Anthony J. Russo, 71; Rand staffer helped leak Pentagon Papers
Along with colleague Daniel Ellsberg, he copied a classified government history of the Vietnam War that was later passed to newspapers.
Anthony J. Russo, a Rand researcher in the late 1960s who encouraged Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers and stood trial with him in the Vietnam War-era case that triggered debates over freedom of the press and hastened the fall of a president, has died. He was 71.
Russo, who lived in Santa Monica for many years, died Wednesday of natural causes in his native Suffolk, Va., according to a spokesman for the Suffolk Police Department. Russo had been in poor health since he had a heart attack three years ago.
In 1971, Russo helped Ellsberg copy a classified government history of the Vietnam War that Ellsberg later supplied to the New York Times and other newspapers. Dubbed the Pentagon Papers after the Times published extensive excerpts and analysis, the secret study provided evidence of lying by government officials, including several presidents, about the scope and purposes of the war.
Ellsberg went on to become an antiwar icon, sought-after lecturer and author, but Russo was relegated to a few lines in history books. His supporting-role status -- "the notion that I had just been a Xeroxer" -- rankled him to the end.
Russo was born in Suffolk on Oct. 14, 1936. He studied aerophysics at Virginia Tech in the late 1950s before earning a scholarship to Princeton University, where he shifted his focus to engineering and public affairs. In a foreign relations course during his third year at Princeton, he learned about the Rand Corp.'s work in Vietnam. The tumult of the '60s was underway, and Russo decided to leave school and apply to Rand.
At the Santa Monica think tank, Russo was assigned to the Viet Cong Morale and Motivation Project. His research in Vietnam radicalized him. His support of the Viet Cong, the communist army opposed by the United States and South Vietnam government, was controversial and sparked the interest of Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who by 1968 was also working at Rand.
Ellsberg, who described Russo as his best friend at Rand, asked his colleague to brief him on the Viet Cong project. "I explained how the so-called enemy, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese, were actually the legitimate parties and how the U.S. presence was illegal, immoral and unwise. I supplied him with reams of documentation," Russo later wrote in a personal account of the period. He was fired from Rand a short time later.
