'Courage is contagious': Daniel Ellsberg's decision to release the Pentagon Papers didn't happen in a vacuum

By Christian Appy, Professor of History, UMass Amherst

In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg arrived at a federal court in Boston, a journalist asked if he was concerned about the prospect of going to prison for leaking a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responded with a question of his own: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

The classified documents Ellsberg released to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers were quickly dubbed the…

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