Daniel Ellsberg's Final Warning to America

[00:00:00]Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-inchief of Current Affairs magazine. And today I am joined by three guests who between them are the collaborators on a new book of collected works by Daniel Ellsberg, famously known for being the Pentagon Papers whistleblower. a man who had such a rich and interesting career so much beyond the Pentagon Papers that we're going to dive into today. So, I am joined by first Jan Thomas who was Daniel Ellburg's assistant for many years and compiled many of his uh unpublished notes. Jen, welcome to Curt Affairs. Thank you. I am also joined by Daniel Ellburg's sons, Robert and Michael, who have very uh eclectic backgrounds. Michael, I I know that you've worked as a a stand-up comedian and a music producer and have a totally interesting background. And uh Robert, you worked with uh Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker and and have been a book publisher yourself. So, I could talk to you both about your own lives for a long time, but we're here to talk about this this new book. Uh, Michael, you co-edited and and uh, Robert, you wrote this uh, this incredible forward. Um, but I guess I wanted to start with you, Jan, if you could talk a little bit about the material that we have here that what Daniel Ellsberg wrote over all these years during which he he was publishing very little, but he was writing all these thoughts. So, tell us a little bit about about what comprises this this new collection. So he throughout the years would routinely and deeply engage with his writing in his notebooks and he was writing thoughts that he was not sharing. You didn't know necessarily what was on his mind but he had a very deep conversation with himself in these notebooks and at the end of his career we were preparing to send off his papers to the archive and it just seemed as though let's wait a second here. there was something important that was being captured as he was contemporaneously going through these events and having deep thoughts about them. Let's see what's there. So that began a process of harvesting what ended up being 600 file boxes worth of material were dug through to pull out the notebooks, go through them carefully and look for things that would comprise a book. And just staying with you for a moment, Jab, what what is it that you found so compelling about these notes when you started deciphering them and understanding what he'd been uh thinking about and writing down all of these years? I mean, what is it about this material other than the fact that obviously Daniel Ellburg is, you know, an important figure in 20th century history, but what is it about these thoughts that you that you felt were so important that they be shared? Well, I think that there was a compelling nature and a dis distillation of his thinking.

[00:02:56]When you're handwriting something, you have to slow down and just get to the gist. And that was the quality of his writings that he really was harvesting deep reflections about things. He wasn't going on and on about them to then get to the point. The point was what he wrote. And so it's a really direct way to engage in a conversation with his inner conversation, his moral complexities and quandries that he was sorting out. So we can ride along with him through time, through 50 years of him having this these frequent sessions with his notebooks, which he believed was only for himself. He never intended any of this material to be public. But when we saw the accumulated pieces, it it just seemed as though it was going to fall into an amazing book. And that's what happened.

[00:03:43]>> Michael, let me turn to you because you co-edited uh this volume. Um when you read through your father's notebooks, what what what kinds of of thoughts in it uh you know struck you as as profound, what kind of themes come out of this this work um that he was thinking about all all of these years?

[00:04:03]>> Yeah, thank you. Um well, I can divide that into two. sort of my my own personal experience and then the the ideas his ideas that got rolling. Uh my personal experience was very moving and I write a little bit about this in the introduction in that um this really was my father's main waking activity um was reading writing marginelia and writing in these legal pads. I mean hours and hours a day. And so this was an activity he was doing, you know, most of the time when I saw him. And one um relevant fact here is that his handwriting is almost inscrutable by everyone. I I literally would have he would need to read the birthday cards he wrote to me because I couldn't read even a word of it. And somehow mira miraculously Jan is able to read it no problem. So, it was like one of those decoders or, you know, the the secret overlay you put or or or, you know, revealing a photograph where all this stuff that that he was doing for decades, my whole life, uh, I'm 49 now.

[00:05:06]Um, uh, revealed and it was like, oh, that's what he was thinking about. And it was very moving to me to kind of get access to this part of him that I didn't have access to before. So, I'm I'm grateful to Jan for that. Um, one thing that was really came really clear um, in the notes among many we could talk about is just how much the accident that he was in when he was 15, which is the subject of his um, of of one of the personal essays which I had read that was typed out and I had read it a long time ago. um he just for for decades, year after year, goes over the implications of this and that he really used that as a metaphor, not to go into it too much, but his father falling asleep at the wheel, his father sort of obeying this very unsafe command that his mother made to like drive through the night. Um and he he really that became uh probably the the core metaphor of his life that he interpreted a lot of his later political um actions through is this um this kind of core obedience that he witnessed and caused his mother and sister to be killed. I want to talk a little bit more about the accident because the accident and the piano plague and the Christian science were all things I had no idea about until I read this volume because he left them out of his uh you know his book Secrets.

[00:06:30]Um, now, but here, Robert, I I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about um the aspects of your father's thinking that I think people who just know about him from what they might have read in the New York Times aren't aware of because people know him as having leaked the Pentagon papers. They might know that he had a crisis of conscience about what he understood about the Vietnam War. um and they might know what what he exposed. But what the notebooks show is that is is that he and if they if people have caught up with the book that he wrote, the doomsday machine, they might understand more uh the the sort of full dimensions of his thinking, but that he his entire life, I mean, Ellberg was one of the uh pioneers or or was very important in decision theory. He was trained as an economist and he seems to have spent a lot of his life thinking very deeply about questions of, you know, why atrocities occur, human complicity, guilt, responsibility, decision-m. Can you sketch for us a little bit more the the broad scope of your father's thinking? Well, of course, he's very well known for uh leaking the Pentagon papers and as a a very important uh uh resistor to the Vietnam War. Uh whose actions uh actually, you know, bore extraordinary fruit in helping to bring down the Nixon administration because of the overreach of of uh Nixon and his plumbers in trying to silence him. Uh but uh people were not so aware that the whole episode of the Vietnam War and his preoccupation with that was really a a kind of detour from his lifelong uh preoccupation with the uh threat and danger of nuclear war.

[00:08:21]And that's where his career began uh in the 19 uh late 1950s working for the Rand Corporation uh working on the question of of how you could uh uh present an effective deterrent uh precisely in particular by making sure that uh that the that an enemy could not just simply knock out your command and control with a bomb on on Washington or something like that. How could you make sure that we could present a credible deterrence? So his his preoccupation was not fighting nuclear war but trying to prevent it. Uh he later though began to see that the whole thing was a kind of insane and murderous and as he would call it evil uh system which he uh characterized as a doomsday machine uh that we had created this uh apparatus uh that had the capacity to destroy uh you know all human life and it was kind of an idea that was popularized in you know the Doctor Strange love that that movie.

[00:09:17]Well, he he he goes and works, you know, for several years on Vietnam and then in resistance to the war uh after he'd uh served there for two years. Uh but when the war was over, he returned to his original preoccupation uh which was warning and trying to uh alert the public to the dangers and the the the catastrophic possibilities of of of nuclear war. Uh and that was something he continued right up until his last breath uh by demonstrating by writing the doomsday machine lobbying uh that uh and he felt you know in many ways that at the end of his life that that he uh didn't have as much to show for those efforts as he he would have liked but he felt that uh there was always one more thing he could do uh and he wasn't going to rest until he had done that. There's also the new documentary, An ordinary Insanity, which I I watched today, which is a halfhour documentary. Everyone can watch it for free online. Um, it's available on YouTube, and it really is an extraordinary document. Uh I I'm not sure exactly when the footage of him was recorded, but it's in the in the last years of his life. So it's all narrated by him as he talks about the danger of nuclear war and this and and how he came to view it as insane and evil and the extraordinary risk of the system that we had built. And and and I think what comes across to me through revisiting his work is just how I mean I don't know many other people who've spent as much time thinking deeply about questions like you know what allows human beings to participate in evil systems or and and how why do we take uh certain risks? Why do we blind ourselves to certain risk?

[00:11:07]Um, could one of you help me understand a a little bit more the the threads that tie together um his work in economics, his work on nuclear war, and his uh work on on Vietnam, the things that preoccupied him.

[00:11:25]>> Yeah, I I love that you caught that thread. Um so this book uh introduces readers to a side of my father's thought that most will be unfamiliar with uh but anyone who knew him personally would be very familiar with is that he he constantly uh analyzed and thought about the way that morality works through organizations. And one of the key points uh that I took away from reading this material uh was he he he makes this really clean distinction between the way morality works uh among you know kind of day-to-day among families and friends and communities uh versus how it works in organizations. And his point is that they're almost exactly opposite. um that in in our day-to-day lives, we have uh you know the kind of playground morality, don't hit people, don't lie, don't steal, don't cheat, that kind of thing. Um and uh and you you have you know you're responsible for your actions and and you have to take responsibility.

[00:12:29]Whereas his analysis over many decades of organizations is that they're essentially responsibility deflecting machines. So that it allows uh an organization allows to take a lot of people who individually in their in their day-to-day lives are are probably very moral, ethical people who follow all that common sense morality. But because they're in a machine that has systematically deflect allows them to deflect responsibility, the machine itself, the organization gets to act in in soc ways that would be considered sociopathic if if an individual were doing it. But it but the morality in the organization is follow the leader, you know, don't question, you know, obey.

[00:13:14]You know, you're justified if you have enemies. You're justified in doing these things to your enemies. So they're almost exactly opposite moralities. One of the things that's striking in the documentary and in in the Doomsday machine is him looking back at his time in the Rand Corporation and and doing this nuclear war planning work and kind of trying to solve the the puzzle of how he as a as an ordinary person of ordinary morality could have participated in something that when he thought more about it came came to seem I I think he said the project is, you know, the the most evil piece of human planning that has ever been done. That is to say that the United States's own contingency nuclear war plans involved the the mass murder of hundreds of of millions of people planning, you know, not intending to do, but at least planning for the possibility of carrying out killing on a scale that dwarfed the Holocaust. And as he looked back on that, he he he seemed to to be trying to wrestle with, and as I understand it, it's part of why he didn't publish for a long time because he didn't have a satisfactory answer to the question of how he and other perfectly normal people could have gotten wrapped up in something that seemed on the surface so rational, but then was also so insane.

[00:14:40]>> You're spot on with that. And one of the things he would say often was, "How can good people do such evil things?" Or as the files that we held his writing on that go, "How could we slash they?" So he was he was partly processing his own complicity um and trying to work out because he felt like he was someone who had every good intention and he was in the system to you know serve his country and yet he realized that he had unwittingly participated in creating a system that could end life as we know it. So he it really troubled him and he and he worked to piece together that riddle of and that's what Michael was speaking to was the the bureaucratic morality the distinctions that allowed those kinds of things to go forward.

[00:15:32]>> This book is a collection of of fragmentaryary notes as we've said. So, I'm going to ask each of you and Jen maybe maybe you could start is um do you have particular not necessarily particular quotes but particular um theme thoughts that come were there particular notes in here that stayed with you or particular insights that he had or or things that that made you think because all the time he's trying to think he's trying to understand the world. So, as you read it, what do you think some of the more kind of profound of his uh conclusions or reflections are?

[00:16:08]>> Well, I think for me some of the most meaningful ones had to do with speaking to people directly about that could inform their own moral conversation. Um I there's one quote that really um a couple quotes. We are in a crisis. Open up the options. Think radically and creatively.

[00:16:29]Act as if peace were possible.

[00:16:33]Take responsibility for your beliefs, your actions, your lives.

[00:16:39]Free your own power and use it.

[00:16:43]Don't delegate conscience.

[00:16:47]End complicity and silence.

[00:16:50]Join a community of risk, of concern, of change. So, I just had this one uh bookmarked. Um, and this is from 1984.

[00:17:01]So, I was uh I was seven. Um, and so, okay, the first page, there are these little pathy there's a lot of little piffy oneliners that really make you think. So, the first one there says, "Groups do not have a tendency to mature, to grow up." And that's really interesting. I'd never thought about that. Obviously all of us, you know, we and our f friends and family, we hope that we grow up over time, but if you think about various organizations, you know, have they actually grown up? Has has the has the US government matured?

[00:17:34]Uh, I think that's a that's a question mark. Um, so this is the this is the one I wanted to uh read here and it says model group of evil. So this is just two paragraphs that I think encapsulate a lot of his political philosophy. Um, subordinates feel part of an omnipotent organization or team, righteous, protected and safe from criticism or judgment. Hence, they are free from constraints against hurting others, free of the fear of retaliation and free from a personal sense of judgment or failure.

[00:18:10]Leaders feel themselves to be servants of the cause, capital C, serving the organization, team or state. They too feel diminished and take no personal responsibility for policy. They see themselves as being responsible to stockholders, the organization or voters in a way that quote leaves them no choice. Hence they are protected from the constraints of personal conscience.

[00:18:36]Um, so right there is I mean there's this the book is just sused with these meditations on personal conscience and the way it works in organizations um in these really pathy ways that as Jan mentioned weren't really intended he he certainly didn't intend them for publication. He he did give us permission at the end. Uh but um so it is a consensual publication, but it wasn't something that he was really he was just trying to work these thoughts out in his own mind for himself.

[00:19:06]>> And he certainly never believed that it would actually happen. He gave of permission [laughter] kind of, oh yeah, sure. You know, he didn't consideration that this would see the light of day.

[00:19:19]Robert, do you have uh partic as as you read through uh these notes, are there um particular?

[00:19:26]>> Well, I' I've I've mentioned that that you know, people are not that aware, not everybody is aware uh of this preoccupation he had with nuclear war.

[00:19:34]And he he certainly considered that the the most urgent message that he had to share with people uh because he felt that people didn't really understand uh the nature of the risks uh and uh the possibilities. But there's a whole other side of him that he he just didn't share that much though, you know, he did with family and friends. Uh and it's it really runs through all of these notes is this question on who are we as a species? In other words, the the danger that he he saw was not just from the weapons themselves or uh kind of our nuclear plans which could be changed, could be improved in various ways uh with different technology, different uh policies, different ideology or whatever. Uh but he really was trying to get to the heart of what is it about human beings especially in you know not just in bureaucracies because he he also pointed out that that we are kind of unique among species. uh in making war on our own kind, you know, uh and this way that we have, I think Michael, you know, referred to it also of of distinguishing between our tribe, our our group, our in-group, our family, uh and the other. And most people don't really care that much about the other.

[00:20:48]Uh and so he felt that you know if this documentary you mentioned is called ordinary uh ins insanity you know uh he says the idea that you can win a nuclear war is a kind of insanity but it's very ordinary insanity because it's so widely shared. Uh in a way he felt that we had to develop an ordinary sanity. we had there had to be some kind of moral evolution and the question is is whether we had time to achieve that. Now part of his work was to model that other model.

[00:21:22]You know, a different kind of ethic, a different way of being. Uh demonstrating uh that there were people who care about the others, who care about the future, uh not just about you know what's around the corner or the next uh you know midterm election or something like that uh and are willing to take uh risks uh make sacrifices uh to achieve that end.

[00:21:43]So he was very concerned about what what what could it what would it take and what what could we do to awaken that capacity uh for uh an kind of inclusive empathy and solidarity with with uh not just other human beings but other but other creatures.

[00:22:00]>> The film is really remarkable and if there are any teachers listening I recommend uh uh playing it in schools and having a discussion and getting people thinking about these things. Um I another thing people might not quite realize is that Daniel Ellsberg had basically the capacity to succeed at the highest level in the establishment.

[00:22:24]Right? He went he got a PhD from Harvard. He ended up you know in the red then red corporation at the United States government. I mean this is a guy I mean Jan you describe him in in what you write as you said you know you think he's you think the word genius would would apply to him he was someone who but what's interesting about his particular kind of genius was that um you know he he could have been a top uh you know assistant secretary of state the you know someone who was you know senior professor of economics at at Harvard but it it seems to me like his mind was so restless on these moral al questions that he couldn't accustom himself to or accept or reconcile himself to things that felt wrong about the institutions that he was in. I may be misreading I I didn't know him. You knew him. But this is what comes across to me is this this idea that like, you know, he couldn't you're supposed to if you're in the Rand Corporation, you're supposed to ultimately just accept the logic that nuclear war can be rational.

[00:23:29]if you're working, you know, on the on the Pentagon papers, you're supposed to sort of swallow the contradictions. Um, and he was someone who ultimately seems like on an intellectual and moral level just just just couldn't accept these things and couldn't uh, you know, put aside um, his his restless inquiry into, wait, hang on a minute. What? This is this is violence. This is madness.

[00:23:56]Um, you know, Jen, you work with him a lot. Tell me, tell tell me your thoughts on on that.

[00:24:00]>> I think you have just shown tremendous insight in those comments. Um, you know, he started out being totally dedicated to serving as a patriot of his country and he believed that he was even when he was in the war planning role, he believed he was protecting the country and doing everything he could to make things safer in his own way. as time went on and as he learned more, the center didn't hold that, you know, he he just had so many, you know, things that came up that that just first he was pushing off those doubts and then then Vietnam continued the piece of as he went in he just learned more and more. He saw with his own eyes and he could not align himself with the policy objectives that were being uh carried out. And I think it just went on and on and on until the weight of the contradictions just snapped something in and he he he had to really line up behind um behind his moral considerations which had governed him in the early stages as well. He was he had every bit of moral sensibility that he you know carried with him but it's just that he he hadn't met he hadn't met the realities in a way that caused him to have to turn aside and he went from being the ultimate insider as you said someone who was just his background destined him. He was just decision theory how to make decisions under uncertainty he was such a resource in in all of those policy ways he went from that to being called a traitor. So that was such a and I think that the system really wanted to just crush him because he was such an insider and they just couldn't let that stand.

[00:25:44]>> I think it's uh you know worth pointing out that you know in effect there were kind of two big before and afters in his life. The first one was the accident when he was 15 that killed his mother and his sister. Uh there was a kind of before and after in his life. The second great one though occurred after he was you know he was fully against the war but um so many other people that he worked with in the government didn't feel any different than he did. Uh everybody was against the war. Uh and then he encounters this uh young man who is about to go to jail uh to uh resist the draft. uh and it suddenly kind of broke open his heart in this way to think like what if what could I do if I were willing to go to jail you know uh that really broke his life and you know he went from being the outsider in the insider at that point to then uh realizing what the power also of non-violent uh you know civil disobedience and truthtelling uh could could achieve and so that was also one of the uh great messages of his life that he wanted to share with people is uh the the you don't know what uh the effects can be of even just getting up and giving a speech. Uh and it can be one of those things that kind of breaks the spell of of obedience when you see that there's an alternative. There's there's another way you can respond in a different way. Uh and he he aside from you know preaching about the dangers of nuclear war he also wanted to convey this idea of personal responsibility.

[00:27:18]uh and uh how ordinary people uh by casting their whole vote is you know thorough's phrase uh could could possibly change the world change the future. Michael, you mentioned earlier this this accident. Uh I mean, I didn't know anything about this actually until I until I read this book. These these beginning essays, these three essays that that the book opens with are really remarkable because each aspect of his uh life of his early life. I mean the fact that the you know his his parents' religious uh faith they were uh uh he was from a Jewish family but actually they practiced Christian science and the fact that he was you know his mother decided when he was born that he was going to be a top concert pianist and spent most of his childhood trying to force him to be one of the greatest pianists in the United States and then all of a sudden his his mother and sister died and and and you mentioned that actually you know the sudden death of his mother and sister in this in this horrific car accident. You know, he replays this over and over throughout his his life. And there are even kind of lessons from that in terms of these ideas about how you need to be able to dissent when you see a situation that is headed for catastrophe. and how how he you know goes over this to try and understand it to try and make sense of it to try and think you know what what should people do in various uh situations. Could you tell us a bit a bit more because you hinted at this uh earlier.

[00:28:50]>> Uh yeah so it was actually a a fairly direct example of a lot of the things that he later talked about in organizations um you know he witnessed to disastrous effect in a family unit.

[00:29:03]Um, and without going, you know, giving away the whole chapter or going into too much detail, basically there was sort of a a family disagreement between his mom and his dad, they were um the mom wanted to get um to Denver uh from Detroit very quickly in a rush. She had a bunch of reasons to get and she she was insisting that they drive through the night. Um and it was sort of a it was it was definitely a mother-ledd family. The the mother was in charge. That was pretty clear. and um and uh and my his dad, my grandfather uh objected and said, "No, I'm too tired. This isn't safe. We should wait. We should miss this party."

[00:29:44]And basically, it was always overruled, overruled, overruled. You know, you must obey orders, more or less. And then that led to these disastrous consequences.

[00:29:54]And um so this was this very upfront and consequential window into what happens when a subordinate knows that a plan is dangerous, raises the danger with a kind of I I'll just say kind of crazy leader who's making not wise decisions um dangerous decisions um and doesn't doesn't disobey um because he could have just refused. He could have said no, sorry, I'm not driving. Um and so he my father really took that as a as a model of why it's so important to um independently consider the wisdom of policies that you're being asked to put forward when you know that they're putting tremendous lives at risk uh in in dangerous ways. In the new film, he talks about Stannis Lav Petrov, the Russian, you know, soldier who defies, you know, who who defies orders, I think, in the 1980s. And, you know, that this the importance of making your own independent assessment and not doing something that, you know, is going to lead to disaster. And you could see having read the essay the direct link there. Jen, I think you're about to say something.

[00:31:02]>> Well, I just was going to say it's interesting to me that the whole thrust of his his life became preventing catastrophe. And I it's not an accident that he had such a formative catastrophe in his formation.

[00:31:15]>> He was very interested in in other examples of catastrophes uh such as the uh the Titanic. You know, he often used that as a kind of metaphor. You've got this uh this ship that is trying to set a record going across the uh uh the ocean uh and so ignoring uh dangers of of floating ice.

[00:31:36]Uh and uh so he's raising this question, where are we? Are we all is it are we destined for this collision that's going to happen or is there still time uh to change things? Uh is it is it possible that we can mutiny uh against the uh this you know crazy uh uh you know insistence of of the captain that they that they keep on sailing. you know, um I forget who it was who among you who said, you know, he early in his life he thought of himself, you know, as a as a real true red-blooded American patriot, but he says at one point in here he says, you know, he talks about patriotism as well.

[00:32:14]And he says like I actually I still consider myself he talks about being accused of being a traitor and says you know I I I it's so insulted by this because I really do feel like the duty of someone who cares about their country is to exercise this kind of independent evaluation of conscience as to whether the country is doing something uh self-destructive. And in the case of the Vietnam War, he had a patriotic obligation to uh risk his freedom in order to ensure that the US public could make an informed choices about the war that [laughter] was being waged in in in their name.

[00:32:51]>> I think that's what a true patriot looks like and throw the word around. But um he took it very seriously.

[00:32:57]>> He often uh you know said that that the highest obligation of an American citizen is to the constitution. uh not to the party, not to their boss, not even to you know uh you know the nation in some kind of international conflict or whatever. And uh and that all public officials take that oath. Uh and so you know the irony that he would be called a a traitor uh because he put a a loyalty to to the constitution or what was right uh above loyalty to the his his tribe his inroup. As we conclude here, um perhaps each of you could just give your assessment, you know, looking back on the extraordinary and long life of uh of Daniel Ellburg as uh you know, what each of us should take for our own lives out of examining his. We've mentioned some of the themes that preoccupied him and that come across in these notebooks. um you know the the in the responsibility to use your mind and use your conscience and to not um set aside things like nuclear war uh just because they just because they're painful to think about.

[00:34:13]I mean if we're headed for the precipice, we have to confront these things and talk about these things and we have to examine institutions. But I I want to each in your own words to say as you as you as you look back on on his extraordinary life and work um what you think each of us can can take away from it.

[00:34:29]>> Well, I will say that uh to me he is the epitome of a moral exemplar and that is in such deep contrast to the times we're living in and the the truth is lies the you know the transient values. So I think that taking on this example of a life truly well-lived from his gifts. So he took his gifts and he used them in every way he could to you know improve the world and make us safer. So I think we can each take that example just say what are is my moral responsibility as a human being? How do I want to show up in this life? And there's just a whole lot that we can benefit from his reflected, you know, insights. He he he took his smart mind and he worked out a lot about life and humanity. And so there's there's a lot to be learned there. And each reading it seems I learn more. I'll answer that question in a slightly different way is is just um if you if you read the book, what you see is a a a mind grappling with questions over 50 years and and really um trying to get to the bottom of things. Um, and I personally was very inspired throughout his life and also reading this book of this commitment to not just settle for easy answers. Um, one thing I really appreciated about my father is that he wasn't really an ideologue. You know, he was on the left, but he wasn't like a he wasn't like ideological about it. And he was just as willing to criticize people on on the left side of things as on the right. And you can really see that working through um this uh the this these notes over 50 years is of trying to question everything and get to the bottom of some answers that that he could feel comfortable in. So I I I I would think that anyone reading this could see how can you live a life devoted to ideas, devoted to commitment and action, but not from a simple ideological way, but from really having thought things through. I think what I would say is um my dad was not a an optimist.

[00:36:52]In fact, I said to him, "No, you're you're a catastrophist." He he spent so much of his time uh thinking about the unthinkable, thinking about the worst case scenario, which uh he didn't he didn't feel that was like really slim odds. He felt that slim odds were that we were actually going to survive the nuclear age. Uh but he was a person of hope and that was not the same thing as optimism just a confidence that it's all going to work out somehow. Uh he he felt that by living hopefully you make it possible that there's that there's a different future. Uh and the stakes are so high uh that that's a very good way to uh use your life even though you in your own lifetime might not see the ultimate fruit of that. he'd seen in his own life uh that you just never know uh what the outcome of your actions could be with the Pentagon papers had much greater impact than than he could have even imagined not in the way he expected and so he called himself a person of hope and uh I I I don't know how he came upon this but the subtitle I think really puts all those things together reflections on catastrophe civil resistance and hope uh and hope was I think his most important legacy Robert, if you don't mind, I'll just read a tiny little bit of your uh forward here where you say he knew that he was not irrerapproachable in all aspects all the time in his life, but the survival of the world could not wait for irreroachable people. It would require many people of compassion and hope who could recognize the dangers facing our planet and were prepared, as Albert Kimu put it, to speak out clearly and pay up personally. It would require a kind of awakening to the moral and ethical dimension of our crisis. He had hope that such an awakening could occur.

[00:38:33]This hope was not the same as naive optimism. He reckoned realistically on the low odds, but low odds were not zero odds and he retained hope that catastrophe could be avoided. So I uh and that's just a sliver. People should pick up the whole book for Robert's entire forward. Um although I think it was also published on common dreams. So you can check uh check it out there. Um >> I really hope everyone picks up truth and consequence about it. The great Norman Solomon, who's also been a guest on this program, says you will never read a more profound book about obedience and conscience. As I mentioned, there is also a new film that is available for free. The book is Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope by Daniel Ellburg. It is edited by Michael Ellburg and Jan Thomas with a forward by Robert Ellburg. Thank you all so much for joining us today on Current Affairs.

[00:39:30]>> Thank you.

[00:39:31]>> Thank you. It was great. Thank you.

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