Communist Party USA
Many have been the obituaries and tributes to radical poet and civil libertarian Lawrence Ferlinghetti, including this one from City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. Ferlinghetti died on February 22 at 101 in his home in North Beach, the literary heart of San Francisco. Many readers may be unfamiliar with another facet of the writer’s life. In 1962 a group of San Francisco veterans of World War II and Korea, seeing that a new Viet Nam war was looming, marched unofficially at the end of the annual Veterans Day Parade under the banner of “Veterans For Peace.” The principal organizer of that contingent was world-renowned poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The turning point in Ferlinghetti’s life came in late September 1945 as he walked the streets of Nagasaki, Japan, six weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped there by his country. He was a 26-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, having already seen…
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and veteran for peace