Kiriakou’s admiration for Daniel Ellsberg is not something he arrived at as an adult, or as a fellow defendant. He has described it as inherited.
The lesson at six
Ellsberg, he says, was a hero in their family. He remembers his father explaining to him, when he was only six years old, that this man — this one man — had decided to tell the American people the truth when everybody else was lying about the truth.[1]
Why it landed in that household
The reason the lesson had weight is a matter of arithmetic. Kiriakou’s mother came from a very large family: he has twenty-seven first cousins on her side alone. Seven of those twenty-seven fought in Vietnam.[1]
And they went, he says, thinking they were fighting in Vietnam for the right reasons. They believed what they were being told: that they were the good guys, that they were on the side of righteousness, that they were there to protect the American people and the American way of life, and that they were winning.[1][2]
All of that, in his summary, was a lie — and the family did not even know it was a lie until Daniel Ellsberg told them.[2]
Revelatory
Kiriakou calls the effect revelatory, and says his parents made sure the children understood, even at those young ages, that Ellsberg was a bona fide American hero.[2]
The account is unusual in his repertoire for what it leaves out. Kiriakou generally describes his family’s politics through the frame of public service and obligation — the debt owed to a country that took his grandparents in. This story runs the other way: the same family learning, through seven of its own, that the government could ask them for that service on a false account of what it was for, and that the correction would have to come from someone who broke the law to supply it.