From TruthDig
By Amy Goodman

Of the Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Mike Gravel is probably the least well recognized. His dark-horse candidacy may be the butt of jokes on the late-night comedy shows, but that doesn’t faze former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg: “Here is a senator who was not afraid to look foolish. That is the fear that keeps people in line all their lives.”

The famed whistle-blower joined Gravel this past weekend on a panel commemorating the 35th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the Beacon Press, a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association. It was this publisher that Gravel turned to in 1971, after dozens of others had turned him down, to publish the 7,000 pages that Ellsberg had delivered to Gravel to put into the public record.

The story of the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times is famous, but how they got published as a book, with Gravel’s face on the jacket, reads like a John Grisham novel.

Ellsberg was a military analyst working for the RAND Corp. in the 1960s when he was asked to join an internal Pentagon group tasked with creating a comprehensive, secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg photocopied thousands of documents and leaked them to The New York Times, which published excerpts in June 1971.

President Richard Nixon immediately got a restraining order, stopping the newspaper from printing more. It was the first time in U.S. history that presses were stopped by federal court order. The Times fought the injunction, and won in the Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States. Following that decision, The Washington Post also began running excerpts. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the Post on the condition that one of its editors, Ben Bagdikian, deliver a copy to Gravel.

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