File:The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023.png

The Vietnam Moratorium mobilization of October-November 1969 is revealed to have politically influenced and stopped US President Nixon from using nuclear weapons

The documentary film tells the story of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president

• https://www.movementandthemadman.com/home
• https://www.movementandthemadman.com/history
• https://www.movementandthemadman.com/preview
• https://www.movementandthemadman.com/interviewees
• https://www.movementandthemadman.com/filmmakers

2023

A Public Broadcasting System Film About the Attempt to Turn from War to Peace -- and a Nuclear War Prevented

The Movement and the 'Madman'

PREMIERED MARCH 28, 2023 ON "AMERICAN EXPERIENCE"

Watch scenes from the PBS The Movement and the ‘Madman’ PBS documentary film

— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhHcq-IUQo

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A Call Out of the Blue and a War Remembrance

Steven Schmidt/GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner: Some fifty years after being an organizer of the Vietnam Moratorium, I received a call from a Vietnam war documentary production. They wanted remembrance comments of what it was like, up close, organizing a national peace movement. My response was "it was overwhelming" and... have you talked to Roger Morris? They said they intended to, they knew about Roger and did I have have his contact number. My next statement, which I repeated strongly over a period of months, filling in details, came from Dan Ellsberg, who was a friend and, in former times, a nuclear war planner. I spoke of Roger and the NSC, and nuclear weapons, and Dan's book, the Doomsday Machine, and suggested the documentary producers look into the Vietnam story of Nixon-Kissinger and "the Bomb".

Those who objected to secret plans back then by Nixon-Kissinger to expand the war beyond Vietnam, bombing Cambodia, Laos and planning, as it turned out, to 'send a message' to Hanoi via nuclear weapon use. These NSC staffers left government, with personal and professional consequences, and their experiences were not revealed until many years later. The Movement and the Madman PBS - American Experience film now tells the tale, and it is a shocking story. We should listen carefully, as the story of the Bomb and Vietnam comes to light, how nations of the world came close to experiencing nuclear disaster, a Cold War that would have instantly and forever become a Hot War with reverberations continuing until the present day.

Our peace organizing, it turned out, had profound impacts then and now as revealed by PBS's Movement and Madman.

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Nuclear_Weapons
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Moratorium_October_15_1969.jpg
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Oct_15,_1969,_Vietnam_Moratorium_Day_in_memory.jpg

Exposition Park, Los Angeles, Moratorium for Peace, October 15, 1969. Photo by Harvey Smythe.