On this day in 1965, a young father and devout Quaker named Norman Morrison set himself on fire underneath the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara  to protest the Vietnam War.

In her essay about her trip to Hanoi, Susan Sontag would remember that nearly everyone she met would make a point of telling her that they loved American people, it was only the government that was the enemy. As evidence they would talk about their admiration for Morrison, whose picture she found the taxi drivers had attached to their dashboards.