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Remarks by
Monica Green Many, maybe even most of us, here today were personally inspired by Randy, as I was when I joined the Nuclear Freeze movement in Ohio, just out of college in the early 1980s. Actually, when I first joined the Cleveland Heights Freeze, I heard a lot about two Randys - each of whom were national leaders in the Freeze movement. Initially, I didn’t even know that Randy Forsberg – unlike Randy Kehler - was a woman! But once I met her, the combination of Randy’s intelligence, passion, eloquence, and beauty, made an unforgettable impression, and made me a lifelong fan. When I was asked a couple of years ago to write about women in the nuclear disarmament movement for the 50th anniversary Peace Action book, I knew that Randy would figure largely in what I wrote. When I had just joined the staff of the Nuclear Freeze, and was still deciphering all those nuclear acronyms, Randy came to speak at the Cleveland City Club. She visited our little grassroots office, and I drove her to and/or from the airport. At one point in the car we had a brief personal conversation in which she encouraged me to continue my work for the Freeze, and essentially to honor my own convictions. That brief conversation helped me gain confidence in a field in which I had no formal training (I had been an English major) – enabling me to contribute my energy and skills to a critically important effort to change the world, and at the same time deeply enriching my life. After I moved to Washington to work with the national office of Peace Action, it was always a special pleasure when Randy visited from Boston and brought her incisive analysis, clear thinking, and bright smile to a disarmament meeting. I knew very little about Randy personally, though, before I did some research for the Peace Action book chapter, and my admiration grew as I learned more about her. My respect for Randy has deepened further in recent weeks as I’ve read one tribute after another by journalists, colleagues and friends - tributes that have appeared in publications all over the U.S. and beyond. Many of the obituaries about Randy have retold the story of the Nuclear Freeze movement, and of subsequent chapters in Randy’s impressive career. But it has been the descriptions of Randy’s personal qualities that I have found most moving and I would like to share a few with you. The London Times commented that Randy “had significant political influence … and the rare ability to talk with political leaders in terms they understood.” All of us who knew Randy can testify that she was not only a brilliant thinker, but she was able to communicate her analysis and her ideas clearly to others whose expertise on weapons and military policy came nowhere near approaching hers. Joshua Cohen, a board member of Randy’s Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, said this of Randy: "She never lost sight of what the larger issue was, an end to war… I think what she thought was that ultimately moral progress in the area of security would come when people came to regard going to war in the way we now envision cannibalism, or slavery, or human sacrifice . . . . You just don't do that.” John Tirman wrote in the Boston Globe: “Above all, her exemplary life is a tribute to the power of an individual's capacity to change history. Her combination of knowledge, inventiveness, and persistence is itself a rarity. But Randy Forsberg proved it could be done, a glorious paragon of the better angels of our nature.” In the Nation, Jonathan Schell concluded with these words: “More striking than her great mental capacities was the rarer quality of her readiness, from early adulthood until the day she died, to pour her life into the service of her convictions. Forsberg’s death took place, as all of our deaths must today, in a world still shadowed by the peril of a nuclear holocaust. Against the background of this engulfing darkness, which she fought with every fiber of her being, the memory of her life shines with a brilliant light.” Finally, Randy’s sister Celia said: “She will be remembered as a peacemaker… What’s most important is that she believed it was possible to end international war. And I think she was right.” Today I have the privilege of officially announcing the establishment of the Randy Forsberg Memorial Fellowship Fund. Randy felt strongly about helping young people gain a footing in the disarmament policy world – she always had students helping in her office at IDDS. The Forsberg Memorial Fellowship program, initiated by the Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund, will help perpetuate Randy’s legacy by funding a part-time internship for a young organizer, probably a college student, to work with Mass Peace Action during a school semester or summer to build the movement for nuclear disarmament and the end of war. This concert is the first event in support of this important effort, and we are grateful to you for supporting this memorial tribute to Randy by being here today. I’d like to close with an anecdote I came across the other day. Those of you who were at the June 12 rally in New York City in 1982 may remember Randy looking out over the crowd and exulting: “We’ve done it! The nuclear freeze campaign has mobilized the biggest peacetime peace movement in United States history. The politicians don’t believe it yet.” Then she continued: “Until the arms race
stops, until we have a world with peace and justice, we will not
go home and be quiet. We will go home and organize.” |
