CNN Moderator: Mr. Ellsberg, can you tell us what you've been up to since the end of the Vietnam conflict?

Daniel Ellsberg: My trial ended in May of 1973 and the war went on for two years, so ... I continued to spend those two years still working to bring the war to an end. Since then probably my main activity has been anti-nuclear lecturing, writing and activism. It was my hope to help bring about a grass roots active movement to end the nuclear arms race comparable to the movement against the Vietnam War, in scale and activities, and I hoped in effectiveness. In the course of that, I've lectured and also participated in non-violent direct action. That is what is often called civil disobedience. I've been arrested between 60-70 times in that connection. Mostly in actions against the nuclear arms race but also against U.S. interventions in Nicaragua and elsewhere. I did spend three years, from '92-'95 in Washington with the PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, basically lobbying for policies to end nuclear proliferation and to reverse the nuclear arms race. Right now, I'm [working] on a memoir that will cover my Vietnam, Pentagon Papers and Watergate years.

Chat Participant: What was your main moral objection to the Vietnam War?

Daniel Ellsberg: Initially, I recognized, as did most Americans who went to Vietnam, either military or civilian, that we were extremely unlikely to have any success in any form whatever in our intervention in Vietnam, and therefore the people we were sending to kill and to die were doing so with no benefit to anyone, to the United States or to the world. That was not only a practical reason for ending our military involvement, but it was also a moral reason in that in terms of just war, just war theories, doctrines, it's wrong to pursue a war where one has no prospect of success or useful outcome. So at that point, at that stage of my protest, in Vietnam and right after I came back from Vietnam in 1967, I still didn't know much about the history of our original involvement, and I took it for granted that we had been justified in waging war in the earliest stages. In other words, that it was a legitimate effort. I saw it as many Americans still see it, as an effort that was legitimate in its origins, but should be ended because it was hopelessly stalemated. But after I had read the classified history, the Pentagon Papers, to which I had access as a government researcher, I realized that from the very earliest days ... our effort had been illegitimate. We had supported a French effort to regain its former colony by force. Thus from the point of view of American principles [it] had no legitimacy whatever, and its nature had not changed in the '50s when we replaced the French in repressing Vietnamese efforts for independence and unification of Vietnam. So at that point, which was in 1969, I saw the war as immoral, not only the continuation of the war as being immoral. I saw the war as having been wrong from the start. And I was determined to try to help end it as quickly as possible.

Chat Participant: I did not realize that you tried various methods of releasing this information through Congress and the courts before releasing to the press. I gather the press release of the papers was not an easy thing for you to do.

Daniel Ellsberg: Well, I began by thinking that it would be more effective to release the information in Congress, because they could hold hearings, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for example, in which they could subpoena witnesses and use the documents, the top secret documents in the Pentagon Papers, as the basis for questioning those witnesses, and they could also call current officials -- and this was of the utmost importance -- and demonstrate that the current administration, the Nixon administration, was pursuing the same sort of strategy, including secret threats of escalation, that five previous presidents had pursued as shown in the Pentagon Papers. I hoped that these hearings then would unveil Nixon's secret wartime policy so that it could be discussed in Congress and the public, and I hoped that that would lead to pressures to end the war. So it was a secondary consideration that if these documents came out in Congress, I would be somewhat less likely to go to prison for the rest of my life than if they first came out in the press. But that really was a secondary consideration. Because I thought it very likely that I would go to prison for life anyway. Moreover, if I had believed that it was more effective in ending the war to bring them out first in the press, I would have done it that way.

Chat Participant: To me, your actions, by releasing secret information, regardless of your views, was tantamount to treason. What is your response?

Daniel Ellsberg: We live in a country, thank God, where telling the truth to Congress is not treason even though the president is determined to deceive Congress and the public. Of course, that's that marvelous difference between our country and not only the Soviet Union, but most countries in the world. I was not of course charged with treason or espionage, although Nixon and his Justice Department would have loved to bring those charges if our Constitution had even faintly permitted it. But they did not dare come right out and say that giving information to Congress and the public was giving it to the enemy, even though that is undoubtedly what they privately thought. In other words, all executive branch officials in all administrations see their opponents in the U.S. Congress and the public as the enemy. And they use that word, by the way; I heard Jack Valenti use that precise word in explaining why he said his boss Lyndon Johnson could not find a way out of Vietnam. He said his enemies would have accused him of being a coward. Valenti was not referring to the North Vietnamese when he used the word "enemy." He was referring to American hawks both in the Democrats and Republicans. To come back to the question now, though, I believe that a person who sees telling the truth to the American public, the sovereign public, a truth that a president does not want them to know, a person who sees that as treason does not understand the founding principles of this country very well in my judgment.

Chat Participant: How does Ellsberg feel about the extent that the Nixon White House was willing to go in order to "neutralize" him?

Daniel Ellsberg: I was sure that the Nixon administration would put me on trial and would take every effort to destroy my reputation. I did not foresee that they would actually, that Nixon's White House would actually bring agents up from Miami to Washington to "incapacitate me totally," that is, to assault, or perhaps to kill me, which did occur on May 3, 1972. I didn't think they did that. They went so far as to order physical assaults on Americans, although I knew that my government had done such things to Vietnamese in Saigon when those politicians had done things to displease them.

CNN Moderator: Please elaborate on the events of May 3, 1972.

Daniel Ellsberg: Charles Colson, who was the counsel to the president, called Jeb Magruder, who was running the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), to arrange for counter-demonstrators to disrupt physically a demonstration, a rally, at which I would be speaking on May 3. Magruder turned to Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, who arranged for 12 Cuban Americans, all of whom had worked for the CIA or were still on the CIA payroll, to be flown up from Miami for this purpose. They have testified that they were shown my photo, told that this was their target and that I was to be beaten up. Eventually the special prosecutor, Watergate prosecutor, who was investigating this action told me that their orders were "to incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally." I asked him, "What does that mean? To kill me?" And he simply repeated the orders. But you have to realize that these guys never used the word "kill." He believed the intent was to kill me. My own judgment, looking at a several other things, including over 1,000 pages of Watergate special task force documents, that the intention was not to kill me but simply to shut me up physically at that particular moment. That is to put me in the hospital, where I would cease talking for a week or two about Haiphong, which was five days away, which took place on May 8, and I was predicting it. All of the people who had burglarized my former psychoanalyst's office nine months earlier were included in this assault team, as were all of the people who were caught in the Watergate offices about a month later in June. So when Hunt and Liddy along with several of these Cubans were in the hands of prosecutors in connection with the Watergate arrests, Nixon knew that Hunt in particular and Liddy could tell the prosecutors about this earlier crime they had participated in, on orders from the Oval Office, only a few weeks earlier, as well as being able to tell about the break-in to Dr. Fielding's office nine months before that. Thus Nixon had to keep Hunt and Liddy in particular from talking to the prosecutors truthfully, because they could tie him to these domestic crimes in a way that they could not tie him to the Watergate break-in itself. In order to keep them quiet, Nixon first tried to keep Hunt and Liddy from being arrested at all, and when that failed, he gave Hunt money ostensibly for his legal expenses but in a way which constituted a new crime -- obstruction of justice. When eventually John Dean revealed this cover-up, Nixon's ultimate resignation reflected, above all, the crimes he had committed against me, and the crimes of cover-up he had committed in order to conceal those particular crimes.

Chat Participant: Mr. Ellsberg, If the papers were not released to the press, what do you think the outcome would have been of the war. How much longer would we have been involved?

Daniel Ellsberg: Let me work backward. Without Watergate and Nixon's resignation, I believe the war would have continued at least a couple of years longer in the form of U.S. bombing. Both of South and North Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. On that basis, with continued U.S. air support of the Saigon armed forces, which were wholly in our pay, the war could have continued for a number of years. Though I believe the eventual outcome would have been the same after hundreds of thousands more deaths. The release of the Pentagon Papers themselves would not have affected Nixon's strategy or the ending of the war very much, if at all, if it had not been the case that Nixon knew that I had documents from his own administration on Vietnam that went beyond the Pentagon Papers history, which ended in 1968. Nixon feared that I would release documents proving that he was lying about the war like his predecessors and that his strategy was prolonging and expanding the war. The crimes I have described by Nixon against me were precisely intended to silence me from revealing such documents after I had already been indicted for releasing the Pentagon Papers. I believe that if he had not felt a compulsion to commit such crimes against me he would not have been vulnerable to prosecution himself and would not have had to leave office and therefore, he would have continued the war.

CNN Moderator: How do you view the Vietnam War in context of the policy of containment and the Cold War in general?

Daniel Ellsberg: Well, first, we really first entered the war in Vietnam by supporting a French effort to regain their former colony, which had declared its independence in the spring and summer of 1945. And the actual French fighting, which we supported logistically and financially from the beginning, began in late 1946. That is well before most historians see the beginning of the Cold War, and it had very little to do with the Cold War. In short, that had not a lot to do with containing communism in Asia in the beginning. It had more to do with our Cold War policy in Europe because we wanted French support for the rearmament of West Germany, and that was the motive in supporting their imperial actions in Asia. Now later, as anti-communism and the Cold War became major factors in U.S. domestic politics from 1949 on, presidents from Truman through Nixon all did fear the charge that they would be described by their domestic political rivals as weak on communism, as weak men, or as LBJ once put it, as an "unmanly man." That is the precise point that Valenti was making in this episode about Lyndon Johnson. So there was a great concern that if communists took power in Indochina, the incumbent president, whoever he might be at that moment, would lose power in Washington and would have to leave the White House. The White House was the domino they were concerned about. So in that sense, the Vietnam War was, from almost its beginning to end, part of our Cold War containment policy, but the domestic factor was of very crucial importance.

Chat Participant: What is your opinion of the media coverage of Vietnam? Did they tell American citizens what they needed to know?

Daniel Ellsberg: The media coverage of the war in Vietnam itself was indispensable and holds up very well in retrospect. I'm referring to the best of the reporting. Virtually all of the reporters there, especially in the early years, supported our Cold War objectives in Vietnam and wanted the U.S. to succeed. But they were good enough reporters that they told the public honestly that our efforts there were not succeeding and showed no signs of succeeding in the future. They made it easier for a member of the public to see that we were deeply stalemated in Vietnam, year after year, than it was for the president to recognize that. But the coverage of the actual policy-making in Washington was very inadequate throughout the war. The Pentagon Papers showed in 1971 that Washington reporters had been easily manipulated and fooled about the intentions of several administrations from the earliest days on, from the '40s through the '50s and '60s, and that they had been lied to by virtually every statement of each president and had rarely penetrated behind those lies. I hoped that the proof of this in the Pentagon Papers would change the reporting at the Washington end and make reporters aware that presidents lie as they breath and that it is essential to find other sources within the administration who are willing to tell the truth or can be forced to tell the truth in congressional hearings. But unfortunately, even the Pentagon Papers did not lead to the holding of hearings on the war in Congress and I did not see that the Nixon policies were being investigated more effectively than before. So the public was not at all as well informed about the policy-making in Washington right up to the end of war as it was about the lack of progress in the field in Vietnam.

Chat Participant: What do you think about the alleged "obstruction of justice" and "perjury" by President Clinton? Do these amount to "high crimes," in the way of Watergate or Nixon's ordering break-ins into your psychoanalysts office?

Daniel Ellsberg: As I just said, the reality is that presidents lie, by that I mean every president in my lifetime has lied about foreign policy and military policy just as aggressively and just as frequently as Bill Clinton has been found lying about his sex life. I would be happy if the outrage about this lying about his private life would be extended to presidential lying about matters of very, very much greater import involving life and death and war and peace. But I don't see much signs, either in the media or in the Congress, of interest in holding officials accountable for these far more important lies. Even in the domestic field, of course, Nixon's burglary of a doctor's office or orders to bring Cuban Americans up to beat up an American citizen look more serious than what Clinton is accused of here. As I've explained, those crimes were undertaken as part of a foreign and military policy. In other words, their intent was to [silence] someone who was exposing Nixon's secret war policy, thus the intent of those crimes were to prolong the war. I have little doubt that Clinton himself and his officials have lied about actions such as his attack on a pharmaceutical company in Sudan in ways that deserve far more attention than his lies about his dealings with Monica Lewinsky. But I see no pressure. I'm not encouraged to see him brought to account only for these latter lies, and in effect questioned about what he does with his cigars, while at the same time, there is no movement at all toward congressional investigative hearings about what he does with his cruise missiles, which are far more dangerous.

CNN Moderator: How do you think your actions have affected current U.S. policy in, say, Bosnia or Kosovo?

Daniel Ellsberg: Well, I won't say my actions have been critical here. The anti-war movement and for that matter, the anti-war sentiments of the public during Vietnam certainly reflect the understanding of the American people. Despite our vast and unparalleled destructive power we are not guaranteed success in a counter-guerrilla war even against a very much weaker nation. That is a reality which the Russians, the Soviets had to learn for themselves in Afghanistan. They were not apparently able to learn from our experience in Vietnam any more than we managed to learn from French experience in Vietnam. And even after their failure in Afghanistan, the Russians proceeded to try to suppress rebellion in Chechnya again with no success. Even if our cause appeared very well justified in opposing genocide or massacre in the Balkans, the American people understand that there would be no guarantee at all of a quick or easy success, and I think that is a true and realistic lesson.

Chat Participant: Is it just to compare you to a Kenneth Starr or a Desmond Tutu of present day?

Daniel Ellsberg: I wouldn't know what the relation to Starr would be. I was not a prosecutor. I was a defendant. I would of course be very flattered by any comparison with Desmond Tutu, but I certainly perceive him as someone who spoke truthfully about the wrongdoing of his government and without regard for the costs to himself and at a time when that truth-telling was quite risky for him. So Tutu is one of my heroes, as are the young Americans who did go to prison for draft resistance in order to do everything they could to bring to an end a war that shamed their country. Without their example, it would not have occurred to me to do something that I expected to put me in prison for the rest of my life and which, in fact, did lead to my facing charges totaling a possible 115 years in prison. So I am grateful to those Americans, 5,000 of whom did go to prison rather than going to Canada or Sweden or to Vietnam in order to make the strongest possible statement of their opposition to the war.

CNN Moderator: Any final comments, Mr. Ellsberg?

Daniel Ellsberg: In the series, so far, and what I know of what is to come, I'm sorry to see that the difficulty of ending the war under Johnson and Nixon may not come through clearly, and thus the essential role played in ending the war of the anti-war movement right through till 1975. The war was not fated to end after the Tet Offensive of 1968, as many people in the public and the press believe. And it is absurd to say, as Jack Valenti did say, that Lyndon Johnson's sole objective was to "haul ass" in 1968 but that he simply didn't know how to do it. It is equally absurd to believe that Nixon had accepted American defeat in Vietnam or that he ever did accept that, and the war went on as long as it did because Nixon, just like Johnson, was attempting effectively to win the war or at least to stave off defeat for America and its chosen Vietnamese agents indefinitely. So right up until 1975, the highest priority of an American citizen was to contribute somehow to thwarting their president's efforts to continue the war and to bring it to an end. I'm not sure the series makes that clear, and therefore, I want to end this chat by paying tribute to the very many Americans, especially young Americans, who not only perceived that priority but actually acted upon it at great risk to their own futures.

CNN Moderator: Our thanks to Daniel Ellsberg. Please visit CNN.com/ColdWar on Sundays at 9:30 p.m. ET for more COLD WAR chats.