He was 92.

Ellsberg, who announced in February that he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, died Friday morning, according to a letter from his family released by a spokeswoman, Julia Pacetti.

Until the early 1970s, when he revealed that he was the source for the stunning media reports on the 47-volume, 7,000-page Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina, Ellsberg was a well-placed member of the government-military elite. He was a Harvard graduate and self-defined cold warrior who served as a private and government consultant on Vietnam throughout the 1960s, risked his life on the battlefield, received the highest security clearances and came to be trusted by officials in Democratic and Republican administrations.

He was especially valued, he would later note, for his talent for discretion.

But like millions of other Americans, in and out of government, he had turned against the yearslong war in Vietnam, the governments claims that the battle was winnable and that a victory for the North Vietnamese over the U.S.-backed South would lead to the spread of communism throughout the region. Unlike so many other war opponents, he was in a special position to make a difference.

An entire generation of Vietnam-era insiders had become just as disillusioned as I with a war they saw as hopeless and interminable, he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. By 1968, if not earlier, they all wanted, as I did, to see us out of this war.

As much as anyone, Ellsberg embodied the individual of conscience who answered only to his sense of right and wrong, even if the price was his own freedom. David Halberstam, the late author and Vietnam War correspondent who had known Ellsberg since both were posted overseas, would describe him as no ordinary convert. He was highly intelligent, obsessively curious and profoundly sensitive, a born proselytizer who saw political events in terms of moral absolutes and demanded consequences for abuses of power.

As much as anyone, Ellsberg also embodied the fall of American idealism in foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the upending of the post-World War II consensus that Communism, real or suspected, should be opposed worldwide.

The Pentagon Papers had been commissioned in 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a leading public advocate of the war who wanted to leave behind a comprehensive history of the U.S. and Vietnam and to help his successors avoid the kinds of mistakes he would only admit to long after. The papers covered more than 20 years, from Frances failed efforts at colonization in the 1940s and 1950s to the growing involvement of the U.S., including the bombing raids and deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops during Lyndon Johnsons administration. Ellsberg was among those asked to work on the study, focusing on 1961, when the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy began adding advisers and support units.

First published in The New York Times in June 1971, with The Washington Post, The Associated Press and more than a dozen others following, the classified papers documented that the U.S. had defied a 1954 settlement barring a foreign military presence in Vietnam, questioned whether South Vietnam had a viable government, secretly expanded the war to neighboring countries and had plotted to send American soldiers even as Johnson vowed he wouldnt.

The Johnson administration had dramatically and covertly escalated the war despite the judgment of the Governments intelligence community that the measures would not weaken the North Vietnamese, wrote the Times Neil Sheehan, a former Vietnam correspondent who later wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on the war, A Bright Shining Lie.

The leakers identity became a national guessing game and Ellsberg proved an obvious suspect, because of his access to the papers and his public condemnation of the war over the previous two years. With the FBI in pursuit, Ellsberg turned himself in to authorities in Boston, became a hero to the anti-war movement and a traitor to the wars supporters, labeled the most dangerous man in America by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, with whom Ellsberg had once been friendly.

The papers themselves were seen by many as an indictment not just of a given president or party, but of a generation of political leadership. The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt would note that growing mistrust of the government during the Vietnam era, the credibility gap, had opened into an abyss.

The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material, which, unhappily, he must recognize as the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy, she wrote.

The Nixon administration quickly tried to block further publication on the grounds that the papers would compromise national security, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the newspapers on June 30, 1971, a landmark First Amendment ruling rejecting prior restraint. Nixon himself, initially unconcerned because the papers predated his time in office, was determined to punish Ellsberg and formed a renegade team of White House plumbers, endowed with a stash of White House hush money and the mission of preventing future leaks.

You cant drop it, Nixon fumed privately to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. You cant let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?

Ellsberg faced trials in Boston and Los Angeles on federal charges for espionage and theft, with a possible sentence of more than 100 years. He had expected to go to jail, but was spared, in part, by Nixons rage and the excesses of those around him. The Boston case ended in a mistrial because the government wiretapped conversations between a defense witness and his attorney. Charges in the Los Angeles trial were dismissed after Judge Matthew Byrne learned that White House plumbers G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had burglarized the office of Ellsbergs psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, California.

Byrne ruled that the bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.

Meanwhile, the plumbers continued their crime wave, notably the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic Partys national headquarters, at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The Watergate scandal didnt prevent Nixon from a landslide reelection in 1972, but would expand rapidly during his second term and culminate in his resignation in August 1974. U.S. combat troops had already left Vietnam and the North Vietnamese captured the Southern capital, Saigon, in April 1975.

Without Nixons obsession with me, he would have stayed in office, Ellsberg told The Associated Press in 1999. And had he not been removed from office, he would have continued the bombing (in Vietnam).

Ellsbergs story was depicted in the 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. The movie had its West Coast premiere only a few blocks from the Rand Corp. headquarters in Santa Monica, Ellsberg former workplace. He sent college students with fliers to urge old colleagues to attend the screening, but none attended.

Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931, to Jewish parents who converted to Christian Science. His father was an unemployed engineer in the early years of the Great Depression and the family later moved to suburban Detroit, where his father worked in a plant making B-24 bombers. Daniel held vivid memories of learning that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, and of reports of the Nazis bombing London and the U.S. bombing Germany and Japan.

In his teens, Ellsberg found himself in agreement with Harry Truman and other Cold War liberals, believing in civil rights and economic justice at home, and containing the Soviet Union overseas. He was also shaped profoundly by personal tragedy. During a car trip in 1946, his father nodded off at the wheel and crashed into a sidewall, killing Ellsbergs mother and younger sister. Ellsberg would look back with a sense of loss and mistrust his father, the authority figure, had failed to keep his family safe.

With thoughts of become a labor organizer, Ellsberg won a scholarship to Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude. He served in the Marines as an act of defiance against his Ivy League background, but eventually returned to Harvard and earned a doctorate in economics. In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corp., a global policy think tank based in Santa Monica, California, and consulted for the Defense Department and the White House on nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans and crisis decision-making. Ellsberg spent two years in the mid-1960s with the State Department in Vietnam, where he learned first-hand how casually military and political officials lied and became convinced the conflict was unwinnable, in part through the firefights with the North Vietnamese that he survived.

Encouraged by a close friend from Rand, researcher Anthony J. Russo, Ellsberg had decided by the fall of 1969 that the Nixon administration would continue the policies of other presidents and that the McNamara study needed to be seen. His life would soon resemble an espionage thriller.

Ellsberg removed some of the bound, classified volumes from his safe in the Rand offices, placed them in his briefcase and walked past security guards and a sign reading Loose Lips Sink Ships. With Russos girlfriend owning an advertising agency, Ellsberg spent months copying the documents on an office Xerox machine, sometimes helped by his teenage son Robert. On occasion, the office alarm would mistakenly ring, police would show up, and leave soon after. Ellsberg became so worried that he began slicing off the Top Secret markings from the papers, in case authorities wanted to inspect more closely.

Leaking to the Times was not his first choice. He had hoped that government officials, including Kissinger, would read the study and realize the war was hopeless. Legislators turning him down included Sen. William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, the longtime chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, who in 1972 would run for president as an anti-war candidate.

A final plot twist was unknown to Ellsberg until decades later. He had showed some of the report to Marcus Raskin and Ralph Stavins of the liberal think tank the Institute for Policy Studies before approaching Sheehan. Only in the early 2000s did he learn that Raskin and Stavins, who had recommended that he speak with Sheehan, had already given some of the papers to the Times reporter. Sheehan, who died in 2021, also defied Ellsbergs request not to make duplicate copies and did not give him advance notice before the first Times report ran.

It was just luck that he didnt get the whistle blown on the whole damn thing, Sheehan later said of Ellsberg, whom he regarded as out of control.

In his later years, a spry, silver-haired Ellsberg became a prominent free speech and anti-Iraq war activist, drawing parallels between U.S. involvement in Iraq and Vietnam, and called for impeachment of President George W. Bush. He expressed similar fears about Afghanistan during the Obama administration, saying it had the potential to become Vietnamistan if the U.S. increased troops there.

He was active in campaigns to prevent nuclear arms proliferation and drew upon his history in government for the 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, in which he included a once-top secret document showing that the U.S. had considered launching nuclear attacks on the Chinese in 1958. He also defended other leakers and whistleblowers., among them WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed details of secret U.S. surveillance programs and is now living in Russia.

Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way that its wrong but they keep their mouths shut, Ellsberg told The New York Times in 2023.

Ellsberg is survived by his second wife, the journalist Patricia Marx, and three children, two from his first marriage. He and Marx wedded in 1970, the year before the Pentagon Papers were made public. In a New York Times wedding announcement, he was identified as a senior research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Center for International Studies, where he was writing a critical study of United States involvement in Vietnam.

After China lifted its strict zero COVID border closures in January, other tech tycoons such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook have visited the country. But no magnate besides Gates has met one-on-one with the president. 

Chinas economy is currently suffering a huge slowdown in trade and industrial production, and US officials are discussing the possibility of economically decoupling from Chinawhich Janet Yellen recently said would be disastrous. Xi seems to want to avoid an economic implosion and return to pre-COVID ways of business by strengthening ties in the private sector. 

Ive just landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019, where Im excited to visit with partners who have been working on global health and development challenges with @gatesfoundation for more than 15 years, Gates wrote in a Wednesday tweet. 

This weeks trip was Gates first return to China since before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft has a long history of collaboration with Beijing, including a decades-old research institute in the capital city as well as two accelerators (more than it has in any other country) in Beijing and Shanghai. Gates left the board of Microsoft in 2020, but remains its largest shareholder. Since his departure from the company, he has devoted much of his time to his philanthropic nonprofit, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At Fridays meeting, Xi told Gates that he wanted to increase collaboration with the Gates Foundation. 

Xis connection to the Gates Foundation goes back several years, and the president even wrote the Foundation a personal thank-you letter in 2020 for emergency COVID-19 funding. Gates and Xis meeting comes a day after the Gates Foundation pledged $50 million in a research partnership with the Beijing Municipal Government and the citys Tsinghua University. Beijing will match the Foundations $50 million, and the funds will be used over five years for drug and infectious disease research.

The Gates Foundation did not respond to Fortunes request for comment.

China has made significant gains reducing poverty and improving health outcomes within China, Gates said in a Thursday speech at the Global Health Drug Discovery Institute in Beijing. Im hopeful China can play an even bigger role in addressing the current challenges, particularly those facing African countries.

The decoupling backdrop

Gates trip comes amid spiking tensions between the US and China. It also overlaps with the US Secretary of State Antony Blinkens visit, his first since assuming the role. Blinken had planned to make the trip in February, but the diplomatic chaos surrounding a Chinese spy balloon in U.S. airspace postponed his visit. 

It also comes amid economic challenges for China following the lift of its zero-COVID policy. The government is targeting modest GDP growth of around 5% for this year a huge drop to around 3% for 2022, one of its worst years in almost half a century. Imports and exports have still not recovered since the country fully reopened its borders, and the Chinese property market is wilting. Chinas economic slowdown is so severe that foreign investors are pulling out of the country, and several major foreign banks have slashed their GDP growth forecasts for the country by over 5%. Bank of America cut its forecast from 6.3% to 5.7%, and Japanese bank Nomura downgraded its forecast from 5.5% to 5.1%. Last month, Chinese retail sales and industrial output both fell short of expectations.

The spy balloon, which the US shot down, intensified Washingtons concerns over Chinese espionage. The US government is also wary of TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media platform, which it fears is collecting American data for potential Chinese state use. 

The US and China are sparring over international relations issues as well, including Taiwan and trade. Taiwan is an independently governed island that the Peoples Republic of China views as a rebel province and seeks to unify with the mainland. It plays a huge role in international trade as the home of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the worlds largest chip manufacturer by market share. China condemns the USs relations with Taiwan, including a highly contentious visit by then-house speaker Nancy Pelosi in August 2022.

Microsoft is one of the only major US tech firms still operating in China.

The producer, Alex McCaskill, confirmed his exit in an Instagram post. Fox News did not comment on Friday.

He had remained at Fox after Carlson, the networks most popular personality, was fired on April 24. The reason for Carlsons sudden ouster, less than a week after Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to end a defamation case, has never been publicly explained.

It was during the last minutes of Carlsons former time slot on Tuesday when the message appeared under separate onscreen boxes that showed Biden and Trump talking. It read: Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.

Carlson, in a Twitter monologue posted Thursday, said the women who run the network panicked about the post and scolded the person responsible. Carlson didnt name the producer, but said he was considered one of the most capable persons in the building.

The producer offered to resign with two weeks notice, but was told to clean out his desk and leave immediately, he said.

Fox, in a statement on Wednesday, said the chyron had been taken down and the issue addressed, without further explanation.

In an Instagram message posted on Twitter by Justin Baragona of The Daily Beast, McCaskill is pictured outside of Foxs Manhattan office holding a box.

Today was my last day at Fox, read the message under his picture. Its been a wild 10 years and it was the best place Ive ever worked because of the great people I met. But the time has come. I asked them to let me go, and they finally did. To all my friends there: I will miss you forever.

A call and text message to a phone listed as McCaskills was not immediately returned.

Plenty of Biden critics have suggested politics was behind Trumps indictment by special prosecutor Jack Smith on charges of hoarding classified documents and resisting government attempts to retrieve them. Biden has not commented on the case.

McCaskill was named this spring in a lawsuit filed by a former Fox producer, Abby Grossberg, who also worked on Carlsons staff. Her lawsuit said McCaskill habitually belittled female employees at Fox. He said that a room at Fox set aside for employees to pump breast milk was a waste of space and should be replaced with a room for men to tan their testicles, according to the lawsuit.

Fox has denied allegations in Grossbergs lawsuit.

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Associated Press correspondent Beatrice Dupuy and researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.

My hope was to change that and have it be positive for civilization, he said as part of a wide-ranging discussion at the VivaTech conference on Friday in front of a crowd of about 4,000 people. Musk said he believed that most regular users of Twitter would say that their experience on the site has improved. 

Musk also expressed optimism about new Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarinos ability to court advertisers. Use of the network is at an all-time high and that almost all the advertisers have said they have either come back, or they will come back, he said.

When Musk took over, advertisers began fleeing Twitter because they were concerned about the type of content their ads would appear next to. Since October, Twitters advertising revenue has declined by 50%, Musk said in March. Twitter recently lost two executives in charge of making sure the site was moderated for violence, hate speech, pornography and other content that businesses are hesitant to promote their products alongside.

Musk hired Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal ad executive, to improve the companys relationship with brands. He said shed do great job handling advertisers concerns about posting ads on the social network.

Still, he quipped about his $44 billion purchase: If Im so smart, why did I pay so much for Twitter?

Musk, who was interviewed on stage by ad industry veteran and Publicis Groupe SA Chairman Maurice Levy, also used the platform to repeat his concerns about the dangers of letting artificial intelligence develop unchecked. 

There is a great danger for digital superintelligence having negative consequences, the billionaire said. If we are not careful with creating artificial general intelligence, we could have potentially a catastrophic outcome.

While the results of the technology, that he called the most disruptive ever, could also be positive, he stressed that there is a risk to the public for sure, and the technology should be regulated.

Musk also predicted his Neuralink Corp. would carry out its first human implant later this year. Last month, Neuralink said it received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to conduct human clinical trials. Calling progress slow, Musk said the aim is to restore full-body use to a person who has lost it.

Earlier on Friday, he had lunch with Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire who temporarily surpassed Musk to become the worlds richest person. Musk recently reclaimed his title from the CEO and controlling shareholder of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE after investors sold luxury stocks.

Musk also met with French president Emmanuel Macron, who has lobbied Musk to build a factory in the country. Macron said before the meeting that he wanted to discuss AI, social media and the regulatory framework for social networks.