Quiet Gestures, Heroic Acts: A Conversation with Robert Ellsberg

[struggle4progress]

by Michael Hogan

<snip>

A: In 1971, my father, Daniel Ellsberg, released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, to the New York Times and other newspapers. For this he was arrested and put on trial, facing 115 years in prison. Ultimately, the charges were dismissed when it came out that the White House had organized a team of secret operatives -- the same Plumbers who were later arrested in the Watergate break-in -- to spy on and discredit him. This was the outcome of a long moral and political journey throughout the 1960s, during which time he had served in the Pentagon, in Vietnam, and at the Rand Corporation think-tank, as a government analyst. He has described his evolution as moving from seeing Vietnam as a "problem to be solved," to a "mistake to be ended," and finally -- after personally reading the Pentagon Papers, a chronicle of government lies and deception over several decades -- as a "crime to be resisted." Another critical influence was the example of young draft resisters and activists schooled in the Gandhian tradition of "speaking truth to power." If these people were willing to risk prison for what they believed, he asked himself, "What could I do, if I were willing to go to prison?" The result was the decision to copy the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers and make them available to the public ..

A: As I had been growing up my father had been sharing with me books and writings by Gandhi, King, and Thoreau that had influenced him, and naturally this helped shape my own conscience. For years I anticipated that my eighteenth birthday -- when I would be required to register for the draft -- would represent a great turning point. When that day came, during my freshman year at college, I wrote a letter to the Selective Service System announcing my refusal to register. By that time, 1973, the draft had been discontinued, although the war continued. Nevertheless, not many people were paying much attention to these issues -- at least not my friends and classmates. They found it pretty hard to comprehend why I would be doing this. Finally the prospect of going to jail forced some deeper soul-searching, and I decided, ultimately, that I wasn't prepared to follow through on the consequences of this stance. So I registered. But at the same time I decided that college was not the place for me to pursue the moral questions that were troubling me. So I dropped out of college ..

A: I went to the Catholic Worker in the summer of 1975, intending to stay for a few months. I ended up staying for five years. The Catholic Worker is a movement started by Dorothy Day in the 1930s. She was a radical journalist who became a Catholic and then sought some way to integrate her faith and her commitment to social justice. The Catholic Worker newspaper took a prophetic stance -- denouncing war, injustice, and all the forces that oppress people, while also holding forth a positive vision of a society based on the example and message of Jesus. The Catholic Workers live in community, embrace voluntary poverty, and serve the poor through the "works of mercy" -- feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless -- while also engaging in protest and direct action. After a few months there, Dorothy asked me to become managing editor of the Catholic Worker newspaper ..

A: Dorothy was in her late seventies when I arrived, but she was still the most impressive person in any room. She carried a deep authority. While young people like myself might come to the Worker for a few months or a few years, this was someone who had been doing this for nearly fifty years: living among the poor, with virtually no privacy or personal possessions, offering her witness against war in season and out. For most of her life she had operated on the margins of the church. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when she was almost alone in protesting nuclear weapons, she was regarded by many as some kind of communist agent. She was actually an incredibly balanced person with a tremendous sense of humor and a capacity to enjoy the small pleasures of life -- a piece of fresh bread, the sight of the ocean, the opera on the radio, the good books that she loved. Rather than despairing at all the terrible things in the world, she always saw signs of hope, and when you were with her she made it seem as if it would not be such a hard thing -- in fact, it would be tremendous adventure -- to be a better person. She died in 1980 at the age of 83, a few months after I had returned to college ..

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