Randy Kehler, who later became national coordinator

of the Nuclear Freeze movement in the United States, was drafted into

the Army in the early 1970s to go fight in Vietnam.  Like many

others, he refused to serve and was sentenced to jail.  But   unlike

many others, he did more than that.  Before beginning his jail

sentence, he toured the United States, speaking out against the war

on university campuses, in churches and to peace organizations.  He

had no idea whether this would make any difference, but his

conscience demanded that he try to do whatever he could.

 In one of his audiences was Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon

analyst and co-author of the "Pentagon Papers," the secret history

of the Vietnam war.  He had become increasingly disillusioned with

the way the United States fought the war, and had begun to doubt its

justification.  But he said that what finally persuaded him to do

something was hearing Randy Kehler speak.  Here was a young man

willing to go to jail for his conviction that the war was immoral. 

So Ellsberg secretly made four sets of photocopies of the 7,000 page

report, and left them anonymously in boxes in front of the offices

of the New York Times, the Washington Post and two other major

national newspapers.  When editors read the reports, they realized

that   they contain so many accurate facts that they could not have

been forgeries by someone outside of the government, and they began

to publish them.  President Nixon ordered them to halt publication,

but the US Supreme Court ruled that prior restraint violated the

first amendment of the US constitution guaranteeing free speech.   

When people read that they had been deceived all these years by their

own government, and that the United States was not winning the war,

they began to oppose it in large numbers.  That forced President

Nixon to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1973, and led to an end

of the war in 1975.At the right moment, one more snowflake can break the branch of

a tree.  Even if our efforts don't show any immediate result,

whatever we do makes it easier for others who follow to complete our

work.

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