October 24, 1979

Anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg lectured against nuclear weaponry in the Green and Grey room. Confessing, “I was a hawk until I realized there was a possibility [nuclear weapons] will kill all life on earth,” Ellsberg advocated civil disobedience as a means to oppose them.

In 1971 Ellsberg, a former CIA officer and advisor to then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, leaked “The Pentagon Papers,” the defense department’s secret history of United States involvement in Vietnam, to The New York Times.