Christopher Michel (CC BY 2.0)
Daniel Ellsberg, 2008.
In September 1971, a shadowy group known as the White House Plumbers—associates of President Richard Nixon tasked with plugging leaks—broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, California, in search of incriminating evidence to use against him. Ellsberg was a high-level U.S. military analyst who earlier that year had leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers, a highly classified study that documented how the U.S. government had for years lied to the American public about the war in Vietnam, to The New York Times.
The Plumbers ransacked the office to make it look like a common break-in, rather than a search for records of a specific patient, but they came away empty-handed. Ellsberg faced felony charges for violating the Espionage Act, but these were dismissed in 1971, due to what the judge flagged as governmental misconduct.
As it turned out, Ellsberg was seeing a psychiatrist not because of any doubt or regret over his decision to spill state secrets, but because he suffered from a massive case of what his son Michael—in his introduction to Truth and Consequence, a new collection of Ellsberg’s writing—refers to as a “publishing block.” Daniel Ellsberg, who died of cancer in 2023 at age ninety-two, wrote compulsively but published only a handful of books. He left behind more than 600 boxes of mostly handwritten notes, replete with what Michael calls “detailed examples and counterexamples and analogies, along with thickets of tangents springing from tangents.”
Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope
By Daniel Ellsberg, edited by Michael Ellsberg and Jan R. Thomas
Bloomsbury Publishing, 400 pages
Publication date: March 3, 2026
These form the core of Truth and Consequences, along with a smattering of essays, also previously unpublished. It’s a strikingly personal collection, one that shows how Ellsberg’s courage, commitment, and even his moral clarity derived from traumatic events in his past.
Ellsberg’s early years were dominated by his mother’s ambition that he become a world-class concert pianist. It was a goal he pursued relentlessly until a well-known pianist named Mischa Kottler, the musical director of a major radio station in Ellsberg’s home town of Detroit, declared this to be an impossible dream. It was an opinion that could very well have been wrong but was seen as irrefutable. Soon after, Ellsberg’s mother, racked with disappointment, pressured his father to keep driving despite his exhaustion on a family excursion on July 4, 1946. His father fell asleep and crashed the car, badly injuring himself and Daniel, then fifteen, and killing his mother and sister.
Throughout this life and therefore throughout this book, Daniel Ellsberg dwelled on his aborted music career and the tragedy he believes it helped bring about. The accident, he writes at one point, “made me hypervigilant about the failings of authority and fueled my determination to tell truths that might save lives and preserve democracy.”
One recurring source of fascination for Ellsberg was Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram’s notorious 1960s experiments in which unsuspecting participants were pressured by an authority figure to deliver what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to an actor posing as a test subject. Ellsberg was struck by the study’s finding that the willingness of participants to comply could be overcome if a plant posing as a fellow participant refused to deliver the shocks.
This was the role that Ellsberg played throughout his life—someone who would not go along with what he knew to be wrong. He thought of himself as a prophet and embraced the phrase “courage is contagious.” He was proud of his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers, which he had a hand in creating, as well as his decades as a frequently arrested activist against the unmitigated evil of nuclear weapons, another policy area in which he played a direct role.
Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress
Daniel Ellsberg speaking at a press conference in New York City, January 1972.
At the heart of Truth and Consequence are year-by-year snippets from the 600 boxes of writing that Ellsberg left behind, culled by son Michael and longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas. Here are some examples:
“My sense is that something is wrong with the existing ethical system both of leaders and followers.” (Undated)
“You [the U.S. government] cannot spend a generation overthrowing popular governments and suppressing self-determination abroad without endangering self-determination at home.” (1974)
“The loss of awareness of evil, of the meaning of what one does, is the evil of our time.” (1975)
“What if humanity was a fatal error for Earth?” (1975)
“In May 1969 I saw that what we were doing in Vietnam was indiscriminate, random murder. I also saw it as an error which could only be corrected from outside the Executive branch, not by the President or his subordinates.” (1983)
“If you want peace, prepare for peace . . . . If you want to avoid war, plan and prepare to avoid war, not to make war.” (1984)
“ ‘Self- defense’ is used as a rationale for any amount of violence and aggression—up to and including . . . preemptive nuclear war.” (1985)
“The best way to avoid having one’s patriotism questioned—in fact, to assure it is unquestioned—is to be unquestioning of the regime in power.” (1986)
“One needs to be ready to tell secrets, break agreements and promises, lose, be humiliated, face failure, leave the team or leader, disobey authority, or break laws.” (1988)
“In truth, it is terrible to be seen by even one American as a traitor. I come from the World War II generation. In quite conventional ways, I am patriotic to my core.” (1996)
“Each of us humans is capable of acting heroically, of rising to the moment and doing what is needed or might help, even at risk to our own well-being.” (2002)
“The Curse of Cassandra is that she was given the gift of foresight—without documents.” (2005)
“We do not need an explosion of [artificial] intelligence or technology at the service of humans as we are. Such intelligence will almost surely be put to work creating better weapons and surveillance, increasing power and control, and supporting victory in war.” (2014)
“It is easy to con young men into killing and dying for things that are not real, or for things that are not worth—and do not justify—killing or dying.” (2021)
And from one of the included essays, written in 2000: “Given the preciousness of life, it is worth one’s own life, or career, to affect everyone else’s, every minute.”
Truth and Consequence is loaded with such insights, bearing witness to Ellsberg’s deep compassion wrought from tragedy. His sagacity, determination, and example will long endure.