Voice of experience

By J. Patrick Coolican

Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007 | 7:29 a.m.

Mike Gravel was given the Pentagon Papers at midnight outside the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. in June 1971.

Then a U.S. Senator from Alaska, Gravel had been handed the secret government history of the Vietnam War, which exposed many of the deceptions at the heart of America's conflict in Southeast Asia.

In 1972, Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel wrote "Citizen Power: A People's Platform," collecting his thoughts on the issues of the day: the environment, health care, nuclear power, poverty and government reform, among others. His writings on war and warfare seem particularly prescient today. Below, an excerpt on the Vietnam War.

"In the eyes of the rest of the world, this country has shown itself to be one of the major problems of world order. Our desire to use power where and when we please has made us one of the world's most dangerous nations. I am not saying that other nations are more peace-loving. It is only that we have the power to be a danger to world peace with no constraints on our nation's leaders but their own moral judgment."

The papers were highly classified, the leaker the subject of the largest FBI manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. Gravel hid them under his bed.

Soon after , he risked his career and his freedom by reading the documents into a U.S. Senate subcommittee record, thus making them public.

For Gravel, it was the most significant chapter in his life and nearly destroyed him. He left the Senate after losing his bid for re election in 1980, disgusted with government and politics, and embarked on a business career that failed , not to be heard from again.

But just as Iraq seems more and more like Vietnam - the brainy but naive intellectuals who supported it, the endless claims of progress, the shifting rationale, the death and destruction - so now returns Mike Gravel, like some resurrected voice of anti-war movements past.

It's a voice more powerful in a 90-minute conversation than in the sound bites of televised debates, where he's come across as slightly wild-eyed and eccentric. (In one debate, he aroused curiosity by openly talking about getting his "meds" from the VA. He said he takes one pain pill per day for what sounds like a very painful nerve condition.)

Now that he has emerged from nearly three decades of obscurity to run for president, the 77-year old Democratic long shot is rewriting a book he published back then called "Citizen Power."

The similarities, then and now, are chilling, he said in a sit down with the Sun on Thursday.

"Just doing that chapter on warfare, I'm awestruck," he said. "I'm not changing a word so far. You could read it and substitute Vietnam for Iraq, substitute Westmoreland for Petraeus, and it's totally deja vu."

Many Americans know the history of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon analyst who leaked the documents to The New York Times, The Washington Post and more than a dozen other papers across the country. The papers were forced to heavily edit the 7,000 pages of documents and their coverage of them because of space constraints.

Gravel made 4,100 pages of the documents public. His chapter of the story has been largely forgotten because Gravel disappeared from public life after 1980. He told one interviewer that he "crawled under a rock," so alienated he'd become from public life.

To hear Gravel relate , both in an interview and a recent public radio broadcast, how he came to receive the Pentagon Papers and make them part of the public record is to relive a painful and divisive time in American history, and to get a look into Gravel's enigmatic personality that would turn those dark times into fodder for a rollicking barroom tale.

Ellsberg said in a telephone interview last week that he first sought out other anti-war senators, such as George McGovern and William Fulbright, who declined to make the Pentagon Papers public.

Ellsberg took note of Gravel's filibustering on the renewal of the draft, which Gravel was trying to abolish. (The draft ended two years later.)

"He was the single senator with the guts, he was really sticking his neck out," Ellsberg recalled. "He had a kind of courage no one else had."

Gravel said he got the call while on a massage table in the Senate gym, in the kind of candid detail he is given to offer.

He began making arrangements to set a new record for a filibuster, which is a delaying tactic allowed under Senate rules. He would read the Pentagon Papers on the floor of the Senate.

Ellsberg had them delivered through an intermediary.

Once Gravel received them, his staff helped him read, organize and remove names that needed to remain secret. (Another fascinating paradox of Gravel: Though clearly a voracious reader, his dyslexia makes the task arduous, to this day.)

To prepare for his expected record filibuster, he said, he went to a doctor to get a colostomy bag so he would not have to leave the proceedings.

"My administrative assistant's job was to bleed my colostomy bag," he said.

Senate leadership, perhaps sensing something was up, blocked his attempt at a filibuster.

So Gravel called a meeting of the sole subcommittee he chaired - buildings and grounds.

He began reading the documents into the record, but then broke into sobs, not having slept for several days.

An aide urged him to stop, and he moved to place the rest of the papers into the record.

Among the documents' many revelations were that President Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war while promising not to. For many Americans, the documents were a devastating blow to the government's credibility.

Gravel said the only time he's ever regretted not being in the U.S. Senate was when it was considering giving President Bush authorization to attack Iraq in October 2002.

"You could see this thing coming down the pike," he said Thursday. "If I had been there in Washington on Oct. 11, I would have filibustered this thing."

Given his history with Vietnam, it would seem Gravel would be well-positioned to run a campaign that would remind Americans of the lessons learned there, and how to extricate the nation from Iraq.

He argues forcefully that the country is in the throes of what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex."

American government, and indeed, American society, have been taken over by a frightening militarism that only he is willing to confront, Gravel said.

And yet, his effectiveness as a messenger isn't always clear. (See Pentagon Papers, colostomy bag, or, when discussing how similar Vietnam and Iraq are, saying "It will make you want to barf.")

Gravel is the candidate, perhaps the only one in the race, radically unafraid to say what he believes, which can be refreshing, but also distracting.

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is "morally unfit to be president."

Arizona Sen. John McCain "is a hero, a hero who dropped bombs on people who did him no harm."

And despite his strong and well-articulated belief about the need to end American militarism, it's oddly not the focus of his campaign.

Instead, his central theme is something called the National Initiative for Democracy, which would install an initiative system like that of states such as Nevada, on a national scale.

Representative democracy has failed, he said.

Asked about California, which has seen its initiative process manipulated by special interests, he called it one of the "best governed states in America."

On representative democracy's successes, such as the New Deal and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he said they came from the people, not from the government.

Gravel is also dealing with the issues of any shoe string candidate. Since leaving the Senate, he's struggled financially, which means he can't bankroll his campaign.

He has no paid staff.

When he launched his campaign at the national press club, his dyslexia caused him to confuse '4' and '9,' which meant the phone number listed for the campaign was wrong. He'd spent most of his money on the banner.

It was the number of a little old Vietnamese woman, he said. She took down the numbers of people who called, and spelled their names phonetically so Gravel could call them back.

Perhaps he's delusional, but he sounds convinced his campaign will take off: "People think I'm way out there," Gravel said. "I've got news for them. Anything can happen in politics. When I showed up in Alaska I was broke. The next week I had a job, and 12 years later I was a United States senator."

Sun reporter Michael J. Mishak contributed to this report.