In 1967, after dropping out of graduate school, Randy Kehler sent his draft card back to the Selective Service with a letter explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War. He worked for the War Resisters League in San Francisco (1967-70). Speaking at a conference of war resisters in August ’69, Kehler helped to inspire audience member Daniel Ellsberg to risk imprisonment to help stop the war. After his two-year federal prison sentence (for draft law violations), Kehler co-founded the Nuclear Weapons Freeze and became its national coordinator (1980-84). Kehler continues his work as an activist, promoting publicly-funded elections and nonviolence.
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Randy Kehler, 80, Dies; Peace Activist Inspired Release of Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg was so moved by Mr. Kehler’s opposition to the Vietnam War that he decided to leak documents that changed the course of the conflict.
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By Clay Risen
Aug. 1, 2024 (NYTimes.com)
Randy Kehler, a peace activist whose opposition to the Vietnam War so moved Daniel Ellsberg that he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers, the set of top-secret documents whose exposure changed the course of the war, died on July 21 at his home in Shelburne Falls, Mass. He was 80.
His wife, Betsy Corner, said the cause was myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
Mr. Kehler’s pivotal encounter with Mr. Ellsberg, a defense analyst, at an antiwar conference in 1969 was just one episode in a life defined by determined opposition to America’s military machinery.
By 1969 he had already been to prison for blocking access to an Army induction center in Oakland, Calif., and was preparing to go back, this time for returning his draft card to the Selective Service.
During the late 1970s, Mr. Kehler (pronounced KEE-ler) helped organize a nationwide campaign for a moratorium on nuclear-weapon production, which some observers claim had a significant influence on the Reagan administration’s push for arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union.
And in 1989, after he and his wife refused to pay federal taxes for years in protest against military spending, Mr. Kehler was back in the news — and back in jail — when the Internal Revenue Service seized their home and he refused a judge’s order to vacate.
But it was his role in the Pentagon Papers that may have had the greatest impact on history.
After graduating from Harvard in 1967, Mr. Kehler had moved to California to study education at Stanford. But he dropped out three weeks into his first semester to work full time for the War Resisters League, a leading force in the opposition to the Vietnam War.
Like his friend and fellow activist David Harris, Mr. Kehler not only refused to serve in the military, but he mailed back his draft card, a felony. He was arrested in 1969 and later served most of a two-year sentence.
Soon after his arrest, he gave a speech at an antiwar conference at Haverford College, outside Philadelphia. In attendance was Mr. Ellsberg, who had been a Marine and an adviser of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, but who had been growing skeptical of the war.
Mr. Ellsberg was likewise skeptical of antiwar activists and what he considered its doctrinaire pacifism, so he went to Haverford to hear them out. Mr. Kehler’s speech, in which he explained why he had chosen prison over military service, caught Mr. Ellsberg’s attention.
“Many others are already in jail, and I’m really not as sad about that as it may seem,” Mr. Ellsberg recalled Mr. Kehler saying through intermittent tears. “There’s something really beautiful about it, and I’m very excited that I’ll be invited to join them very soon.”
Mr. Kehler’s speech persuaded Mr. Ellsberg to take a radical step of his own. A few months later he and a fellow analyst, Anthony J. Russo, photocopied thousands of pages of a Pentagon report detailing how the government had secretly expanded the war effort while presenting a misleading positive outlook on its progress.
In 1971, Mr. Ellsberg leaked the documents to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for The New York Times, who revealed them in a front-page article that dealt a fatal blow to the American engagement in Vietnam.
“No Randy Kehler, no Pentagon Papers,” Mr. Ellsberg said on many occasions.
After getting out of prison in 1973, Mr. Kehler moved to western Massachusetts to become a teacher. With the war ending, he turned to other focuses of activism, including conservation, campaign-finance reform and nuclear disarmament.
He married Ms. Corner in 1976. The next year, when they had a combined income large enough to incur federal taxes, they wrote a letter to the I.R.S. explaining that while they would pay state and local levies, they refused to contribute to the U.S. military and would instead give the money to humanitarian causes.
Twelve years later, the I.R.S. sent U.S. marshals to seize the couple’s home in Colrain. They found Mr. Kehler waiting for them, alone, playing Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria” on an upright piano. They let him finish, then arrested him for trespassing.
When Ms. Corner came home, they arrested her as well, but the judge dropped the charges when she promised not to return to the house. Mr. Kehler refused to make the same promise, so the judge sent him to jail for contempt.
The I.R.S. struggled to find a buyer. When it did, friends of the couple — including a group of Buddhist monks — established a camp around the house and shut off its water and power. That led to an 18-month standoff with the new owners, who finally agreed to leave in 1995.
Though Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner could have struck a deal with the I.R.S. to reoccupy the house, they refused to, saying it would make them complicit. Instead, they moved into a nearby home owned by Ms. Corner’s family and kept their income low enough not to be bothered by the tax authorities again.
“Randy was the ultimate person of conscience,” Aaron Falbel, a friend and fellow activist, said in a phone interview. “He listened to that little voice inside his head, and he acted on it.”
Gordon Randall Kehler was born on July 16, 1944, in Bronxville, N.Y. His father, Gordon M. Kehler, was an executive with a baking company, and his mother, Elsie (Wharton) Kehler, managed the home.
While an undergraduate, he worked for the Harlem chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality and spent several months tutoring refugees in a camp in Tanzania. His students had been driven from their home by forces equipped with U.S. warplanes, a fact that inspired his work with the War Resisters League after graduating with a degree in government.
Mr. Kehler’s first marriage ended in divorce. Along with Ms. Corner, he is survived by their daughter, Lillian Whitsett; his brothers, Rob and Charlie; his sister, Mary Liz; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner’s former home in Colrain was a modest white clapboard structure with a steeply pitched roof on which they hung a banner that read “Swords Into Plowshares.” Their fight with the I.R.S. was the subject of a 1997 documentary, “An Act of Conscience,” narrated by Martin Sheen.
Despite the onset of his disease, which induces extreme fatigue, Mr. Kehler continued his activism, including speaking to high school and college students. Among his talking points was this piece of advice:
“Don’t ever, ever assume that anything you do, particularly if it’s an act of conscience, won’t make a difference.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 3, 2024, Section B, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Randy Kehler, 80, Dies; Activist Who Inspired Leak of Pentagon Papers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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