Before the end of the war in Vietnam was declared on April 30, 1975, Kovic became one of the best-known peace activists among the Vietnam veterans and was arrested 12 times for participating in anti-war demonstrations. He attended his first peace demonstration soon after the
Kent State shootings in May 1970. That same spring, Kovic’s first speech against the war at
Levittown Memorial High School in
Levittown, Long Island, New York was interrupted by a bomb threat and the auditorium was cleared. In 1974, Kovic led a group of disabled Vietnam War veterans in wheelchairs on a 17-day
hunger strike inside the Los Angeles office of Senator
Alan Cranston. The veterans protested the "poor treatment in America's veterans' hospitals and demanded better treatment for returning veterans, a full investigation of all
Veterans Administration (VA) facilities, and a direct meeting with the Director of the VA,
Donald E. Johnson. The strike continued to escalate until Johnson finally agreed to fly out from Washington, D.C. and meet with Kovic and the other veterans. The hunger strike ended soon afterwards. Several months later, Johnson resigned from his post. In late August 1974, Kovic traveled to
Belfast,
Northern Ireland, where he spent a week in the Roman Catholic stronghold of "
Turf Lodge", interviewing both political activists and residents. In the spring of 1975, Kovic, author
Richard Boyle, and photo journalist Loretta Smith traveled to Cambodia to cover the
Cambodian Civil War for
Pacific News Service. In 1990, Kovic considered running for a seat in the House of Representatives as a Democrat against California Republican
Bob Dornan, but he ultimately decided not to run. From 1990 to 1991, Kovic participated in several anti-war demonstrations against the first
Gulf War, which occurred not long after the release of his biographical film in 1989. In early May 1999, following the
U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, Kovic met with China's ambassador to the United States
Li Zhaoxing at the
Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. to express his condolences and present the ambassador and his staff with two dozen red roses. He was an outspoken critic of the
Iraq War. In a new introduction to his book,
Born on the Fourth of July (1976), written in March 2005, Kovic stated, "I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war, to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward, not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence. I had been beaten by the police and arrested twelve times for protesting the war and I had spent many nights in jail in my wheelchair. I had been called a
Communist and a traitor, simply for trying to tell the truth about what had happened in that war, but I refused to be intimidated." In 1989, on the last day of filming of
Born on the Fourth of July, Kovic presented actor
Tom Cruise, who portrayed him in the movie, the original Bronze Star he had received, explaining to Cruise that he was giving him the medal as a gift "for his heroic performance". ==Legacy==