The Papers

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.