Where Are They Now? Daniel Ellsberg

Cheers, tears and laughter broke out in a Los Angeles courtroom 37 years ago today as a judge dismissed all charges against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press. Federal Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. brought the four-month trial to an end, saying the burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by the White House "Plumbers" and other government misconduct "offend a sense of justice."

The saga began a dozen years earlier when Ellsberg, a self-described "dedicated cold warrior" and former Marine, made his first trip to Vietnam as a Defense Department consultant and reluctantly concluded that U.S. prospects for success there were grim.

"The government there in Saigon, that we were supporting, was as illegitimate in the eyes of the Vietnamese people as the Karzai government is in the eyes of the Afghan people," he told the AARP Bulletin.

But the real turning point for Ellsberg came when he heard draft resister Randy Kehler speak in the summer of 1969 about his willingness to go to jail to end the war. Overcome with emotion, Ellsberg wept for an hour after Kehler's speech. In his 2002 autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, he recalled feeling as if his life had split in two.

"So the question was, how could I now help to end this war, now that I was willing to go to prison," he said in the interview. "And within a few weeks the idea came to me of putting out the Pentagon Papers, which I thought would put me in prison for the rest of my life."

An analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg had worked on the 7,000-page, top-secret study of U.S. decision making in Vietnam, later known as the Pentagon Papers. At the urging of a former Rand colleague, Anthony Russo, he began removing portions of the study from his office safe and smuggling them out in his briefcase.

He and Russo copied one page at a time on a 1960s-era photocopier at the office of Russo's girlfriend. Ellsberg's 13-year-old son, Robert, also helped. Recently married to Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg has said she spent the first year of their marriage helping her husband get the Pentagon Papers out, although she knew it could send him to prison.

The New York Times began publishing the papers in June 1971, and the revelations predictably enraged President Richard Nixon and members of his administration.