Greg Mitchell: When Antiwar Protest Turned Fatal: The Ballad of Norman Morrison

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When Antiwar Protest Turned Fatal: The Ballad of Norman Morrison
Greg Mitchell
November 13, 2010


The wars in Iraq an Afghanistan were notably, and tragically, absent as campaign issues this autumn. Street demonstrations? Very scattered. Various forms of protest continue online but it's a long way from the heated Vietnam era. This Monday, in fact, marks the 41st anniversary of the largest mass antiwar march ever, the November 15, 1969, demo in Washington, D.C., which I attended as a college student.

But this month marks another notable anniversary in the annals of Vietnam protest: the day Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore handed his infant daughter off to a bystander, doused himself with kerosene and set himself ablaze under Pentagon chief Robert McNamara's window at the Pentagon.

One week later, on November 10, 1965, another antiwar protester, Roger LaPorte, did the same thing in front of the United Nations building in New York.

Morrison had been particularly saddened by the burning of villages and killing of civilians in Vietnam. A Catholic priest's account of a bombing in a Vietnamese village particularly distressed him. He had resisted taxes, demonstrated, and lobbied in Washington, but now said to his wife (she recalls), "It's not enough. What can be done to stop this war?"

In his final letter to Anne, his wife (they had three children), he wrote, "Know that I love thee, but I must go to help the children of the priest's village." It is believed that he carried his daughter to the Pentagon that day to remind him of the children he was trying to save in Vietnam.

McNamara would later describe Morrison's death as "a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth."

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/156433/when-antiwar-protest-turned-fatal-ballad-norman-morrison