Catholic book editor recounts lifelong moral journey

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The year was 1969 and the nation was being torn apart by the Vietnam War. Some 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam; 33,000 Americans had died, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. President Johnson had fallen victim to the war's unpopularity, declining to run for a second term. His successor, President Richard Nixon, continued to drag out the war, with a continuing loss of U.S. and Vietnamese lives.

Word of the massacre of some 400 to 500 Vietnamese farmers by U.S. soldiers in a village called My Lai was beginning to surface. Millions of Americans raised their voices and took to the streets demanding a halt to U.S. involvement in what many now regarded as an immoral and unwinnable war. The nation was in a frenzy. It was into this mix that a boy named Robert Ellsberg, only 13 at the time--and later to become one of the nation's most prominent Catholic book publishers--was personally forced to encounter the Vietnam tragedy. It happened when his father, Daniel Ellsberg, a highly placed Pentagon official, asked for his son's support in discerning a moral question whose outcome could put the father in prison.

"My father came to me one day and said that there was something he wanted to do," recalls the younger Ellsberg. "He thought it had a chance of helping end the [Vietnam] war, no guarantees. He thought it was worth doing, and involved some risk. In fact, it might involve his going to prison, essentially forever, as far as he knew.

"Would I be willing to help him?

"I said, 'Of course, of course I'll help.'"

The young Ellsberg accompanied his father on several evening trips to a vacant office where they methodically copied, sheet by sheet, a 7,000-page top secret Pentagon-sponsored history of the Vietnam War, a study that high lighted a pattern of government lies and deceptions that would eventually be published in The New York Times and a half dozen other major U.S. newspapers.

Even telling the story four decades later, Ellsberg's voice quiets almost to a hush. "I was pretty young to be dealing with those things," he said, "but I had been following my father's evolution [in thinking] for a couple years and was being drawn into a kind of community of moral discerners. They involved authors and people I was meeting who were willing to take on considerable personal risk to end the war, to stop violence.... It had a tremendous impact on me. It was a formative time in my life."

The son's admiration for his father is visceral. "My father wanted to leave as a legacy the example of a person making a choice in a deliberate, calm, coolheaded and responsible way. He also wanted to introduce me to a moral community with the hope it would be helpful to me in my own life choices. And so at a young age I found myself asking, 'What was my life for? What kind of response was I going to make to the great moral issues of our time?'"

Answers to those life-forming questions can be found in Ellsberg's unfolding career path, most recently as publisher and editor in chief of Orbis Books, the book publishing arm of the Maryknoll religious order, the U.S.-based Catholic mission movement, whose members--priests, brothers, sisters and laity--are noted for their work in developing countries. Maryknoll and Orbis, whose prophetic vision has made it a player in many of the historical dramas of our time, share a reputation for placing social justice squarely within the work of Christian evangelization. (See related story.)

Daniel Ellsberg was arrested and charged with treason. The U.S. government case against him eventually fell apart--but only after months of anguish for the family. Today, the elder Ellsberg lives in Berkeley, Calif. He writes and speaks widely and has been, in his son's words, working tirelessly for an end to the war in Iraq.

Robert Ellsberg early on decided he wanted nothing to do with war.

In 1973, at age 18, he had decided he would not register for the draft. In college he felt alone; most of his peers had simply not experienced what he had. "I felt very isolated and lacking not just a community of support, but a community in which it even made sense to worry about things like that."

By then he had long been immersed in the readings of Gandhi and Thoreau and found himself attracted to their philosophies of nonviolent resistance to immoral government policies. Although raised in the Episcopal church, Ellsberg said he had strayed away from formal religious practice and increasingly was being influenced by the example of draft resisters and nonviolent activists, many in turn influenced by people associated with the Catholic. Worker movement. It would be a movement he wanted to learn more about.

He finally registered for the draft, feeling he lacked the personal resources, in his words, "to see that all the way through and go to prison at that time." Still struggling for greater clarity and not finding it in college, he dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year. One day, almost by accident, he recalls, he found himself at the Catholic Worker house in New York.