For Salon’s debut of its new radio programme, Glenn Greenwald interviews Nixon era hero, Daniel Ellsberg:

… I spoke with Daniel Ellsberg, one of the very few people in America who really merits the term “political hero.” During the Vietnam War, Ellsberg — a Harvard graduate, former U.S. Marine, top aide to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and State Department official in Vietnam — had a Top Secret security clearance as a result of his high-level work on the Vietnam War with the Nixon administration and the Rand Corporation, when he obtained the now-famous “Pentagon Papers,” which revealed that the U.S. Government, throughout the 1960s, knew that the Vietnam War could not be won, yet continued to deceive the American public as it escalated the war.

Knowing that he was risking life imprisonment, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in an attempt to alert the public to what the Government was doing (he did so only after numerous members of Congress refused his pleas to make those documents public). The NYT then waged an epic battle with the Nixon administration for the right to publish those papers, resulting in one of the most important First Amendment victories in Supreme Court history. For his efforts, Ellsberg was subjected to extensive warrantless eavesdropping by the Nixon White House, had his psychoanalyst’s office invaded and searched at Nixon’s behest in an attempt to obtain incriminating information about him, and was arrested and then brought to trial where he faced life imprisonment for having leaked the report (though the charges were ultimately dropped as a result of the Nixon administration’s misconduct towards him).

In countless ways, Ellsberg embodies exactly what our political system has been so conspicuously and tragically lacking, and he has become one of the most insightful analysts of our current political crisis.

Listen to the interview here