Was I interested in writing about it? I was.
In the weeks that followed, I carefully read the Taiwan study and consulted experts on the history of the 1958 crisis. As I worked on my article, Ellsberg and I spoke repeatedly. He preferred to talk by video call from his book-crammed home office in California. On one lengthy call, his wife, Patricia, joined us.
Part of his motivation, he said, was renewed tensions over Taiwan. He said it was likely that Pentagon war planners were again drawing up contingency plans to use nuclear weapons if China were to attack Taiwan and it appeared that conventional weapons were not enough to repel it. He thought the possibility of any such dire step warranted a public debate.
But another reason, he said, was that in openly confessing to retaining and disseminating the classified document without authorization, he hoped to be charged under the Espionage Act. He wanted to be a test case to put before the Supreme Court the constitutionality of how the Justice Department has used the law to punish leaks.
The provision against unauthorized retention of national security secrets, he pointed out, is so expansively written that, on its face, it could also be used to indict journalists, publishers and even readers of a newspaper article about a classified matter who tell a spouse about it or retain a clipping instead of turning it in to the authorities. Citing the chilling effect that the creeping expansion of the law has on what information the public gets in a democracy, he expressed disappointment that the Biden administration had not dropped the Espionage Act charges against Mr. Assange.
“It’s clearly overly broad and does not just apply to people like me who had a security clearance. Assange is now feeling the weight of that,” he said, adding: “For 50 years I’ve been saying to journalists, ‘This thing was a loaded weapon looking at you.’”
In short, at the age of 90, he was willing to risk the prison sentence he had been spared when he was 42. But as aggressive as the Justice Department has become in using the Espionage Act, it apparently wanted no part in going along with Ellsberg’s plan. The article published and drew some attention — but to his disappointment, no charges ensued.
“I was looking forward to arguing in court,” he told an interviewer in March, after he announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “This is before I knew that my life would be shorter than I had expected.”
