When the news came that Daniel Ellsberg led a rally in Concord, New Hampshire, to help impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, I happened to be looking at the entries for the year 1967 in an almanac.
That year, the United States kept expanding its forces in Vietnam amid mounting protests worldwide, and I was marveling how it was that it took so many more years before that lopsided, prolonged war America waged in a remote land ended.
In the increasingly helpless atmosphere the war engendered, which I remember only too well, the contentions over the Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg helped bring to light in 1971, cast a ray of light, if I may use a term reminiscent the phrase often used during the Vietnam War: "the light at the end of the tunnel." I was looking at the year 1967 because, on Feb. 28, 1967, four Japanese writers issued an appeal condemning the Cultural Revolution, another upheaval that was unfolding.