Randy Kehler Memorial Zoom, 7pm ET Jan. 26, 2025

Randy Kehler is appreciated on Sunday, 7 PM ET, Sunday, January 26, 2025 in a special Zoom presentation for his many contributions to democratic movement building and living a life dedicated to world peace, sustainable energy policy and non-violent resistance, when necessary, to direct global change. For more on the event and how to register go to this Zoom link.
During the Vietnam War, Randy returned his draft card to the Selective Service System refusing induction into the US military to fight in the war. While preparing to go to federal prison for his decision, where he would be incarcerated for nearly two years, Randy addressed the August 1969 War Resisters League Conference in Philadelphia, PA. In the conference audience was Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard trained economist and military analyst employed at the RAND Corporation who heard Randy’s address on his opposition to the Vietnam war. Randy’s words and principled action inspired Ellsberg, at grave risk to his personal freedom and career, to go into the RAND files to copy 7,000 pages of top secret government documents known as “The Pentagon Papers” to and release copies to high profile media outlets in 1971. The media release publicly revealed the US government’s methodical secret instigation of the Vietnam war. The documents revealed how four US presidential administrations from Harry S. Truman through Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately deceived the American public in a cover up of the true intentions and the staged development of US involvement in the war. The release of the Pentagon Papers went on to lead President Richard Nixon to commit high crimes by directing his Watergate “plumbers” to also break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office in Los Angeles, California to steal medical records in hopes of discrediting Ellsberg. This criminal activity led in part to Nixon’s fall from Office of President. Ellsberg once signed a copy of his book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” presented to Randy with “No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers.”
As a key strategist and organizer Randy would become a leader in the launch of a Western Massachusetts’ campaign in 1979 to democratically mobilize dozens of local town ballot initiatives around the novel call for a nuclear moratorium or a Nuclear Freeze for the mutual and bilateral halt to the military buildup of nuclear weapons and first strike missile systems between the United States and Russia. The success of the Massachusetts mobilization of ballot initiatives demonstrated strong bipartisan public support for the call end to accelerating Cold War nuclear weapons brinksmanship. The regional civic actions originating in Massachusetts spread throughout New England to blossom and merge with simultaneously developing national initiative orchestrated by The Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) led by scholar/activist Randall Forsberg across. The Nuclear Freeze mobilized across the United States with added support of the Mobilization for Survival campaign. This national mobilization culminated into the June 12, 1982 disarmament rally in Central Park, New York City that drew an estimated 700,00 to 1 million Freeze supporters.
Randy was also instrumental in the launch and coalition building for the US antinuclear power movement that sprang up in New England in 1976 with the formation of the Clamshell Alliance’s and its opposition to the construction and operation of the Seabrook nuclear power station on the narrow New Hampshire coast in a sensitive saltwater estuary for Georges Bank. In the summer of 1975, Randy and his spouse, Betsy Corner, visited Wyhl, Germany where tens of thousands of local farmers, vintners, craftspeople, university students and public came together in 1974 to protest, blockade and occupy the proposed construction site to halt the construction of the nuclear power plant. The nuclear project would finally be legally halted and the permit withdrawn in 1977. The successful civil disobedience actions launched the German ecological movement and eventually the German Green Party. Randy and Betsy had returned to New England earlier to share a film about the Wyhl antinuclear occupation. Their inspiring first hand story of the German community’s site occupations would lend itself to the spreading of nonviolent antinuclear power activism throughout New England and across the United States coast to coast from Seabrook, New Hampshire to Diablo Canyon, California.
[Headline photo of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner by Paul Franz/Greenfield Recorder]
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