“The Children of Vietnam”
This article features William F. Pepper’s text and photographs on the Vietnam War. The images show disfigured mothers and babies horrifically burned by napalm dropped from American planes, and the text includes a preface by the famous paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock. Ramparts had already reported on the source for this weapon in James Colaianni’s “Napalm: Made in USA”, from August 1966, which detailed protests against the sub-lease by Standard Oil Company (California) — a Rockefeller family concern — of one of their plants in Redwood City, California, to United Technology Center (U.T.C.) for the specific purpose of manufacturing 100 million pounds of napalm under a contract with the Department of Defense. “The Children of Vietnam” so horrified Martin Luther King Jr. that his opposition to the Vietnam War became inseparable from his campaign for civil rights, famously expressed in his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” at Riverside Church, New York, on April 4, 1967, when he identified the US Government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Opened in 1930, the church was conceived by John D. Rockefeller Jr., industrialist, financier and philanthropist.