Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92

Mr. Sheehan, believing the papers were “the property of the people” and paid for with “the blood of their sons,” as he said, broke the deal, had copies made and took a set to New York, where teams of Times reporters and editors worked in a hotel suite round-the-clock for weeks to prepare the trove of national secrets for publication. Mr. Ellsberg did not learn of Mr. Sheehan’s duplicity until June 13, 1971, when The Times published the first of nine installments of excerpts and analytical articles on the Pentagon Papers. The reaction was swift.

Attorney General John N. Mitchell, citing espionage and conspiracy statutes, warned The Times that it had jeopardized national security and said the newspaper faced ruinous legal action. Editors, lawyers and The Times’s publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, conferred, and publication resumed. After the third installment, however, the Justice Department obtained an injunction, halting publication.

Mr. Ellsberg, meantime, leaked the papers to other publications, including The Washington Post. The government sued. The Times and The Post carried their cases to the Supreme Court, which lifted the injunction on June 30, allowing publication to resume. The case reinforced a constitutional doctrine that the press, absent a national emergency, should not be subject to prepublication censorship.

Damaging Disclosures

The Pentagon Papers revealed not only that successive presidents had widened the war, but that they had been aware that it was not likely to be won. The documents also disclosed rife cynicism among high officials toward the public and disregard for the enormous casualties of the war. Mr. Ellsberg called the conflict “an American war almost from the beginning.”

The White House soon began to pursue Mr. Ellsberg, who had gone into hiding. Under President Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser, John D. Ehrlichman, a unit called the “plumbers” was formed to plug leaks and carry out covert operations, including burglaries at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (no damaging files were found), and in 1972 at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. The arrest of the burglars there began an unraveling that led to Mr. Nixon’s resignation in 1974.