At 75, most people are happy to move quietly into retirement, their life's work done. But Daniel Ellsberg played a crucial role in the removal of one President back in 1974, and now has his sights set on President Bush.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The reason I'm here is because I think it is essential, essential, to be part of a movement to be pressing for the impeachment of Bush.

As a committed activist, Ellsberg has joined this small but growing coalition to impeach the President. In his view, George Bush is America's biggest liability.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: But I'm saying the problem is not that he's a fool, the problem is that he's dangerous. He's dangerous to the security of this country and the world, and he's dangerous to our democracy.

Political activism is nothing new to Daniel Ellsberg. 35 years ago he became the most famous whistleblower in the world when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. It made him a marked man under the Nixon administration, but now he's grown used to dealing with that.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The chance that there are not government representatives in here now, recording this program is negligible, it's not worth considering. So I say to them, you are acting as secret police in the United States of America, political police working on political dissent, defining as treason the criticism, the criticism, and you should reconsider what you are doing.

MAN 1: I think he's wonderful. I think he also tried to show the American people when the government is doing things that are not right.

REPORTER: What do you think of him?

MAN 2: He's a great man, he's a wonderful man. I've been aware of him since I was you know, 50 years ago, I guess.

Daniel Ellsberg started life right at the heart of the establishment. After graduating top in his year at Harvard University, he became a marine commander in Vietnam. Later he worked for the US Defense Department and the State Department. By the late '60s, he was working on a classified Defense report that opened his eyes to the truth about the Vietnam War. It was a major turning point in his life.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I realised I'd been part of a system that lied from top to bottom in a question of murder. But I did believe that eventually there would be escalation, as there was, and that eventually it would lead to threats and even use of nuclear weapons, so I felt that to stop that, all I could do was to release the documents I did have.

Ellsberg took the extraordinary decision to leak 7,000 pages of top-secret Pentagon documents. He was fully aware that by challenging the Nixon government so directly he was risking a lengthy jail term.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I gave them to the Senate in 1969, the fall of 1969. They didn't come out till '71. I wasted 22 months really hoping that Congress would hold hearings and subpoena witnesses and really investigate the whole question, but they shied away from releasing classified documents. They couldn't get them directly from the Pentagon, although Senator Fulbright asked for them, on a classified basis, and he was denied them. So eventually I gave them to the press in 1971.

WHITEHOUSE RECORDINGS, 1971

PRESIDENT NIXON: Nothing else of interest in the world today?

ALEXANDER HAIG, MILITARY AIDE: Yes sir, very significant this goddamned 'New York Times' expose of the most highly classified documents of the war.

NIXON: Oh, that? You mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

HAIG: Sir, it was a whole study that was done for McNamara. This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I've ever seen.

JOHN EHRLICHMAN, TOP AIDE: Mr President, the Attorney-General has called a couple of times about these 'New York Times' stories, and he is calling now to see if you would approve his putting them on notice before the first edition for tomorrow comes out.

NIXON: You mean to prosecute the 'Times'?

EHRLICHMAN: Right.

NIXON: Hell, I wouldn't prosecute the 'Times'. My view is to prosecute the goddamn pricks that gave it to them.

EHRLICHMAN: Yeah, if you can find out who that is.

NIXON: Yeah, I know.

JOHN MITCHELL, ATTORNEY GENERAL: We have got some information we've developed as to where these copies are and who leaked them and the prime suspect is a gentleman by the name of Ellsberg. He is a left-winger that's now with the RAND Corporation.

The release of the Pentagon Papers set off a chain of events that eventually destroyed the Nixon presidency. The first step was Nixon's attempt to destroy Daniel Ellsberg.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, of course, the main thing was that I was put on trial for the release of these papers, facing 12 felony counts, as I say, a possible sentence of 115 years.

NIXON: People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook.

Nixon set up a dirty tricks group within the White House. It was this group that burgled the Democratic Party offices, which started the Watergate scandal. Their first job, however, was to silence Daniel Ellsberg.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: He then established a group within the White House headed by a former CIA and a former FBI agent. They in turn hired a number of CIA assets from Miami - Cuban-Americans from the Bay of Pigs - to neutralise me in various ways. And that involved going into my former psychiatrist's... psychoanalyst's office to get information with which they could blackmail me into silence.

But these illegal tactics backfired. All charges against Daniel Ellsberg were dropped, and the press's right to publish the Pentagon Papers was affirmed by the Supreme Court.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The decision was a great one. And the story today is what the constitution of this country means to us. I really...I have never appreciated what the meaning and importance of separation of powers is so much as in the last week.

REPORTER: What does this mean to your case?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I'm not worrying about my case today. I'm celebrating the Supreme Court case.

REPORTER: How are you going to celebrate?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: My wife and I will find a way.

MAN 1 ON TV: Did we know this was coming out?

MAN 2: No, we did not, sir.

Patricia is Daniel Ellsberg's wife of 36 years. She played a pivotal role in the release of the papers and over the years she has continued to be his confidante and greatest admirer.

PATRICIA ELLSBERG: Our first year of marriage was spent putting out the Pentagon Papers. And then it becomes clear that he has to put those papers out for his own conscience and for mine. He said, "Shall I do it?" and I said, "You have to," and I thought he would go to prison for the rest of his life.

After four decades of political activism together, Daniel and Patricia have never lost their passion. At the beginning it was hard for Patricia because her conservative father had no time for Daniel.

PATRICIA ELLSBERG: My mother died when I was very young, my father was both father and mother to me, and, again, those kind of bonds never dissolve so I always loved him. But I think he was very angry at me for being married to this guy who did this terrible, traitorous act.

REPORTER: Did that cause any problems with your relationship?

PATRICIA ELLSBERG: It was probably the hardest thing of all. When we came back from the trial, my dad took me out to lunch. And then he said, "That bum should have gone to jail," and I said, "You can't ever speak to me about my husband again," and he didn't.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: So I've been blessed, no question about it, in having such a marriage, and in particular to this woman, this partner I've been in love with so long.

REPORTER: What is he like as a man?

PATRICIA ELLSBERG: Well, intense is the first word that comes to mind. He's intense both politically and personally. He is a very passionate, committed person. He's very funny - you wouldn't know it from all the serious talks he gives and the serious subjects he holds in his heart, but he's actually very funny. He's brilliant. His life is very interesting. There is never a dull moment.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: This is before the first arrest. We were on the tracks and this particular day there was hail.

Daniel Ellsberg has been arrested more than 70 times.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: In 1978, we were blockading, sitting on the tracks at the nuclear weapons production facility in Rocky Flats, Colorado. That made all the plutonium triggers for all of our thermonuclear weapons. And of course the plutonium trigger is a Nagasaki bomb. Being arrested doesn't worry me any more. It's routine for me. I do it because I believe that these kinds of actions convey - especially in people who are doing it for the first time and aren't used to it – convey a moral seriousness and a commitment and an awareness that is a matter of conscience, a matter of morality as well as of politics, and I think civil disobedience helps on that.

When he was a teenager a very painful event helped shape Ellsberg's life and philosophy.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was in a car with my mother and sister and father, who was driving, in Iowa, in a very hot day, 4th July, in a straight road, in cornfields in Iowa. And my father fell asleep at the wheel and the car went off the road slightly, hit a culvert and my mother and sister were killed. I've come to think that my own personal awareness that disaster is really possible, and that men who are otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned can take the country off the road, can fall asleep at the wheel, in effect, and that you can't leave everything to them, that it's up to you somehow.

Dan Ellsberg sees a direct parallel between what he did during the Vietnam war and those working inside the Government today.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: We have 140,000 young men and women in Iraq right now who are risking their lives and their bodies every day because of the silence of people like me in the Pentagon, in the early 1960s, who didn't tell the public what was coming. If one or two of them, those people, has to pay a personal cost, it won't be as much as the one we've condemned our young troops to.

One of the main reasons why Daniel and Patricia have maintained their activism is to avoid the threat of nuclear war.

MAN: I just want to say, on a personal level, I read your book 'Secrets', and just wanted to thank you for what you did.

They are regulars at Hiroshima Day protests, this year at the Livermore nuclear facility near San Francisco.

MAN: We all know him, we appreciate him and we are honoured to have him today - Daniel Ellsberg.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was just saying to my wife, coming to a group like this is coming to a family, a family reunion. It just occurred to me it's our anti-nuclear family.

When Ellsberg was inside the government he had first-hand knowledge of nuclear war plans, and he's really worried about the current rhetoric against Iran.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was very involved in the Cuban missile crisis. I mean, we were very close to nuclear war at that time. I've become aware of others, other occasions. The prospect of nuclear war in Iran would represent to me a failure of a personal...involvement that I've had for 60 years now to avoid that, to avoid the next Hiroshima.

A couple of reporters here have asked me why am I here today. Well, I'm usually doing something like this on August 6 or August 9. But in this particular year we are facing the greatest likelihood, I could say, in any August I can remember that the promise made to the victims at Hiroshima may be about to be broken. Those of you who were at Hiroshima will remember the famous plaque there with a pledge in Japanese - and English, I think, also - to the people who died there - "Rest in peace for the crime shall not be repeated."

WOMAN: We have shut down the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory! It is closed!

REPORTER: How long do you think you will continue the campaign?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: As long as I live. I'm afraid that we're I think we'll be fighting in Iraq as long as I live, whether that's 10 years or 15 years or longer. I think it will take us longer to get out of Iraq than it did in Vietnam, despite the turbulence there and the prospects of civil war and the total lack of success.

Reporter/Camera:
DAVID BRILL

Producer:
MELANIE MORRISON

Editor:
WAYNE LOVE

Executive Producer:
MIKE CAREY