Daniel Ellsberg died of pancreatic cancer at 92, having lived a long and contentious life.

As the obits everywhere tell, he started by touching every base on the career trajectory of an elite military analyst: an academic start in prep school, through undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard, interrupted by a stint as a Marine Corps officer, and then a job at RAND and service as an adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

In 1971, Ellsberg jumped off the inside track and leaked The Pentagon Papers, a secret study of US involvement in Vietnam commissioned by McNamara. Photocopying thousands of pages–before autofeed existed, Ellsberg tossed away his career and any prospect of future government jobs to show, among many other things, that successive US administrations lied to Americans about the war, offering an optimistic vision of a potential victory that high level officials knew was impossible.

Why did he do it?

Years later, Ellsberg told different versions of the same story: he was moved and shamed into action by the stories of young men who went to prison for resisting the draft. There were more than a few names, but one that came up in every story was Randy Kehler, a star student at Harvard–like Ellsberg–who returned his draft card, rejecting the conscientious objector status he’d been granted, and served nearly two years in Federal prison.

Ellsberg spent the rest of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons, war, and government secrecy.

Randy Kehler has spent his life organizing against war and for democracy. A founder and national coordinator of the Nuclear Freeze campaign, Kehler launched many citizens’ campaigns and staged a very visible tax resistance campaign that cost him his home. (Kehler’s papers are collected and available to researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, not far from where he lives.)

“No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg wrote in a copy of one of his books, given to Kehler.

Kehler said that he didn’t think his stint in prison would end the war, but resisting the draft was the right thing to do. It’s hard for me to imagine that he didn’t entertain doubts about his efforts during his time in prison. Certainly, there were few visible signs that a very costly personal sacrifice was changing the conduct of the war at the time.

But protest sometimes works in odd and unanticipated ways, and inspiring others to action can matter.

Ellsberg certainly thought so. In the decades after leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was arrested 90 times at protest actions.