Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg

Highly celebrated as a well intentioned whistleblower is Daniel Ellsberg, who was the Rand Corporation military analyst who in 1971 tuned over the so-called Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other large U.S. newspapers in an effort to shorten our nation's war in Vietnam.

A Harvard Ph.D. in Economics, Elleberg had spent two years working for the State Department in Vietnam. He saw that the U.S. war effort there was doomed to failure and took note of how the U.S. public was being fed optimistic lies about our progress there.

He returned to Washington and became part of a team doing a study of classified materials about the war. With the aid of another Rand Corporation analyst, Anthony Russo, Ellsberg managed to make photocopies of some 7,000 pages of documentation. Unable to find a senator bold enough to introduce this material of the floor of the Senate, he instead turned the documents over to the New York Times, which assigned a team of its own to review them.

In 1971, the Times published what was intended to be the first of a series of articles based on these papers. The Nixon administration quickly got a court injunction that prevented the paper from publishing further installments.

The copy was turned over to the Washington Post, which immediately published story #2. Again came a government injunction. Eventually 15 more newspapers were involved in bringing out all the facts from what by then had become known as the Pentagon Papers.

Thwarted, President Nixon authorized the ill-starred group called the White House Plumbers (burglars) who did the celebrated Watergate break-ins that brought down his administration.

Ellsberg and Russo were charged with espionage, but in the midst of the administration's many embarrassments, the charges were dropped.

Ellsberg still is a protester. He was arrested in 2005 for trespassing while taking part in a protest of the war in Iraq.