Norman Morrison Pentagon Fire Protest

In 1965, Norman R. Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker and anti-war activist from Baltimore, went to the Pentagon and doused himself in kerosene below the office of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He brought his one-year-old daughter, Emily, with him, set her down or handed her to someone in the crowd, and then set himself on fire, an act inspired by photographs of Vietnamese children burned by napalm and by earlier Buddhist self-immolations. Morrison died within minutes after an ambulance took him to nearby Fort Myer.

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