William F. Pepper - An Act of State

In spring 1966, US carpet-bombing had systematically devastated ancient village-based rural culture in South Vietnam as napalm rained from the sky, slaughtering helpless peasants. As a freelance journalist, I had witnessed and chronicled these atrocities and in early 1967 opened my files to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize two years earlier.

At this time when I discussed the effects of the war on the civilian population and the ancient village road culture of the Vietnamese people with Dr King, he was already inclined to formally announce his position on the war. He had previously voiced his growing concern about his countrys ever greater role in what appeared to be an internal struggle for control of the nation by a nationalist movement seeking to overcome an oligarchical regime in the south, which was previously beholden to western economic interests.

It occurs to me that he would likely react in much the same way today, opposing American, unilateral opposition to nationalist revolutionary movements around the world, which ostensibly is being mounted against terrorist organizations.

In the Museum of History in Hanoi is a plaque with the following words: All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was with these words and pro-American spirit, which Ho-Chi Minh said he took from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, that he proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945.

It was not lost on Martin that Ho-Chi Minhs reverence for Jefferson, Lincoln, and American democracy, as he idealized it, made him the legitimate father of a unified Vietnam. So, on April 4 1967, Martin declared his formal opposition to the increasing barbarities in Vietnam. By July 1967, against the disastrous backdrop of the Vietnam War, America began to burn not only through enemy attack but from racial tensions and riots sparked by mounting anger over living conditions at home.

At the Spring Mobilization anti-war demonstration in New York on April 15, before 250,000 cheering and chanting citizens, after I had advanced his name as an alternative presidential candidate to Lyndon Johnson, Dr King called on the government to stop the bombing.