Daniel Ellsberg in 1972. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons.

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.

Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope, being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.

“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.

The book’s subtitle—offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope”—could hardly be more timely.

Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.

At the centre of Truth and Consequence are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.

“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.

“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”

“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he........

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