Daniel Ellsberg instigated a national political controversy in 1971 by releasing the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of government tactics and decisions regarding the Vietnam War that was leaked to newspapers across the country.

Ellsberg, an author and active member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, will speak Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. His lecture, ‘From the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg,’ will recognize Ellsberg’s lifelong work in extending the boundaries of free speech, according to a news release on Newhouse’s website.

Ellsberg will also discuss how those boundaries have been affected by the Pentagon Papers and, in recent months, by the website WikiLeaks, according to the news release. Julian Assange has released government secrets through WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006. Though the two controversial leaks were decades apart from each other, Ellsberg sees clear crossovers between WikiLeaks and his own Pentagon Papers, according to the news release.

Ellsberg’s work led to the first-ever federal government lawsuit against the press in an effort to preserve national security by preventing the release of classified information, according to the release. The government tried to prevent the publication of the content in The New York Times and the Washington Post, but it failed because the Supreme Court decision stated it was perfectly legal for newspapers to publish such detailed information, according to the release.

Roy Gutterman, an associate professor of communications law and journalism and the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, is responsible for arranging Ellsberg’s appearance.

One of the reasons Gutterman chose to bring Ellsberg to campus was because Ellsberg was at the center of a trial after releasing the Pentagon Papers, Gutterman said.

‘We get to hear from someone who was front and center in the Supreme Court case,’ he said. ‘They often get buried in doctrine and rhetoric, but here’s the real live person. He’s a pretty big name in free speech circles and whistleblower circles.’

At RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that helps improve decision-making through research, Ellsberg worked as a consultant to the White House and to the Defense Department. In 1967, he was assigned to work on the highly classified McNamara Study, which looked at specific United States decisions made in the Vietnam War, according to his website.

He made copies of the studies two years later — which consisted of 7,000 pages of information — and handed them over to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The New York Times and the Washington Post as the ‘Pentagon Papers,’ which sparked the lawsuit, according to the website.

Ellsberg graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1952 and went on to study at King’s College at Cambridge University before serving in the U.S. Marine Corps for three years, according to Ellsberg’s website. There he served as an operations officer, rifle platoon leader and rifle company commander. He then went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1962.

Gutterman, the SU professor, said he is curious to hear what Ellsberg has to say because he also sees the parallel between WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers.

‘When you first look at it, they seem pretty similar,’ Gutterman said. ‘You have the government trying to figure out how to deal with it, like they had with the Pentagon Papers.’

meltagou@syr.edu

 

 

 

 

Published on March 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Marwa: meltagou@syr.edu | @marwaeltagouri