Moral Courage--who has it and who doesn't?                            March 2005

Moral courage -- an elusive quality that nearly everyone values but few exhibit. It is the courage to say and do the right thing when you know it will cause great pain for someone--yourself, your loved ones, your co-workers, your boss, your country! Consider the story of Daniel Ellsberg who gained notoriety in 1971 when he leaked the famous Pentagon papers to the Washington Post. The Pentagon papers documented the detailed planning for escalating the war in Vietnam, contrary to what the government under Lyndon B. Johnson and later, Richard  M. Nixon, claimed. It was a sensational leak and branded Ellsberg as an unpatriotic member of the U.S. State Department.

Did Ellsberg exhibit moral courage? Is leaking information the right thing to do? Ellsberg doesn't feel he exhibited moral courage but that it was the right thing to do as the Vietnam War continued to take the lives of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese. In retrospect, Ellsberg believes that it would have truly taken moral courage (that he didn't have) to leak the papers long before he did. On election day 1964 he recalls that he spent the day with an interagency working group to expand the war--contrary to Lyndon Johnson's assertion that his administration "seeks no wider war."

Now, forty years later, Daniel Ellsberg urges public officials to do what "I wish I had done in 1964: go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims" when you believe it is the right thing to do to save lives. Ellsberg made this plea in the context of President George W. Bush's Administration decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Moral courage is an elusive quality--is it not?

Source: New York Times, September 28, 2004, A27.