# The Papers *A Biography of Daniel Ellsberg* — Legendary Biographies No. 060 - **Subject:** Daniel Ellsberg - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 206 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-071-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-580-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/060-the-papers.html ## About this book March 1971, a Cambridge apartment. Daniel Ellsberg, a Marine veteran and RAND Corporation analyst who had helped author the McNamara study now known as the Pentagon Papers, copies seven thousand pages of classified Vietnam War history at his Xerox machine. On June 13, The New York Times publishes the first installment. The Nixon administration sues to block publication. The Supreme Court rules 6-3 in New York Times Co. v. United States on June 30. Ellsberg is indicted under the Espionage Act and faces 115 years in prison. His case is dismissed in May 1973 after revelations about a White House Plumbers break-in at his psychiatrist's office. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in Chicago, where Ellsberg was born in 1931 to Christian-Scientist Jewish parents — and follows the arc through Harvard, the Marine Corps, RAND, Vietnam, McNamara, Nixon, the trial, the Pentagon Papers Project, the Sam Adams Associates Award of 2018, the Right Livelihood Award of 2006 in Stockholm, and the pancreatic-cancer death of June 16, 2023. What emerges is a portrait of a defense intellectual whose entire career, until his forty-first year, was inside the system; and whose decision, after long anguish, to release the documents he had helped write established the modern legal architecture of the American whistleblower. ## Contents 1. Chicago Boy 2. The Marine 3. The RAND Corporation 4. The Pentagon 5. Vietnam 6. The McNamara Study 7. The Decision 8. The New York Times 9. Nixon's Plumbers 10. The Trial 11. Watergate 12. The Aftermath 13. The Nuclear Secret 14. The Activist Years 15. Manning and Snowden 16. The Doomsday Machine 17. The Last Years 18. The Most Dangerous Man 19. The Last Warning ## Questions **Who is The Papers about?** Daniel Ellsberg. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Papers — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,112 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 206 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.