MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – David Dellinger, whose advocacy for peace stretched from draft resistance in World War II to the Chicago Seven trial in the late 1960s to his strong opposition to the Iraq war, has died at 88.

Dellinger died Tuesday, said Peggy Rocque, administrator of Heaton Woods, the Montpelier retirement home where he had been living. He had suffered for years from Alzheimer’s disease.

“He’ll be remembered so long as there’s a peace and justice movement because he contributed to so many people’s lives and so many causes,” Tom Hayden, a fellow 60s radical who joined Dellinger and others in leading protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said from his home in California.

“Mainly I think he’ll be remembered as a pacifist who meant business,” Hayden said. “His pacifism was very forceful. He didn’t mind interjecting himself between armed federal marshals and someone they were pushing around. He didn’t mind standing up and talking back to a judge even if it meant a contempt citation.”

Greg Guma, editor of the politically progressive magazine “Toward Freedom,” who had known Dellinger for 20 years, called him “one of the major figures in terms of peace and social justice of the last half century. I think he was to the peace movement what Martin Luther King (Jr.) was to the civil rights movement.”

Dellinger’s first arrest as an activist came during a union-organizing protest at Yale, where he was a student in the 1930s. He served two prison terms as a draft resister after declaring himself a conscientious objector during World War II.

As recently as 2001, at age 85, Dellinger got up at 2:45 a.m. and squeezed into a van with a half dozen activists one-quarter his age to travel more than four hours from Montpelier to Quebec City. They were going to protest talks on establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“Three percent of the richest people in the world control more wealth than 49 undeveloped countries,” he said. “I think the FTAA is going to extend that kind of system.”

Dellinger’s protests against war were bound up in his critique of capitalism, which he said led to imperialism and violence.

“The evils in the society today are greater than they were in 1968,” he said in a 1996 interview with The Associated Press. “I enjoy life this way, I enjoy life being in solidarity with the people who are fighting for a better world.”

At the Chicago Seven trial in 1969 and 1970, he and four co-defendants – Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis and Hayden – were convicted of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 convention. Those convictions were overturned by a federal appeals court, which cited errors by U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman.

Dellinger was defiant toward what he saw as oppressive authority throughout his life. When Judge Hoffman invited him to address the court at his sentencing, he continued speaking over several admonitions from the judge to stop.

“You want us to be like good Germans, supporting the evils of our decade and then when we refused to be good Germans and came to Chicago and demonstrated, now you want us to be like good Jews, going quietly and politely to the concentration camps while you and this court suppress freedom and the truth,” Dellinger told the judge. “And the fact is I am not prepared to do that.”

Dellinger’s anti-war stance drew notice internationally. When the North Vietnamese decided to release a few U.S. prisoners of war in 1969, they invited a delegation including Dellinger to receive them. The group flew to Hanoi to do so.

Dellinger wove several strands of activism together. He was a strong defender of organized labor and critic of the nuclear arms race. He marched with civil rights leaders in the South in the 1950s and 60s.

Guma called Dellinger a key figure in forging an alliance in the mid-’60s between the civil rights and anti-war movements. “He was a guy who could bring people together across boundaries,” Guma said.

Born in Wakefield, Mass., in 1915, Dellinger studied economics at Yale, spent a year at Oxford University in England and studied for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary. He wrote several books, the most recent, “From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter,” coming in 1993.

When peace activists gathered for a conference earlier this month at tiny Goddard College outside of Montpelier, they joined in writing a letter to their mentor, Dellinger, whose ill health kept him from attending.

“Now, as we face another war and another convention and election, we look and remember your steadfast leadership during the protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, as well as your many less publicized direct actions, against weapons manufacturing and the CIA, and in support of civil rights, and prisoners of conscience,” they wrote.

“Your example continues to inspire us, and motivates us to work for a better world.”