"Peace in Indochina" Petition

Eleven days after four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, the Honolulu Advertiser ran a full-page paid advertisement from the Citizens for Peace in Indochina. The open letter — addressed to the president of the UH Associated Students and signed by hundreds of University of Hawaii faculty and community members — called on President Nixon and Congress for rapid withdrawal of American military forces from Indochina. It quoted a telegram from Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink and opened with a line from Senator J.W. Fulbright: “To criticize one’s country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment.”

Both Lauren Ekroth and Linda Ekroth signed. Five months married, they appear together alphabetically among the hundreds of signatories. This is the first time Linda appears as a political actor in her own right — not as a bride but as a co-signatory on a public antiwar statement.

The petition’s signatory list is a near-complete map of Ekroth’s Hawaii social world. Rev. Mitsuo Aoki, the Church of the Crossroads moderator from the sanctuary crisis, signed. So did Dr. George Y. Fujita, fellow officer in the Hawaii Association for Humanistic Psychology. Brook Hart, Ann Boesgaard, Rene Tillich, and Allen Trubitt — all fellow ACLU of Hawaii directors appointed just one week earlier — signed. Rev. Lawrence Jones, who had officiated at the Ekroths’ wedding six months before, signed. Dave Krieger, whose wife had served as matron of honor at the wedding, signed. And Oliver Lee — the professor whose tenure denial had triggered the Bachman Hall sit-in two years earlier — signed alongside the man who had been arrested defending him.