How do you (or might you) remember your dad?
A day after Father’s Day 2024, Robert Ellsberg profiled the life of Daniel Ellsberg in the June 2024 Give Us this Day. Robert writes a short biography every Monday through Saturday in the monthly prayer source published by Liturgical Press (Collegeville, Minnesota). The daily biography usually honors someone on the anniversary of the person’s death or feast day. Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, 2022.
Robert did not disclose that Daniel was his father, but I have known this fact for several years. If you do not know the name Daniel Ellsberg, maybe you have heard of the Pentagon Papers or saw the 2017 movie The Post. The Pentagon Papers is the common name for the case described in The Post, the actions of a 1970s government whistleblower. Daniel Ellsberg was a defense contractor with access to boxes of federal government papers which described how the US, from the 1940s-1960s, was involved in Vietnam. The papers proved that various US administrations lied to the public for some 20 years, to justify our intelligence, military, and diplomatic operations in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg blew the whistle on the US government by copying the materials and sharing them with the Washington Post and New York Times. Asked by a reporter whether he feared imprisonment for his actions, he responded, “Wouldn’t you go to jail if you could end this war?”
I do not know if Robert Ellsberg and Heather Cox Richardson know each other, or if they read each other’s daily work. On the same day that Robert Ellsberg honored the two year anniversary of the death of Daniel, Cox Richardson (Professor of History, Boston College) remarked on the 52nd anniversary of the Watergate break-in. She included the relationship between President Nixon’s oversight of the invasion of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s files on him and the burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, DC. Daniel Ellsberg is not only an American hero in the eyes of his son, but dozens of ensuing American historians, legal scholars, and justice advocates.
It was a coincidence that Daniel Ellsberg died two days before Father’s Day in 2022. How did your dad witness to you? Robert noted that Daniel witnessed to him to him as a “person of hope.” He did not live a life of optimism, but witnessed a call to act hopefully. Considering Robert’s reflection on his father, I remembered my own dad (who died in 2016). If I were to write a short profile on Herbert Herro for Give Us This Day, I would surely include three important facets: my dad spent years carting his sons to and from football practices and basketball games (even when my own football and basketball careers were spent mostly on the bench!); as an officer of a mechanical contracting firm, he was as kind and considerate to the blue collar staff as he was to the senior leadership; and when his archdiocese began to consider closing and merging Catholic parishes in his home town, he remarked to a local newspaper reporter, “The Church is about the people, it is not about buildings.”
Happy Father’s Day, dad, though one day late. But then again, your heavenly life is not as bound to the calendar as mine is!
"It's all in God's plan" 