“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.” This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth…
First Full Day at the Pentagon for Ellsberg is a Memorable One 56 years ago, on August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson used an attack on U.S. warships that never happened to justify “retaliation,” and the massive expansion of the U.S. war effort against North Vietnam. Squadron commander James Stockdale was one of the U.S.…
On September 2, 1945 over half a million people gathered in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square to hear Ho Chi Minh proclaim Vietnam’s independence, during which he cited the inspiration of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man that emerged from the French Revolution. The text of Ho Chi Minh’s…
Dewey’s last 1945 report to his superiors concluded “the French and British are finished here, and we ought to clear out of Southeast Asia” The U.S. was busy in Vietnam long before the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident led to a Congressional blank check for war. Nearly a decade prior to the defeat of the…
On May 8, 1967 Muhammad Ali was indicted by a federal grand jury for refusing to serve in the U.S. military over his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Two weeks earlier, in response to a reporter’s question about Ali’s opposition to the war, he stated: Why should they ask me to put on…
Here’s a high quality audio recording of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, recorded on April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City. Follow along with the transcript below. The speech marked a major turning point for King, and may very well have sealed his fate, as he linked the…
Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent republic, free of French colonial rule, on September 2, 1945. Half a million people gathered in Hanoi to hear him read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which was modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Below, Susan Dunn delves into the inspiration for Ho Chi Minh’s speech that…
