| DMH Spotlight -Draft card burning, 1968 / Boston Common Anti-War Rally, Ed Murphy VVAW report, and Al Gore Sr. Campaign, 1970/ Anti War Rally NYC 1971 / Anti-War vets at Lexington Bicentennial / Women's Pentagon Action and Vietnam Vet Hunger Strike, 1980 | Back |
So many people asked Diana Mara Henry if the man in the wheelchair is Ron Kovic, Vietnam veteran and author of the book "Born on the Fourth of July." Through the miracle of the internet, she reached him and sent him the images she took on Boston Common in 1970, accompanied by John Wilkes, of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War/ VVAW demonstration there. Ron Kovic was not there, he told her, but he wrote back: "Your photos are beautiful and represent such a powerful and passionate time in American history. I believe these photos will last and many years from now they will be looked at and studied just as Mathew Brady's classic and haunting Civil war photos are today." Please feel free to use this phrase and the one I gave to you the other day ['Thank you for being a part of history.'] as a blurb in your important new book! Best Wishes! Ron Kovic." Thank YOU, Ron!
Then DMH found these photographs she took of a hunger strike in LA protesting neglect of Veterans' needed treatment by the VA, and of Ron Kovic and Suzanne Hopkins.
Ron Kovic wrote on 2/14/11 of the photo of him and Vietnam Veteran Max Inglett, above left: "We are in front of The Westwood Federal building in Los Angeles...It is the spring of 1974 and we are in the mist of a seventeen day hunger strike with other Vietnam Veterans"
Please send ID's for any other of these people if you know them, and your memories which we will be glad to share...Photographs all copyright © Diana Mara Henry. No reproduction without written permission, so email us now.
Going back to the year 1968, draft card burning and spectators at Northeastern University, 1968.
All photographs Copyright © Diana Mara Henry. Email us for permission to reproduce or distribute in any form.
Article is first of three in a seriesabout Ed Murphy by Diana Mara Henry when she was General assignment reporter for the Staten Island Advance;
click here for the following two articles
Photograph Copyright © Diana Mara Henry of Ed Murphy campaigning for Borough President of Staten Island.
She also photographed him at the Statue of Liberty with McGovern,
as a Delegate to the Democratic National Convention, Miami Beach, 1972, and his wedding to Lin Murphy.
( see Subject List of this website.)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ed Murphy, (Labor/Social Justice Advocate) Executive Director, The Workforce Development Institute, is a former military intelligence agent who exposed the CIA’s Phoenix Program in April 1970; a veterans and peace activist....Ed’s professional life began in the May 1968 as an Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, fluent in Vietnamese; assigned to the 4th Infantry Division at Dragon Mountain [18] , in the Central Highlands outside Pleiku, where his first recorded statement against the war was made...
For more than 40 years Ed has articulated the hopes, challenges, mistakes, missed opportunities and options Americans face interacting in a global economy. He has organized and implemented private and public sector veterans programs; established some of the earliest Readjustment Counseling (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) programs and served as an advisor to the federal court on the Agent Orange Class Action Lawsuit.Ed Murphy has a long history as an advocate for peace and social justice; a leader in veterans services, public policy, organized labor, economic and workforce development. Ed taught at the college level for the New School for Social Research, been a guest lecturer at other colleges; published Vietnam Our Father Daughter Journey,
and has been discussed in other books; written a variety of articles and commentaries, appeared on local, national and international, radio and television , had four photography exhibits related to Vietnam and participated in the development of two movies. Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, was given an Emmy and Ed was honored for his contribution to the writing.
Zoeann Murphy wrote, “When I asked my father how the war affected him, he always said, 'Vietnam Lives in my Soul'
Click here for complete announcement of the above event, please.
Left: Women on Park Avenue in demonstration against ITT and the war in Cambodia, 1971.
Right: Women of the Women's Pentagon Action (Extensive documentation linked at the Spotlight page.)
These letters refer to the Al Gore Sr. campaign for reelection to the Senate,
Gore Sr. "was ultimately unseated in the 1970 general election by Republican Congressman William E. Brock III.
Gore was one of the key targets in the Nixon/Agnew "Southern strategy."
He had earned Nixon's ire the year before when he criticized the administration's "do-nothing" policy
toward inflation.... Spiro T. Agnew traveled to Tennessee in 1970 to mock Gore as the "Southern regional chairman of the Eastern Liberal Establishment".
Other prominent issues in this race included Gore's opposition to the Vietnam War, his vote against Sen. Everett Dirksen's amendment on prayer in public schools,
and his opposition to appointing Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Brock won the election by a 51% to 47% margin." ( Wikipedia )
DMH had met Senator Gore at the Crimson, where she was a photo editor and Senator Gore's son, Al Gore Jr., supposedly on the business side.
Both Al Gore Jr. and DMH majored in Government at Harvard-see where we each went with that!
Coming full circle: two more images from the Anti-War demonstration on Boston Common, 1970, as the first one on this page.
Email us or call 413-736-6414 for use of these photographs or to schedule an illustrated lecture.
