Public Acts

At the core of investigative reporting is the relationships we form with our confidential sources. That it involves mutual trust is an understatement. When it comes to biggest and most controversial stories, given the risks involved, it’s more like a matter of mutual survival.

I thought about this when the news broke that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the highly classified Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, announced last week that he is dying of cancer.

Ellsberg the whistleblower arguably did more than anyone to end the Vietnam War, and in the process forged a half-century friendship with legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who’s written a touching piece about him here on Substack.

Sy Hersh was an early supporter of ours at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), signing a fundraising letter that helped us survive. He, of course, had done his own part to raise awareness of the horrors of Vietnam with his explosive expose of the My Lai massacre in 1969.

I was one of those geeks who read the entire Pentagon Papers when they were published as part of my duties at SunDancemagazine, while editing a piece by Robert Scheer. They remain the single most authoritative history of that war from the perspective of the U.S. government, and remain a cautionary tale of imperialistic wars generally.

In another of those quirks of fate, the Washington Post reporter who figured out that Ellsberg was the Times source, Ben Bagdikian, was the dean of the U.C. Graduate School of Journalism who first hired me to teach there. (I subsequently taught courses, usually investigation journalism, there for 14 years ending in 2003.

Bagdikian, who was a supporter of ours at CIR from our founding days, had in his reporting role gotten some of the documents from Ellsberg that helped the Post catch up with the Times in its Pentagon papers coverage, as depicted in the film “The Post,” with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.

These are a handful of people who changed the course of history and there could be no better moment to recognize Dan Ellsberg for his courageous role than now while he is still with us.

(Thanks to Doug Foster for alerting me to Sy’s Substack piece.)

LINKS:

• My 50 Years With Dan Ellsberg (Seymour Hersh/Substack)

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• Russian missile barrage slams into cities across Ukraine (AP)

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• DOJ takes on the Jan. 6 Tucker Carlson tapes (Politico)

• Murdoch confided Trump was going ‘increasingly mad’ as Fox pushed false claims (WP)

• Ukraine Claims Bakhmut Battle Is Wagner’s ‘Last Stand’ (NYT)

• Russia's Wagner group has taken full control of the eastern part of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, its chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said. If the claim is true, it would mean Russian forces control nearly half the city. (Reuters)

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• Biden's public approval rating edged up to 42%, its highest level since June, as inflation has eased in the United States and job growth has stayed strong, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed. (Reuters)

• Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say (NYT)

• Women are losing rights around the world. On International Women’s Day, the U.N. warned this week that years of progress toward gender equality is being lost. (WP)

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• Career-Driven Man Beginning To Worry Entire Identity No Longer Tied To Job (The Onion)