Norman’s Triumph: The Transcendent Language of Self-Immolation

On a chilly November day in 1965, a thirty-one year old Quaker pacifist named Norman Morrison, a father of three, left his home in Baltimore with his infant daughter Emily and drove forty miles to Washington, DC. Once there, as dusk settled over the capitol city, he drove to the Pentagon where he drenched himself in kerosene and struck a match on his shoe. It is not clear if he had handed Emily to someone standing nearby or had sat her down out of harm’s way. As Norman burned alive, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, looking out of his office window only yards away, was horrified. He watched as Pentagon attachés rushed to try to put out the flames, scorching themselves in the process.¹

Sometime earlier that afternoon, Norman had mailed a letter from the Washington area to his wife Anne in Baltimore: “Dearest Anne, Please don’t condemn me … For weeks, even months, I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning, I was shown … Know that I love thee but must act for the children in the Priest’s village.” This latter reference was in regards to an article that Norman had read that morning in which a Catholic priest described graphically “women and children blown to bits” from U.S. bombing and napalm raids on Vietnamese villages.²

“What can we do that we haven’t done?” Norman asked Anne that morning as the two discussed the disturbing article in the quiet of their suburban kitchen. They had done everything they could think of: prayed, lobbied officials in Congress, withheld their taxes, wrote articles and letters to newspapers and people in power, and worked locally on the grassroots level. But the war was escalating quickly and Norman predicted that it was going to get far more destructive, with America possibly becoming desperate enough to use nuclear weapons against North Vietnam (which McNamara later confirmed was a serious option). That past July, President Johnson had announced that he was increasing U.S. military presence in Vietnam to 125,000 men, followed by the doubling of monthly draft calls. One month later, CBS aired the destruction of Vietnamese villages by U.S. Marines. For close to six months leading up to that November day, Norman kept up with news coverage of American bombers raining down Agent Orange, napalm and bombs on the north daily. And only three days before his self-immolation, he had attended a Quaker conference where a speaker asserted that more civilians than soldiers were killed in North Vietnam by a ratio of three to one.³

Norman was “agonized by the killing of Vietnamese civilians” and believed that unless the war was stopped it “would take a heavy toll on the soul of America.” He listened for divine guidance, the Inward Light of revelation that a Quaker waits for in quiet and stillness. Finally, all at once, he felt he had received his answer.⁴ With the “napalmed bodies and wailing children” crying out, Norman must have remembered the Vietnamese Buddhist monk whose burning image had made it all over the world. In 1963, Thich Quang Duc sat in a lotus position at a busy intersection of Saigon, drenched in gasoline, and burned himself to death to awaken the world to the suffering of the war and persecution of Buddhists. It was a sacrifice that had deeply moved and awed both Norman and Anne.⁵

Norman’s answer must have also led him to think about Alice Herz, an eighty-two year old Quaker-Unitarian peace activist who only eight months earlier had sat in front of a federal facility on a street corner in Detroit and burned herself alive to protest the war in Vietnam and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Before her self-immolation, Herz wrote a letter to her daughter where she explained, “I do this not out of despair, but out of hope,” echoing Buddhist monks, such as Thich Quang Duc.⁶

With his path clear, Norman waited for Anne to leave to...