Anti-War Senator Mike Gravel Dies
By Jason Sibert
Anti-war Senator Mike Gravel passed away last weekend.
Gravel served as Alaska’s senator from 1969 to 1981. He lived in Seaside Calif. during the latter portion of his life. He was 91 years old and suffered from multiple myeloma at the time of his death.
Gravel’s Senate tenure in the Senate was notable for his anti-war activity. In 1971, he led a one-man filibuster to protest the Vietnam-era draft and read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page leaked document known as the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s history of the country’s early involvement in Vietnam.
The former Alaska senator reentered politics in 2006 when he ran for president in the Democratic primary for the 2008 election. He launched his campaign as a critic of the 2003 Iraq war.
“I believe America is doing harm every day our troops remain in Iraq — harm to ourselves and to the prospects for peace in the world,” Gravel said in 2006. He hitched his campaign to an effort that would give all policy decisions to the people through a direct vote, including health care reform and declarations of war.
Gravel made his opinions known in the Democratic debates in 2008. In one debate, the issue of the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran came up, and Gravel confronted then-Sen. Obama. “Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?” Gravel said. Obama replied: “I’m not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike.”
He ran as a Libertarian candidate in the 2008 Libertarian presidential race but didn’t win the nomination. Gravel briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. He vowed to slash military spending and criticized American wars. The former Alaska senator didn’t last long. So, he endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders.
The anti-war senator said President George W Bush should be tried for crimes at the Hague for the invasion of Iraq. He also criticized President Barack Obama’s drone strikes and said he and Bush should be tried at the International Criminal Court of Justice.
Gravel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on May 13, 1930. In Alaska, he served as a state representative, including a stint as House speaker, in the mid-1960s. He won his first Senate term after defeating incumbent Sen. Ernest Gruening, a former territorial governor, in the 1968 Democratic primary. Gravel served two terms until he was defeated in the 1980 Democratic primary by Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening, who lost the election to Republican Frank Murkowski.
Jason Sibert is the Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis.
