The Post, Daniel Ellsberg, and a Principled Consistency

Americans live in a tumultuous time, an age in which the hypocrisy and blindness produced by political tribalism have been laid bare in much of the country.

A new movie – highlighting a part of our history which is nearly half a century old, but owns timely connections to the present day – offers younger generations a great opportunity to understand what it means to fight for principle in season and out of season, when convenient… and especially when not.

“The Post,” the new Steven Spielberg film, will naturally grab attention for the Washington Post’s role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers. However, one must not forget that before the Post and the New York Times went to court, someone leaked the documents. That person? Daniel Ellsberg, a consultant to the makers of “The Post.”

When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon was President of the United States. The presence of Nixon in the White House is significant for many reasons, but within this discussion, it is primarily important because it was easy for the American left to oppose Nixon.

I was not alive when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, but part of my life’s work – specifically at a soup kitchen run by the Seattle Catholic Worker – gave me an awareness of Philip and Daniel Berrigan and other peace activists in the Vietnam era. Ellsberg gravitated toward these circles in the course of his life. Leaking the Pentagon Papers marked the biggest product of his personal, moral and spiritual epiphany.

In his earlier professional years, Ellsberg served in the Marines before moving to the RAND Corporation, which worked with the Pentagon. As the 1960s unfolded, Ellsberg -- once a proud member of the military-industrial complex – evolved into a person who realized how dishonest the government was, and how dangerous U.S. military policy had become. Ellsberg wasn’t the first American in the Vietnam era to experience such an awakening and conversion, but he became the paramount military whistleblower of his time.

That he was at odds with a Republican administration makes it easy for contemporary American liberals to regard Ellsberg as the hero he is and – moreover – deserves to be.

This is where hypocrisy and blindness enter the story.

One would naturally look at Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning – people Ellsberg has praised as heroes – and draw a straight line to the Pentagon Papers, which “The Post” will explain to generations of younger Americans.

Yet, among many establishment Democrats, Snowden and Manning are viewed as malicious wrongdoers, not principled whistleblowers resisting the Military-Surveillance State. One does not need a grand explanation for this political reality: A Democrat – also the first African-American President of the United States – was in office when Snowden and Manning (morally) broke laws as Ellsberg did.

Snowden is an easy target because he has taken refuge in Russia, which Democrats now oppose with more vigor than Republicans, in a tidy inversion of American politics relative to the anti-communist fervor of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Democrats – while having legitimate and urgent reason to support Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump White House – have gone well beyond a reasonable and measured approval of specific FBI activities. They have supplanted Republicans as cheerleaders for the Deep State, for institutions which (in the FBI’s case) once urged Martin Luther King to kill himself, or (in the CIA’s case) brought about violent, anti-democratic coups such as the one which toppled Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.

Democrats and liberals are entirely right to accuse Republicans of being hypocrites on family values and Christianity. “The Post” will hopefully make Democrats recognize their contemporary blind spot on two whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg regards as heroic, but receive a fraction of the praise Ellsberg is accorded.

Perhaps the next Snowden – taking the torch from Daniel Ellsberg – will be viewed in a more positive light. “The Post” has a chance to remind American liberals what they are supposed to support and oppose… no matter which party occupies the White House.