Description
John Friedrich (56) talks with his friend Bob Alpern (93) about meeting Father Phil Berrigan, in Baltimore, and forming the Interfaith Peace Mission. They invited a member of the British Parliament to make a major speech against the Vietnam War.Bob, Phil Berrigan and others walked up and down Baltimore shopping streets with signs that said, only ___ bombing days left until Christmas.”
In the same time period, Bob got the home addresses of President Johnson, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara and with a group of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish rabbis and lay people picketed their houses on the weekend before Christmas. They left letters with a security person, and shortly thereafter were invited by Dean Rusk to meet at the State Dept., the first anti-war demonstrators to meet with Rusk. After that, Bob decided he needed to leave his job at the credit bureau and get more involved in the anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons movements.
Bob took a job with SANE, which led him to traveI to South India to see what was happening in the India-Pakistan war. He met with Madame Gandhi in New Delhi. He also met with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first President of Bangladesh. Both were later assassinated.
Bob talks of getting arrested in the U.S. Capitol in an anti-war protest, beside Candace Bergen, Dr. Spock, and many others. That led to Bob taking part in direct actions over the next fifty years (to the present), including at Livermore Laboratories where nuclear weapons are developed, and at the Nevada Test Site project, Mercury 51.
Bob shares how when you refuse to move from an area, you're charged with “failure to quit.” That became a top lifetime motto and ethic of his.
Participants
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John Friedrich