A number of intellectuals came together to create the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” These included Marc Raskin and Arthur Waskow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, Noam Chomsky and others in Cambridge, MA, Donald Kalish at UCLA, and in New York, a group led by Robert Zevin, then a professor of economics at Columbia. It was Zevin who opened an office and hired the first staff person for the organization, Resist, that would attempt to implement the call. These individuals and others circulated the call, mostly by mail, to colleagues and friends.

To the young men of America, to the whole of the American people, and to all men of goodwill everywhere:

• 1. An ever growing number of young American men are finding that the American war in Vietnam so outrages their deepest moral and religious sense that they cannot contribute to it in any way. We share their moral outrage.

• 2. We further believe that the war is unconstitutional and illegal. Congress has not declared a war as required by the Constitution. Moreover, under the Constitution, treaties signed by the President and ratified by the Senate have the same force as the Constitution itself. The Charter of the United Nations is such a treaty. The Charter specifically obligates the United States to refrain from force or the threat of force in international relations. It requires member states to exhaust every peaceful means of settling disputes and to submit disputes which cannot be settled peacefully to the Security Council. The United States has systematically violated all of these Charter provisions for thirteen years.

• 3. Moreover, this war violates international agreements, treaties and principles of law which the United States Government has solemnly endorsed. The combat role of the United States troops in Vietnam violates the Geneva Accords of 1954 which our government pledged to support but has since subverted. The destruction of rice crops and livestock; the burning and bulldozing of entire villages consisting exclusively of civilian structures; the interning of civilian non-combatants in concentration camps; the summary executions of civilians in captured villages who could not produce satisfactory evidence of their loyalties or did not wish to be removed to concentration camps;