Fiery Protest

In what can only be described as a shockingly gruesome act, Norman R Morrison, an American anti-war activist doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon on November 2, 1965, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War. This action was said to have been inspired by photographs of Vietnamese children burned by napalm bombings. Morrison wasn’t the only person to set himself on fire, and in fact, he was likely “inspired” by Thich Quang Duc and other Buddhist monks, who burned themselves to death to protest the repression committed by the South Vietnam government of Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem.

Morrison was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, and was raised Presbyterian. At 13, his family moved to Chautauqua, New York, where he joined the Boy Scouts of America and participated in the God and Country Program, becoming the youngest member in Chautauqua County to earn the award. He graduated from the College of Wooster in 1956, developed an interest in Quaker ideals, but continued attending Presbyterian seminars in Pittsburgh and at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 1959, Morrison joined the Religious Society of Friends, and by 1965, he served as Executive Secretary for Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore. A strong advocate of pacifism, he openly condemned United States military actions during the Vietnam War.

On March 9th, 1965, then President of the United States Lyndon B Johnson had authorized the use of napalm in the Vietnam War, which, by the end of the war, would end up killing at least 50,000 civilians in airstrikes. Upset over that decision had spurred fellow Quaker and peace activist Alice Herz, in an action that I will never understand, to set herself on fire in an open street in Detroit, Michigan on March 16th of the same year, in similar vein as Thich Quang Duc had done in 1963. At the time of his own fiery death, Morrison was married to Anne Welsh, also a Quaker, with whom he had two daughters and a son. In what I consider a reckless and horrific act, Morrison took his daughter Emily, then one year old, to the Pentagon, and either set her down or handed her off to someone in the crowd before setting himself ablaze. He died within two minutes of leaving in an ambulance for Fort Myer. I simply don’t understand placing your one-year-old daughter in harm’s way like that. Even if she didn’t remember seeing her daddy on fire, she will always know she was there. Morrison’s motives for taking Emily remain somewhat unclear, but Morrison’s wife later recalled, “Whether he thought of it that way or not, I think having Emily with him was a final and great comfort to Norman… [S]he was a powerful symbol of the children we were killing with our bombs and napalm – who didn’t have parents to hold them in their arms.”

Before his protest death, Morrison mailed a letter to his wife in which he reassured her of the faith in his act. “Know that I love thee … but I must go to help the children of the priest’s village”. McNamara described 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.” Morrison was survived by his wife, Anne and three children, Ben (who died of cancer in 1976), Christina and Emily.