loving family.” And his sense of humor, they said, stayed with him until the very end.
“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner’,” the statement said.
Ellsberg was working as an analyst for the RAND Corporation in 1969 when he and a colleague named Anthony Russo secretly photocopied a 7,000-page study privately commissioned by the Defense Department which revealed the U.S. government knew early on the Vietnam War could not be won. Initially, Ellsberg and Russo offered the study to several members of Congress and government officials before deciding to leak it to the newspapers.
Then-President Richard Nixon branded them traitors and tried to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers, first in The New York Times and then in The Washington Post. But the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1971 sided with the newspapers with a landmark decision barring prior restraint of free expression.
Two days before that momentous decision was handed down, Ellsberg surrendered to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.
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