Though Ellsberg’s situation seemed dire on the printed page, Gordon E. Beyer ’52 says he knew his former classmate would pull through.

“There was no need to worry about Dan,” he says. “He could take care of himself, and he did.”

The case against Ellsberg was dismissed in 1973, after it was revealed that Nixon aides had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to discredit him.

Rather than retreating from public view, Ellsberg used the event as the beginning of a lifetime of political activism.

Ellsberg wanted to tell his side of the story—and he did in interviews at the time. But the longer memoir that he envisioned would have to wait.

The story that will finally be published this fall extends far beyond the length of an article or even his recently published Harvard Ph.D. dissertation about the philosophical implications of rational decision-making.

Writing the memoir took the cooperation of his entire family, Ellsberg says, including rapid-fire e-mail editing exchanges with his sons.

To him the process brought to mind one night in 1969 when he was copying parts of the Pentagon Papers—one 13-year-old son worked the copy machine and a 10-year-old daughter cut the “top secret” stamp markings off the pages.

Ellsberg waited three decades to begin writing Secrets: Revealing the Pentagon Papers, as the memoir will be called. In the intervening years, Ellsberg felt other causes deserved his immediate attention.

After the Vietnam War ended, Ellsberg demanded that Congress cut off funding for the nuclear arms race and atomic testing.

“I really set out to try to help pull together a movement against nuclear weapons that would be comparable to the anti-war movement,” he says.

The crusade took him from Capitol Hill to German nuclear testing sites to anti-nuclear rallies in Central Park. Ellsberg estimates he was arrested between 60 and 70 times in acts of civil disobedience in the late 1970s and 1980s.

A three-year stint on Capitol Hill with the Physicians for Social Responsibility, a lobbying group advocating the end of nuclear proliferation, ended in the mid-1990s. And Ellsberg finally began to work on his long-anticipated memoirs of the Vietnam and Pentagon Papers years.

Even now, as he prepares for an upcoming book tour in conjunction with the release of his memoir, Ellsberg says the current political situation takes precedence.

“I think I’ll probably be talking more about that than the book,” he says.