In 1974, seven disabled veterans of the Vietnam War occupied the Los Angeles office of U.S. Senator Alan Cranston and staged a hunger strike. The action was the first of the fledgling Americans Veterans Movement, an organization cooked up on a whim by U.S. Marine Corps veteran Ron Kovic. Kovic became an author and an anti-war activist, penning his best-selling memoir Born on the Fourth of July in 1976.