Love and War

Before he became one of the most outspoken critics of the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg — who just passed away at the age of 92 — was one of its architects.

In 1965, a half decade before he leaked the Pentagon Papers and inspired a furious Richard Nixon to exact revenge through the Plumbers, Daniel Ellsberg was actually working in the Pentagon as an assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton.

Indeed, when Antioch College held one of the first big “teach-ins” to debate the expanding war that spring, Ellsberg appeared as the representative of the federal government to make the case for the war.

As you can see at the bottom of that schedule, the Antioch teach-in also featured several opponents of the war, including the journalist I.F. Stone, who joined in from Washington on a long distance “telelecture.” (Very high tech.)

As this piece notes, I.F. Stone and Daniel Ellsberg had been in the same place just a week before — at an April 17th antiwar rally in DC. Stone was there, of course, because he was emerging as a prominent critic of the war. Ellsberg was there because of a first date.

As he related in his autobiography Secrets, he’d met a young woman named Patricia Marx, a radio host and antiwar activist, and, a bit smitten, he asked her out on a date to go see the cherry blossoms.

“She said she was going to a demonstration the next day at the Washington Monument and a march around the White House to protest the war. I pointed out that I couldn’t very well take part in that, since I was helping run the war being protested. … She said, ‘Well, that’s where I’ll be. You’re welcome to come.’”

He did, essentially risking his job for a first date.

Seems it was worth it. Five years later, they got married.

As of his passing today, they’d been together for 53 years. Three kids, five grandkids.