Daniel Ellsberg - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Ellsberg was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1931, the son of Adele D. (née Charsky) and Harry Ellsberg. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish and had converted to Christian Science, and he was raised in a Christian Science atmosphere. He grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and attended Cranbrook Kingswood School. His mother had wanted her son to be a concert pianist but he stopped playing in July 1946 when she was killed in a car crash, together with his sister, after his father fell asleep at the wheel of the car in which the family was traveling and crashed into a culvert wall.

Ellsberg attended Harvard University on a scholarship, graduating with A.B. in economics in 1952, summa cum laude. He then studied at the University of Cambridge on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and one year later he returned to Harvard for graduate school. In 1954, he left Harvard for the U.S. Marine Corps. He served as a platoon leader and company commander in the Marine 2nd Infantry Division, and after satisfying his two year Reserve Officer commitment was discharged from the Corps as a first lieutenant in 1957. He rejoined Harvard as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for two years, until 1959. He then began as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he concentrated on nuclear strategy.

He completed his PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1962. Ellsberg's dissertation in the field of decision theory was based on a set of experiments that showed that, in general, decisions under conditions of uncertainty or ambiguity may not be consistent with well defined subjective probabilities. This finding, now known as the Ellsberg paradox, formed the basis of a large literature that has developed since the 1980s, including such approaches as Choquet expected utility and info-gap decision theory.

Ellsberg served in the Pentagon from August 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (and, in fact, was on duty on the evening of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting the incident to McNamara). He then served for two years in Vietnam working for General Edward Lansdale as a civilian in the State Department.

After serving in Vietnam, Ellsberg resumed working at RAND. In 1967, he contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara. These documents, completed in 1968, later became known collectively as the Pentagon Papers. It was because Ellsberg held an extremely high-level security clearance and desired to create a further synthesis from this research effort that he was one of very few individuals who had access to the complete set of documents.