‘I’ve never seen a class so engaged’: How famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a UMass professor and a journalist created a class unlike any other Updated May 06, 2021; Dr. Daniel Ellsberg was roughly five minutes into responding to a student’s question on wargaming nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union when the time for his answer ran out. That was a fairly common occurrence. The famed whistleblower had at age 40 leaked the Pentagon Papers, top-secret documents on the Vietnam War. Now, he had been given a time limit on his comments by Christian Appy, a renowned professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn’t that Ellsberg would ramble off-topic. It was that for every question, he simply had so much to say.