Chapter 1Chicago Boy

Foreword

A photocopier throws a bar of light across a page, and the page comes back doubled. That is the whole miracle of the machine, and, in the autumn of 1969, the whole crime. In a borrowed advertising office in Los Angeles, after the regular staff had gone home, a man who held the highest clearances his government could issue fed seven thousand pages of its most closely guarded history across that moving bar of light, one page at a time, night after night for weeks. He lifted the staple from each folded section and pressed it back when he was finished, so that the volume he carried into the RAND vault in the morning would look exactly like the volume he had carried out the evening before. He was converting a secret into a public record with a device that anyone could rent by the hour, at ten cents a copy, with his children collating the pages on the floor beside him. That picture is where this book started for me, and for a long time I could not get past it — the sheer manual labor of it, the tedium of conscience, a national reckoning assembled sheet by sheet in the dark.

I did not arrive at Daniel Ellsberg from his part of the American story. The people I have written about before him were, nearly to the last one, Black American writers and intellectuals who worked out what this country was from inside a history that had tried to keep them out of the telling of it — novelists, essayists, men and women who made their claim on the republic in prose. Ellsberg is not that. He was a Harvard economist, a Marine rifle officer, a Cold War strategist, a white insider who sat near the center of the national security state and was trusted with its most terrible arithmetic. On the face of it he keeps strange company among the people I have chosen to write about.

But I have never, if I am honest, been writing about literature. I have been writing about the price of telling the truth into a public sphere that would rather not hear it, and about what a citizen owes the record once the record has been falsified in his name. That is the only question Ellsberg ever asked. My first book was about Ralph Ellison, who spent a career insisting that the people a country renders invisible are the ones who see it most exactly. Ellsberg spent his life on the opposite problem and arrived at the same place: he was a man the system could see perfectly, vetted and cleared and trusted down to the polygraph, and he used that visibility to show the country a thing it had been forbidden to look at. The witness who is kept outside and the witness who is let all the way inside are, it turns out, asking the same thing of the rest of us.

I expected, going in, to write a book about the Pentagon Papers. What I found was that the Papers were nearly the smallest part of him. I worked from what anyone can work from — the long public record, the two memoirs he left behind, the transcripts and filings of a trial that collapsed, the press of half a century — and the record kept pushing me backward, past 1971, past the Xerox machine, to a highway in Iowa and a fifteen-year-old boy who woke in a wrecked car to learn that his mother and sister were dead and that his father, asleep at the wheel, had killed them. Ellsberg said, in as many words, that he came out of that car owing a life. Everything after it — the Marines, the war plans, the seven thousand pages — was, in some accounting he never stopped keeping, the payment.

The man was harder to hold than the myth of him. The myth is a hero with a copier. The person was a former nuclear war planner who had once sat at RAND and calculated six hundred million dead from a strike his own government was prepared to order, and who carried that number in his head for sixty-two years. He had copied a second set of documents in that same season of 1969, the nuclear ones, the ones he considered far more dangerous than the Papers, and a storm two years later carried off the marker above the New York landfill where they lay buried, and they were never found. He spent the rest of his life trying to speak from memory what the paper would have proved. That is the book underneath the book, and it is the one he most wanted written.

Which is finally why he is worth a life of his own on the page. Ellsberg is usually filed as the answer to a question the country has already settled — was Vietnam a lie, and it was. But the secret he cared about is still classified, the machine he named is still running, and the warning he spent fifty years issuing has outlived the only man whose authority came from having been in the room when the charts were drawn. He proved that the act was survivable, that a person could do the most dangerous thing an American insider has ever done and live to be ninety-two, vindicated, at peace. He could not prove that anyone would follow. This book is my attempt to sit with a man who paid the whole price and was right that it was worth paying, and to ask what he left the rest of us besides an example we have not yet used.

— Solomon Treadway, Chicago

Chapter 1 · Chicago Boy

In April 1931, Daniel Ellsberg was born in Chicago, in a city of Jewish and Irish families living in three-story apartment buildings, in a family that believed in education the way other families believed in God, absolutely, without reservation, and with the expectation that it would save you.

Harry Ellsberg was a structural engineer. He was born Ellsberg, the family name was Ashkenazi, arriving in the United States from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, and he had built a modest career designing buildings in Chicago. He was a quiet man, methodical, a man who worked with load-bearing calculations and stress tolerances. The household he headed was a Christian Science household, a fact that would shape it in ways that were not immediately obvious but that became catastrophic. The faith's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, had formalized Christian Science doctrine in her 1875 text Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and the religion had spread substantially in the urban Midwest by the 1920s, attracting professional families who were drawn to its emphasis on mental discipline and the primacy of mind over matter. In the Ellsberg household, these doctrines would have consequences that no theology anticipated.

Adele Charsky Ellsberg, Daniel's mother, was a pianist. She was also the source of the family's religion: raised in a Jewish home, she had become a devoted Christian Scientist, and the children were raised in her faith. She had studied at the conservatory and had talent that, in a different era or a different family, might have led to a concert career. Instead she taught piano, raised children, and poured her ambition into her son.

Daniel had a younger sister, Gloria, and a brother, Harry, who carried their father's name. The family's emotional architecture was built around a single organizing principle: Daniel would be extraordinary. Adele had decided this. She told him so repeatedly. She told him he was gifted, that he had a responsibility to his gifts, that his mind was his most important possession and that wasting it would be a form of sin. This was not casual parental encouragement. It was a program. She drilled piano into him for hours each day, four to five hours, by the accounts Ellsberg gave decades later. She monitored his schoolwork with the attentiveness of a coach preparing an athlete for Olympic competition. She told him, in terms that a child could not fully understand but could absolutely feel, that he existed to do something important.

The piano talent was real, and Adele trained it toward a concert career. She arranged half-day exemptions from school so that he could practice, and on Saturdays he often practiced eight hours or more, under teachers including Margaret Mannebauch. The ambition was hers, and it did not survive her: Daniel stopped playing in July 1948, two years after her death.

The Christian Science dimension of the household added a layer of abstraction to the family's emotional life. Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the 1870s, teaches that physical illness is an illusion to be overcome through prayer and correct understanding of God. In practice, this meant the Ellsberg household did not use conventional medicine. When the children were sick, they prayed. When Adele had headaches, which she did, frequently, she prayed. The theology created an atmosphere in which suffering was something to be transcended through mental discipline rather than addressed through practical intervention. For a child being told he was destined for greatness, the implicit lesson was powerful: the world as it appeared was not the world as it actually was, and the correct response to reality was to see through it.

The family moved to Detroit when Daniel was still young. Harry Ellsberg had found work there, Detroit in the 1930s was building, despite the Depression, and a structural engineer could find contracts. They settled in a neighborhood on the northwest side of the city, a middle-class Jewish area that was transitioning, like the rest of Detroit, into the automobile economy. Daniel enrolled in public school. He was, by every available account, the student his mother had intended him to be. He read voraciously. He excelled in mathematics. He had a memory that his teachers described as photographic, though the term is clinically imprecise, what he had was an extraordinary capacity for retention and recall, the ability to read a page of text and reproduce its content with minimal error.

The piano remained central. Adele drove him to practice with an intensity that crossed the line between encouragement and compulsion. He practiced for hours. He became genuinely skilled, skilled enough that his teachers suggested he had concert potential, skilled enough that the question of a musical career was not hypothetical. But the piano was never really about the piano. It was about discipline, about the daily demonstration that extraordinary effort was the price of extraordinary achievement. Daniel absorbed this lesson completely. He would carry it for the rest of his life, applying it to economics, to military service, to classified analysis, and ultimately to the most dangerous decision he would ever make.

Detroit in the 1940s was a city being remade by the war. The automobile plants converted to military production. Ford built B-24 bombers at its Willow Run plant, and the entire industrial apparatus of southeastern Michigan pivoted to the arsenal of democracy. Daniel was a teenager during the war years, old enough to understand what was happening, young enough to absorb it as a formative experience rather than a disruption. The war taught him that the American government could mobilize its resources on an enormous scale, that it could ask its citizens for sacrifice, and that the sacrifice could be justified by a cause that was genuinely worth fighting for. He would spend the rest of his life grappling with the question of when that justification was real and when it was manufactured.

He was fifteen years old on the night his world collapsed.

The date was July 4, 1946. Harry and Adele Ellsberg, with Daniel and Gloria, had been on a road trip from Detroit toward Denver, driving to a party being held in Adele's honor. The journey required driving almost nonstop to arrive in time, and Harry Ellsberg had been behind the wheel for hours. In the afternoon, after what the family accounts describe as a picnic lunch, Harry fell asleep at the wheel. The car drifted and struck a bridge abutment. Adele was killed instantly. Gloria was killed. Daniel, in the back seat, survived. He sustained a serious broken leg and other injuries and went into a coma. Harry survived.

The mathematics of the accident were stark. Two of the four people in the car died. The two who survived were the father who had fallen asleep and the son who had been asleep in the back seat. The mother who had built her life around her son's potential, and the sister who had shared his childhood, were gone.

Daniel Ellsberg almost never spoke publicly about the accident in detail. When he did, late in life, he described it with a precision that was itself a kind of emotional management. He could tell you the highway. He could tell you the approximate time. He could tell you the mechanical sequence of events. What he could not do, or chose not to do, was describe what it felt like to wake up in a hospital and learn that his mother and sister were dead and that his father had caused their deaths by falling asleep at the wheel.

The psychological literature on childhood bereavement is extensive, and it suggests that the loss of a parent in adolescence, particularly a sudden, violent loss, creates a particular kind of wound. The child does not grieve. The child reorganizes. The assumptions that undergirded the child's world, that the adults are in control, that the world is essentially safe, that the future is going to be more or less like the present, are destroyed, and the child must build new assumptions from whatever materials are available. Some children become cautious, risk-averse, determined to control their environment. Others move in the opposite direction: having learned that safety is an illusion, they develop a tolerance for risk that their peers cannot match, because they have already experienced the worst thing they can imagine and they are still alive.

Ellsberg himself made the connection late in life, tracing a line between his mother's death and his willingness, decades later, to risk imprisonment for the Pentagon Papers. The accident left him, by his own account, with the feeling of owing a life — that because he had survived while his mother and sister had not, his life carried an obligation that other lives did not carry. The obligation was not defined in religious terms; by 1946, Christian Science's explanations for death and suffering held no comfort for him. It was defined in terms of action: he had been given more time, and the time had to be used for something that mattered.

He also drew a second connection, which may be even more psychologically precise. His father, a man he loved, a man of good character, a man who was trusted by his family to drive them safely, had fallen asleep at the wheel and caused a catastrophe. The catastrophe was not the result of malice, or incompetence in any general sense. Harry Ellsberg was a competent structural engineer. He was a decent man. He fell asleep because he was tired, because he pushed himself past a limit he should have recognized, because the urgency of the schedule he was keeping had overridden his judgment about his own physical capacity. The catastrophe was the product of a trusted authority figure making a decision that he should not have been making, in conditions that should have made him stop. Daniel Ellsberg would spend the rest of his life watching for trusted authority figures falling asleep at the wheel. He would find them at the Pentagon. He would find them at the RAND Corporation. He would find them in four successive presidential administrations. He would not remain silent about what he saw.

Daniel Ellsberg moved in the second direction. Not immediately. Not obviously. But the pattern that would define his adult life, the willingness to walk toward the most dangerous question in the room, to volunteer for combat, to carry the highest-classification secrets, to risk life imprisonment by leaking them, begins here, on a highway in Iowa in 1946, with a fifteen-year-old boy waking up in a car that has been destroyed and discovering that the world he had lived in no longer exists.

The immediate aftermath was grim. Harry Ellsberg was devastated by guilt. The Christian Science framework of the household, which had always emphasized the primacy of mind over matter, offered him a way to process the accident that was theological rather than psychological: if matter was an illusion, then death was an illusion, and the proper response was spiritual understanding rather than grief. For Daniel, this was inadequate. His mother was dead. His sister was dead. Theology could not change the fact, and the theology that had influenced his childhood, the insistence that suffering was a problem of perception rather than a problem of reality, now appeared to him as something closer to a lie. He did not break with Christian Science immediately, but the break began here.

What remained from Adele's project was the engine she had built inside her son. The drive for excellence, the conviction that he was destined for significant work, the discipline of the piano bench translated into the discipline of the mind, all of this survived her. In a sense, the accident made the engine more powerful, because now the question was no longer "What will I achieve?" but "What was my mother's death for?" The answer that Daniel Ellsberg would spend the rest of his life constructing was that it had to be for something. That he had survived for a reason. That the life he was living had to justify the one that had been taken.

He returned to school. He graduated from Cranbrook School, an elite preparatory academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, first in his class. Cranbrook was a school of serious academic ambition. Founded in 1927 by the newspaper publisher George Booth, it drew students from Michigan's professional class and set them on paths toward the country's most selective universities. Ellsberg graduated as its top student. He had given up the piano within two years of the accident; the instrument that had been his mother's project stopped forever. He applied to Harvard. He was accepted with a full scholarship, and in the fall of 1948, Daniel Ellsberg, seventeen years old, motherless, carrying the full weight of a tragedy that he would not speak about publicly for decades, arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Harvard in 1948 was a university being remade by the war. The campus was full of veterans, men who had fought in Europe and the Pacific, who were older than the traditional undergraduates, who brought an intensity and a seriousness that changed the culture of the place. For Ellsberg, this was clarifying. He was younger than most of his classmates, but he had his own relationship with catastrophe, and the seriousness of the veterans matched something in him. He was not playing at being a student. He was building something.

He chose economics. Not because he loved economics in the abstract, but because economics at Harvard in the late 1940s was the discipline that was closest to the questions that interested him: How do people make decisions under uncertainty? How do institutions manage risk? What happens when the information available to decision-makers is incomplete or wrong? These were not academic questions for a boy who had survived a car accident that had killed his mother and sister because his father had made a decision, the decision to keep driving when he was too tired to drive, that was catastrophic. Decision theory, the mathematics of choice under conditions of imperfect information, became his intellectual home.

He found his way to the work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, whose Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) had revolutionized the mathematical study of strategic decision-making. Game theory was, at its core, the study of what rational actors do when their outcomes depend on the choices of other rational actors. It was abstract, elegant, and directly applicable to the most consequential decisions on earth, including, as Ellsberg would soon discover, the decision to use nuclear weapons.

He excelled. He was brilliant in the way that Harvard recognizes brilliance, not high-performing, but original. His professors noticed him. His classmates noticed him. He was the student who asked the question that no one else had thought to ask, who saw the problem from an angle that reframed it entirely. He graduated summa cum laude in 1952, third in his class in economics. In 1952, the year of his graduation, he also married Carol Cummings, a Radcliffe College graduate whose father was a brigadier general in the Marine Corps, a marriage that anchored him, however briefly, to the military establishment he was about to join.

After graduation, Harvard offered him a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation grant that took him to King's College, Cambridge, for a year of graduate study. He registered initially toward a diploma in economics, then shifted his course credits toward a doctorate. Cambridge gave him his first sustained exposure to European intellectual traditions and, crucially, the year away from Harvard allowed the decision that was already forming in his mind to solidify: he wanted to enlist in the United States Marine Corps.

When he returned from Cambridge, he did something that baffled his professors and his classmates, something that did not fit the pattern of a summa cum laude economics graduate from Harvard who could have had his pick of doctoral programs.

He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

The decision requires explanation, because it is the first major instance of a pattern that would repeat throughout Ellsberg's life: the choice to move toward danger rather than away from it, to seek out the hardest version of the question rather than the most comfortable. His professors told him he was making a mistake. His classmates thought he was crazy. A man with his academic credentials could have had a deferment. He could have gone straight to a Ph.D. program, then to a university appointment, then to the comfortable life of an academic economist. Instead he chose to carry a rifle.

He later explained the decision in several ways. He said he felt a sense of obligation, that the veterans who had filled Harvard's classrooms had earned something by their service, and that he had not. He said he was curious about combat, about what it was actually like to face the decisions that game theory modeled in the abstract. He said he wanted to test himself.

All of these explanations are probably true. None of them is complete. The deeper pattern is the one that began on the highway in Iowa: the boy who had survived the unsurvivable was not afraid of risk in the way that other people were, because the worst had already happened. The Marine Corps was not a rejection of his intellectual gifts. It was a statement about how he intended to use them, not from the safety of a library, but from a position where the stakes were real.

He shipped out in 1954. He would serve for nearly three years, including a deployment to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, where he commanded a rifle platoon and then a rifle company. He would leave the Marines as a first lieutenant, having earned the respect of his men and his superiors, and having added to his intellectual understanding of decision-making a physical, visceral understanding of what it means to lead men in situations where the wrong decision gets people killed.

He was twenty-five years old when he left the Marines. He had already lost his mother and sister to a catastrophic accident, graduated third in his class from Harvard, and served as a Marine infantry officer. He had lived, by any measure, more life in twenty-five years than most people live in twice that time.

And he was just beginning.

The city of Chicago in 1931. Detroit in the 1940s. A highway in Iowa on a summer night. A hospital room. A preparatory school. Harvard Yard. Quantico. These are the coordinates of Daniel Ellsberg's early life, and they establish the pattern that would define everything that followed: a man who moved toward the hardest questions, who survived what should have destroyed him, and who built from that survival a sense of obligation that would eventually lead him to do the most dangerous thing an American government insider has ever done. But that is twenty years away. First, there are the Marines.