Longtime anti-war and anti-nuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg, who is legendary for leaking top-secret Pentagon documents detailing America’s long involvement within the Vietnam War, announced on Thursday that he only has a number of months left to live.
“On February 17, without much warning, I used to be diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer by CT scan and MRI scan,” Ellsberg, 91, – it was written in a letter shared on Twitter. “I regret to tell you that my doctors gave me three to 6 months to live.”
Ellsberg added that he wouldn’t be undergoing chemotherapy and can be admitted to hospice sooner or later.
While a consultant to the Pentagon employed by the RAND Corporation within the late Nineteen Sixties, Ellsberg obtained a classified report commissioned by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that detailed US activities in Southeast Asia since 1945.
![Daniel Ellsberg speaks to an audience in Berlin, Germany in 2019.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007598661.jpg?w=1024)
The report revealed how U.S. involvement within the war was steadily built by political and military leaders who were overconfident in regards to the prospects of victory and deluded about their achievements against the communist North Vietnamese.
“After I copied the Pentagon documents in 1969, I had every reason to imagine that I’d spend the remaining of my life behind bars,” Ellsberg wrote of his decision to submit the report back to Latest York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. “It was a fate I’d gladly accept if it meant hastening the tip of the Vietnam War, improbable because it seemed (and it was).”
![.Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Daniel-and-Patricia-Ellsberg-subjects-of-Judith-Ehrlich-and-Ri.jpg?w=1024)
In June 1971, the Times published the primary of a series of articles on the report. Then-President Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice attempted to nullify the publication of the articles on national security grounds, however the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Nixon’s attempts to pre-limit were in violation of the First Amendment.
Ellsberg, who on the time was a senior research fellow on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, was also charged with theft, conspiracy, and violating the Espionage Act in reference to the leak—however the case was dropped in 1973. It got here to light that Ellsberg’s conversations were tapped, and his psychiatrist’s office was broken into by members of Nixon’s infamous “plumbers” unit.
![American writer Daniel Ellsberg.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/GettyImages-2603363.jpg?w=1016)
Ellsberg said his unexpected respite allowed him to “spend the last fifty years [wife] Patricia and my family, and with you my friends.”
“Furthermore, I could have spent those years doing every part I could consider to alert the world to the risks of nuclear war and illegal interventions: lobbying, giving lectures, writing and joining others in acts of protest and nonviolent resistance,” he said, noting that he hopes he can “report greater success to our efforts.”
Ellsberg suggested in his 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” that the world has never been closer to a nuclear Armageddon.
![Daniel Ellsberg with his wife Patricia](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007598658.jpg?w=1024)
His Twitter post similarly said that “the present risk of a nuclear war over Ukraine is as great because the world has ever seen” as a result of threats from Russia.
“Leadership within the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to acknowledge that such threats to launch a nuclear war – let alone plans, deployments and exercises to make them credible and more able to be carried out. – are and all the time have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any “reasons”, by anyone, anywhere,” he added.
The previous military analyst also said the Pentagon’s “deliberate denial” on the matter is analogous to America’s denial of “catastrophic climate change.”
Ellsberg told followers he was “completely satisfied to know” that others had “the moral courage to pursue these causes.”
With postal wires