"The Coalition to Stop Funding the War:
The Final Stage of the Movement for Peace in Indochina"
A webinar with
- Jane Fonda
- Michael Jones
- Larry Levin
- John McAuliff
- Karen Nussbaum
- Brewster Rhoads
- Bill Zimmerman
Sunday, April 26, 2 - 3:30 p.m. ET
Register by clicking here
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xOLuZRIFQeejBwFGHpPlxg
Jane Fonda is a film icon and recipient of two Academy Awards, two British-Academy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards and many other accolades for her stage, film and television artistry. She protested against the Vietnam War and supported active-duty GIs and Vietnam veterans who were organizing against the war. She was the creator and lead performer in the FTA Show and toured with the show and performed n the show at American military bases in the US and in the Pacific. She is the co-producer of the documentary film FTA.
Michael Jones Following two years of Peace Corps in Malaysia my wife Diane and I found ourselves in Vietnam, the very place we had thought to avoid. Working for the American Friends Service Committee was my alternative service to participation in the military. Our project was a physical rehabilitation center providing prostheses and therapy to war injured civilians. In addition to humanitarian work, Quakers were a voice in the movement to end the war. We spent nearly a year involved in peace activism on Capitol Hill utilizing our experience from living in Vietnam to help educate decision makers. This included several months with Coalition to Stop Funding the War.
Larry Levin was the executive director from 1972 to 1975 of the Coalition To Stop Funding the War, a lobbying group representing approximately 25 church, civic, antiwar and labor organizations working to defund U.S. military action in Southeast Asia. Previously he was the Washington representative for Medical Aid for Indochina (MAI) and before that a co-founder of the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC). During the 1972 election campaign he was the coordinator for Jane Fonda's and Tom Hayden’s national tour supporting the antiwar cause in key election states. In 1975, one month before the war ended, he traveled to Hanoi to represent the Coalition as a member of a Swedish-sponsored Commission to Investigate U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam.
After the Vietnam era, Levin was active in California Democratic politics and spent a number of years as communications director for Democratic members of the California State Senate in Sacramento. He earlier had a career in journalism, including posts at CBS and NBC television stations in Los Angeles, the NBC bureau in Frankfurt, Germany, and as the producer of a Bonn-based PBS news magazine called “European Journal.” During his time in Europe he covered the 1989-90 revolutions against Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the reunification of East and West Germany. Between reporting stints he worked as a press advisor to the German Green Party and later in Ireland as a communications advisor for the Sinn Fein party in a number of election campaigns.
Levin also taught journalism in the 1990s at Ohio University and in the 2000s as a visiting professor at universities in Ireland and Germany. He now resides in both those countries, dividing his time between Dublin and Berlin. In January 2023, at the invitation of the the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), he returned to Vietnam to attend ceremonies commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Paris Agreement. During that visit he received a state medal and citation in recognition of his work in the 1970s against U.S. war funding.
John McAuliff is the executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development and coordinator of the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee. As a student at Carleton College, he organized support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and participation in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. After serving in the Peace Corps in Peru, he became the first President of the Committee of Returned Volunteers, leading its participation in the Vietnam anti-war movement, including the demonstration at the Chicago Democratic Convention. He represented CRV in national antiwar coalitions and the U.S coalition at international conferences in Sweden. For ten years he directed the Indochina Program in the Peace Education Division of the American Friends Service Committee, traveling on its behalf to Hanoi with a delegation from the Indochina Peace Campaign that arrived on April 30, 1975, the last day of the war. In 1985 he founded the Fund for Reconciliation and Development to continue his AFSC work for normalization of relations with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After that was accomplished in 2005, he refocused most of his work on a similar goal with Cuba. He was "detained" at the March on the Pentagon and the Mayday civil disobedience action and while demonstrating against George Wallace during his Presidential campaign in New York.
Karen Nussbaum has been an organizer for more nearly 60 years. She was the founding director of 9to5, the national organization of working women; District 925, SEIU; the AFL-CIO Working Women's Department; and Working America, the community organizing arm of the AFL-CIO. She is a senior advisor at Working America and shows up to defeat authoritarianism wherever she can.
Brewster Rhoads, a native of Philadelphia, PA, was active in the anti-war movement as a student at the William Penn Charter School and Williams College. He organized multiple vigils, demonstrations and lobbying activities in Western Massachusetts before joining the staff of the Coalition to Stop Funding the War in Washington, DC in 1974.
Brewster was a VISTA volunteer in Western Massachusetts, Director of the Washington-based Coalition for a New Foreign Policy, Director of the Green Umbrella environmental sustainability alliance in Cincinnati and the SW Ohio Regional Director for Ohio Governors Dick Celeste and Ted Strickland. He managed over 150 issue and candidate campaigns in Ohio.
Brewster is currently the Chair of the Board of the Ohio River Way, Inc., a nonprofit working to promote outdoor recreation opportunities on and along the Ohio River from Portsmouth, OH to Louisville, KY.
He also serves on the boards of Adventure Crew, the Mill Creek Alliance, the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund and Innovation Ohio.
An avid kayaker and cyclist, he is the founder and chair of the Ohio River Paddlefest, now the largest paddling event in the U.S.
Brewster lives in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Cincinnati with his wife Ann Lugbill, a whistleblower attorney. His oldest daughter, Elizabeth, is a professor of international human rights and Southeast Asian studies at Gothenburg University in Sweden. His youngest, Caroline, is a Montessori teacher in Berlin, Germany.
brewohio@gmail.com
Bill Zimmerman received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1967. His later faculty appointments at Brooklyn College and back at UChicago, were both terminated because of antiwar activism. Leaving academia, he helped establish Science for the People in 1970-71. In 1972-73, he built and led Medical Aid for Indochina and the Bach Mai Hospital Emergency Relief Fund. In 1974-75, he worked in the leadership of the Indochina Peace Campaign. After the war, Bill managed Tom Hayden’s 1976 campaign for US Senate, then began a long career as a political campaign manager and media consultant. His successful clients included Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, New Mexico Governor Toney Anaya, Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, Congressmen Lane Evans (IL) and Sam Gejdenson (CT), among many others. He was also responsible for numerous successful ballot initiative campaigns, including the nation’s first law legalizing physician assisted suicide (Oregon 1994), its first law to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana (California 1996), the first law requiring treatment instead of incarceration for drug possession offenders (California 2000), and the first law placing a surtax on annual incomes over $1 million (California 2004). He is the author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Frontlines of the Sixties.
Resources
Timeline of Key Congressional Votes
to Reduce U.S. Military Aid to Southeast Asia
Summer 1972 – Creation of Indochina
Peace Campaign leading to Midwest speaking tour in September by Jane Fonda, Tom
Hayden and Holly Near
December 1972 – Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam
January
4, 1973 – Religious Convocation and Congressional Visitation
January 1973 - Coalition to Stop
Funding the War is launched
January 27, 1973 – Peace Agreement is signed in Paris
May 1973 – House passes Addabbo Amendment (219-188)
to end bombing of Cambodia and bar additional U.S. military operations in
Southeast Asia
May 1973 – Senate passes Eagleton Amendment (67-21)
to end bombing of Cambodia & Laos
June 1973 – Senate passes Case-Church Amendment (73-16)
to cut off funding for U.S. military operations in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
by August 15, 1973. Passed 73-16
June 1973 – House votes 204-204 to defeat an amendment
to overturn the Case-Church Amendment thereby keeping the cutoff of
funding for U.S military operations in place.
July 1973 – Both the Senate (75-18) and the House (284-135)
pass the War Powers Resolution requiring Congressional
authorization of the use of U.S. military forces in foreign combat. Nixon
vetoed the resolution, but the House and Senate overrode his veto on November
7, 1973.
September 1973 – twenty city speaking tour
by Fonda, Hayden, Near, Bob Chenoweth and Jean-Pierre Debris
October 26-28 1973 - Conference of twenty antiwar organizations in
Germantown, Ohio forms the United Campaign for Peace in Indochina
April 1974 – House defeats Nixon’s request for $474 million
in supplemental military aid for South Vietnam by a vote of 177-154 with
101 members NOT voting.
May 1974 – Senate passes Kennedy Amendment (43-38)
baring the use of $266 million in DOD supplemental assistance funds “in, for or
on behalf of any country in Southeast Asia”.
June 1974 – Senate defeats Kennedy-Cranston Amendment
(46-45) to the FY ‘75 DOD Authorization bill which would have reduced military
aid to South Vietnam to $750 (from the initial request of $1.6 billion)
Summer 1974
– Tiger Cage Vigil and Fast on the steps of the Capitol
August 1974 – Senate defeats Proxmire Amendment (46-45)
to the FY ‘75 DOD Authorization bill which would have cut military aid to South
Vietnam to $550 million
August 1974 – House passes Flynt-Giamo-Conte Amendment
(233-157) to the FY ‘75 DOD Appropriations Bill reducing U.S. military aid by
$300 million. NOTE – this was the
largest anti-war majority in the House to date on the question of U.S.
involvement in Southeast Asia. The vote took
place on August 6, 1974, exactly 10 years from the week that the House
unanimously adopted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President
unlimited war-making authority.
September 29 – October 6, 1974 – International
Week of Concern for Saigon’s Political Prisoners
October 1974 – Senate passes Abourezk Amendment to
ban funding to train foreign police agencies through the U.S. AID Office of
Public Safety
October 1974 – Amendment to Foreign Assistance Act
limiting number of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam to 2,500 passes
House (209-189) and Senate (46-45).
January 1975 – Nixon asks Congress for $300 million in
supplemental military aid for South Vietnam and $222 million for Cambodia
January 25-27 1975 – Assembly to
Save the Peace Agreement held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC
January 1975 – Gallup Poll shows that 8 out of 10
Americans oppose military aid
April 1975 – The American War Ends in Cambodia on April
17 and in Vietnam on April 30
