I happened across Norman Morrison in a review of the new Taubman biography of Robert McNamara. I had also been reading comments on social media about Vietnam and the idea that self-immolation was a completely foreign concept to the western mind, particularly the Christian one. As one who attended Quaker school and was intimately acquainted and supportive of Quaker pacifism during the Vietnam War, it was obvious there was something here worth investigating; after all, isn't one of the highest military and Christian values to give your life to save the greater number? Wasn't that precisely a rationale for McNamara's support for the firebombing of Japan, an action he knew was a war crime?
During World War II he became a leading adviser to General Curtis LeMay in designing the firebombing of Japan. He approached it as an accounting challenge and calculated that more destruction could be wrought if planes flew at a lower altitude, enabling them to hit more targets while also facing a greater risk of being shot down. More Americans and Japanese died as a result; the firebombing killed 100,000 people in Tokyo and brought mass destruction to more than sixty other Japanese cities. In The Fog of War McNamara acknowledges that he committed war crimes. “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asks. The question is left unanswered. (Fog of War)
Morrison decided on his course of action after watching and reading about all the children being killed in Vietnam by U.S. napalm and bombing. A friend and fellow Quaker noted that Norman had been praying for god’s will for himself and, in response to the criminal war in Vietnam, “he’d been writing letters to editors, to congressmen, to the President, and the Pentagon; he’d participated in demonstrations and protests . . . to try to convince people that what we were doing in Vietnam was wrong . . . but it hadn’t worked. And now he had to do something else . . . some dramatic gesture” Just where does that, as a political statement come from? Does it work? Can it accomplish political goals?
Self-immolation, is not supposed to be viewed as a terminal act of despair; it is a radical form of political protest designed to shock the moral consciousness of a nation. In 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated toward an industrialized slaughter, I had just graduated high school and to be perfectly honest, civil rights was more of an issue for me than Vietnam, even as it heated up and the draft came more into focus. There were all forms of dissent—marches, tax resistance, and petitions—but nothing shook the conscience more than the burning of the monk in 1963 but I suspect as a foreign event in a foreign culture in a faraway land, it did nothing to those in American politics.
Morrison's, on the other hand, had a dramatic effect on McNamara, especially as it occurred within 40 feet of his window. McNamara wrote: "Norman Morrison's action dramatized for me the tremendous discrepancy between the moral imperative-the prohibition on the killing of other human beings that I had subscribed to all my life- and what was occurring daily in Vietnam"' From that tragic moment on, McNamara changed gears. He continued to run the war, but he devoted more of his attention to negotiations. At his initiative, a month after the suicide, the USA decided on a 37-day bombing pause. "We thought we were acting in the interests of mankind, but the cost in lives was far greater than we or others had predicted." He realized by the time of his memoir that the US could have ended the war as early as 1962, ten years before it was finally concluded with an American retreat, if it had explored more fully non-military ways of achieving US goals. In that case we might have "saved our soul", he concluded.
Morrison was not the first Westerner to take this extreme form of political protest. Alice Herz was the first Western citizen to utilize self-immolation to protest the Vietnam War. Her sacrifice carried an immense theological and historical weight; as an 82-year-old refugee who had fled Nazi Germany, she was intimately acquainted with the cycle of state-sponsored destruction. Her act on March 16, 1965, in Detroit, was not merely a protest against a localized conflict but a witness against the recurring darkness of the 20th century. Although her act was initially under-reported because no immediate advocate stepped forward to tell her story, its significance as a precursor to Morrison's Pentagon witness cannot be overstated. But Herz's stated goals were broader.
She offered a searing critique of the billions appropriated for war through "hatred and fear." She explicitly linked the Vietnam conflict to the broader threat of nuclear proliferation, warning that the "Arsenal of Destruction—unlimited" would lead to global ruin unless the public was "awakened to action." Herz performed her sacrifice with her mouth stuffed with cotton. This was to serve as a symbol of the marginalized voice of dissent, a physical manifestation of the inability of the people's plea for peace to penetrate the "Arsenal of Destruction." While contemporary observers mischaracterized her act as a "collapse of hope," her private letters to her daughter, Helga, reveal a different motivation. Herz insisted her act was born "out of hope for mankind," a constructive attempt to inspire a "transnational solidarity" that bridged her European refugee experience with American and Japanese anti-war movements.
She set the stage for the specific "divine leading" that would soon consume Norman Morrison.
On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Baltimore Quaker, targeted the Pentagon to witness against the "impersonal, mechanistic thinking" of the Department of Defense. His choice of location was surgical; by igniting himself directly beneath the window of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, he brought the "fire of the Vietnamese village" to the epicenter of the American war machine. Morrison’s final day was marked by a haunting normalcy: he ate a lunch of French onion soup and grilled cheese sandwiches with his wife, Anne, and spent his final hours preparing notes for a New Testament class; he had been praying for guidance and on that day felt sure God was telling him what to do. Within the Quaker tradition, Morrison followed a "holy and compelling obedience" to a divine directive. This was not a rational political calculation but a response to the "Inward Light," which he believed demanded a sacrifice to awaken the numbed conscience of his compatriots.
Morrison was moved by an article in I.F. Stone’s Weekly detailing Father Currien’s account of a South Vietnamese village destroyed by American bombs. The image of women and children "blown to bits" was the immediate directive that compelled him to act for the "children in the priest's village." He had read an article that morning about
Morrison’s decision to bring his 11-month-old daughter, Emily, to the Pentagon was startling to say the least. While his wife interpreted Emily as a "symbol of hope and survival," the vague references in his farewell letters to "Abraham’s sacrifice" suggest a darker, theological ambiguity—a radical questioning of whether the sacrifice of the innocent was the only language the Pentagon could understand. He had written a letter to his wife in which he describes having prayed for guidance, and this action was apparently the message he received from God. If you have ever been to Quaker Meeting, as I have many, many times, you'll understand how this personal relationship where God speaks directly to you is an important part. I spoke once in Meeting, but it was less evidence of God speaking to me than me as a sanctimonious son-of-a-bitch. But the Elders loved it.
Witnesses watched as Morrison doused himself in kerosene and struck a match on his shoe, an act of grit and finality. He safely set Emily aside only moments before the flames took him, leaving a legacy that would haunt the institutional facade of the war for decades. (While Emily's clothes had been soaked in kerosene, she was set aside and not harmed. One wonders if she hadn't been part of some Abrahamic delusion but changed his mind at the last minute.)
Morrison's protest successfully penetrated McNamara's psyche shattering the "overflowing confidence" of Secretary Robert McNamara. The protest was not merely a public relations crisis; it was a personal haunting that manifested in the physical and emotional deterioration of the McNamara family, with his wife and son developing ulcers from the stress of public accusations like "Baby burner!" and "Murderer!"
The moral justification for self-immolation rests on a philosophical paradox: using a final act of self-directed violence to witness against systemic external violence. The idea of "laying down one's life for his friends" is, of course, also a very military concept, i.e. throw yourself on the grenade to save your squad.,
The Society of Friends remains divided over this legacy. Some viewed it as a violation of the "pacifist testimony" against taking any life, while others saw Morrison as a "model Quaker" who followed the "Inward Light" , i.e. that of God in every man, to its ultimate, agonizing conclusion. Ultimately, these individuals believed that their self-sacrifice would save the lives of thousands of others.
In the case of the Buddhist monk, it surely spelled the beginning of the end for the Diem regime; Herz's death, probably because there was so little press coverage, had almost no effect other than to encourage Morrison's suicide by fire. Morrison's death clearly affected McNamara, but in the end, the sacrifices of these three didn't prevent many more years of war and the deaths of millions of people.
I have Craig McNamara's memoir on my list to read. McNmara's position on the war bitterly divided his family, and reviews suggest it's Craig way of coming to terms with that animosity. (McNamara, C. (2022). Because our fathers lied: A memoir of truth and family, from Vietnam to today. Little, Brown. )
Bibliography of Consulted Sources
Benn, James A. (2007). Burning for the Buddha: Self-immolation in Chinese Buddhism. University of Hawai'i Press.
Cassie, Ron. (2025). "Norman Morrison’s Self-Immolation Protesting the Vietnam War Shocked America’s Conscience." Baltimore Magazine.
https://www.documentaries.org/films/phoenix-the-life-and-death-of-alice-herz/
Khalil, Sarah. (2020). "Mohamed Bouazizi, 1984-2011: The fire that lit the Arab Spring." The New Arab.
McNamara, Robert. (1995). In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Times Books. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37580670
Patler, Nicholas. (2015). "Norman's Triumph: The Transcendent Language of Self-Immolation." Quaker Theology. If you read nothing else, read this excellent analysis of Morrison's actions. You can get her here: https://quakertheology.org/Morrison-Patler-Remembering-Norman.pdf
Tibbits-Lamirande, Meghan. "The Self-Immolation of Alice Herz." All Academic.
Friends Journal. (December 1, 1965). Volume 11, Number 23. Contributors: William Bagwell, Lawrence Scott, and Jeanette S. Michener.
Welsh, Anne M. Fire of the Heart: Norman Morrison's Legacy in Viet Nam and at Home. 2005. (Welsh was Morrison's wife and fellow Quaker.) This pamphlet is available from Pendle Hill: https://pendlehill.org/product/fire-of-the-heart-norman-morrisons-legacy-in-viet-nam-and-at-home/
Welsh, Anne M., and Joyce Hollyday. Held in the Light: Norman Morrison's Sacrifice for Peace and His Family's Journey of Healing. 2008. (Describes Morrison's family visit to Vietnam where Morrison is still considered something of a hero. Very personal Quaker book.)
