Living Witness

When my father, Daniel Ellsberg, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16, 2023, the first person I called was Randy Kehler. Hearing my voice from my father’s phone, he said, “I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

My father’s and Randy’s lives were connected by deep ties. When Randy died on June 20 this year, his obituaries highlighted that connection. “Randy Kehler, 80, Dies; Peace Activist Inspired Release of Pentagon Papers” was the headline in the New York Times. This was true. As often as people lauded my father’s courage in risking prison to oppose the Vietnam War, he always credited Randy’s witness. As for Randy, he humbly cited his experience to encourage others in their small protests or acts of conscience. You could never know the consequences of such acts, he said. “All I did was give a speech…”

That consequential speech occurred at a conference of the War Resisters International in the summer of 1969 at Haverford College. My father, a former Marine and high-level defense analyst who had recently returned from two years in Vietnam, was an unlikely member of the audience. Despite his background and top-secret security clearances, he had turned sharply against the war and was eager to hear from those who were protesting against it.

Randy, a 25-year-old staff member for the War Resisters League, had been organizing resistance to the draft. As he concluded his speech, he cited a number of friends who had gone to prison and mentioned that he was proud to be joining them soon. He had been sentenced to two years in prison for his own refusal of induction.

At this point, my father rushed from the hall and retreated to a restroom where he sank to the floor and wept for a long time. And then a question arose in his mind: “What could I do to help end this war if I were willing to go to prison?” The answer came in his decision to copy the top-secret history of the Vietnam War in his office safe and give it to Congress. Eventually, released to the press in 1971, it became known as the Pentagon Papers. My father was arrested and faced 115 years in prison.

His case was eventually dismissed on the grounds of “gross governmental misconduct,” but in fact, with its connection to Nixon’s payoffs to the Plumbers/Watergate burglars, it played an indirect role in helping end the war. My father always said, “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers.” With that speech at Haverford, he said, “It was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open. But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.”

Randy lived a life of deep meaning and consequence, quite apart from his influence on my dad. After prison, he taught, and later helped organize the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the 1980s. For their refusal to pay taxes for war, he and his wife, Betsy, had their house seized by the IRS. At his memorial service in August, the packed church attested to his deep impact on the community in western Massachusetts, where he and Betsy raised their daughter.

In his last years, he was steadily laid low with severe chronic fatigue syndrome. In light of his illness, I was amazed just months before his death to receive a long letter from him in which he tried to express his spiritual intuitions, and mentioned that every night before going to sleep, he read an entry in my book All Saints—a book of daily reflections on “saints, prophets and witnesses for our time.”

“I wrote that book because of you,” I told him. In the introduction to a recent 25th anniversary edition, I wrote: “I have seen and felt the impact of living witness—how one lamp lights another. Dorothy Day’s life was built on this conviction: the power of small gestures, the protests, the acts of charity, which, even if no more than a pebble dropped in a pond, might send forth ripples that could encircle the globe. As she wrote, ‘We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the action of the present moment, but we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts, that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.’”

Randy was not conventionally “religious,” any more than my father. But he understood what I meant. In words cited on the program at his memorial, he said, “Don’t ever, ever assume that anything you do, particularly if it’s an act of conscience, won’t make a difference.”

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Robert Ellsberg is the Publisher of Orbis Books. He writes a daily reflection on “Blessed Among Us” for Give Us This Day. His new book is Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.