"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.
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.
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