Daniel Ellsberg has a cleareyed view on how worried we should be.
When I visited Daniel Ellsberg this month at his home in California, a great gale was blowing up the hills and splashing rain against the windows loudly enough to be caught on my digital recorder. |
I was there to talk to the man who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers to The Times and The Washington Post, an act that has rippled through American life for decades in the form of a distrust of government over its lies about the Vietnam War. It also ushered in a new era of aggressive investigative journalism. |
Ellsberg announced on his Facebook page this month that he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. |
When I asked how he was feeling, his answer was, "Great." |
"I've always thought to live each day as though it were your last," he told me. "And I can recommend it to everyone." |
What he wasn't feeling great about was the state of the world he may soon leave behind. The potential for nuclear war, the threat of climate change and the attacks on journalists and whistle-blowers all loomed large in his mind. |
His description of the current nuclear peril was most alarming. |
"For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine," he told me. "We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I'm worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff." |
In his interview with Times Opinion, he talks about the many dangers facing society and why, unfortunately, there aren't more Daniel Ellsbergs willing to risk it all to expose more truths to the public. |
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