New York City - The Nuclear-Free Future Award

August 9, 1999, the fifty-fourth anniversary of the dropping of
Fat Man on Nagasaki. A yellow cord strung up by Los Alamos
National Laboratories (LANL) security marks the point to
which protestors can advance. "This isn’t about civil disobedience,"
says Greg Mello into a blow horn, "this is about civil
justice." Armed police and security forces on one side; approximately
400 adamant demonstrators on the other. To cross the
line means jail. John Tucker, chief of the LANL security division,
stands at the cord looking impervious, models for a Roman
coin to be pressed in his likeness. A fifty-nine year-old protestor
tells a journalist: “We’re the generation that brought the bomb,
and we’re called on
to do away with it.”
He embraces Helen
Caldicott, then steps
up to the microphone of the demonstrators’ improvised stage
and recites a poem by Rabindranath Tagore:
Lifetime Achievement
My Country Awake
Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where words spring from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening
thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
He is the first to step over the line. Surrounded by demonstrators,
journalists, news cameras, he falls down to his knees and
repeats the Lord’s Prayer. The activist we witness in Willem
Malten’s YouTube segment, Cry13, Final Cry, is none other
than Martin Sheen, star of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the man
who played President Josiah Bartlet in the TV-series West Wing.
"I'm all yours," he tells Tucker. "You going to beat me up?"
Taken away in plastic handcuffs, Sheen laughs, “Free at last!
Free at last!” He tells Amy Goodman, “I work for NBC to make
a living. I do this to stay alive.”
12
Martin Sheen was born Ramón Antonio Gerard Estévez on
August 3, 1940, the seventh of ten children to a Spanish-born
father, Francisco Estévez, born in Galicia, Spain, and an Irish
mother, Mary Anne Phelan from County Tipperary. His mother
fled from Ireland during the Irish War of Independence due
to her family’s IRA connections; his father immigrated to the
United States via Cuba. Sheen grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and to
become an actor was always his dream. He tells the story that he
purposely flunked the entrance examination at the University
of Dayton to forego the future his father had planned for him.
Instead, he borrowed money from a local priest and moved to
New York City. The year was 1959; working at odd-jobs and
showing up at auditions, Ramón Estévez took the stage name
Martin Sheen to escape being typecast in ethnic roles. The name
Martin he adopted from Robert Dale Martin, a casting director
for CBS he much admired; the surname Sheen he took from the
popular tele-evengalist Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.
While working on Apocalypse Now, at the age of 36,
Martin Sheen suffered a near fatal heart attack. He was given
his last rights. Coppola: “Marty is not dead until I say so.“
Sheen later said that the heart attack helped him to focus on
what is important in life, helped him to separate the wheat from
the chaff. For his work on the film Gandhi he donated his entire
wage to charity. About Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Trinity
Test, the first atomic detonation, Sheen reminds us: “Those
guys watching that test, who had built that bomb, were not sure
that the atmosphere would not burn and that the universe would
not catch fire. And they didn’t know that, and yet they risked
that. Now that is the epitome of insanity.” For his activism on
behalf of a saner planet, Martin Sheen has been arrested more
than sixty times.
It is fitting that Frida Berrigan gives Martin Sheen’s laudatory
address. Her father, Philip Berrigan, was one of Sheen’s
mentors. Martin remembers the first time he was arrested, when
he joined the Berrigans on a demonstration against Reagan’s
Star Wars program. He recalls, “We placed our bodies at the
doors so the employees on the project couldn’t get through
and I remember being terribly frightened by what was going
to happen.” Our Lifetime Achievement Award laureate tells us:
“It was one of the happiest moments of my life.”