Former Senator Mike Gravel who was one of the very few true anti-war politicians in Washington and risked everything when he made the Pentagon Papers public record died Sunday at the age of 91.
EMPIRE Media has never been a website that’ll stan a politician and/or support any cult of personality around them which is often the perception on CNN when Gloria Borger will gush over a milquetoast Joe Biden or Sean Hannity’s tendencies to provide Donald Trump with verbal back rubs night after night on Fox News.
Relative though to the position of a politician in the United States, Mike Gravel was a different breed and is worthy of the recognition of being that rare bureaucrat who was genuine in their fight for regular, everyday people. A breed that the Democratic Party tried to suppress during his POTUS runs notably when the DNC changed the rules to be on the debate stage, only to change them back in 2020 in order to get a corporate shill like Mike Bloomberg back on.
And here’s exactly why the DNC did everything they could to keep Gravel off the stage give he was no stranger to speaking truth to power.
However, before the days of WikiLeaks and database dumps on some Tor network, Mike Gravel was directly exposing U.S. imperialism and the propaganda that encompassed it.
In 1971, Gravel read over 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers—the classified documents leaked by Daniel Ellsberg that brought to the surface U.S. government lies about the Vietnam War—into the Congressional Record. Gravel’s reading came only a day before the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an injunction on the New York Times and the Post from further publication after the outlet previously posted excerpts from the report.
Columbia Magazine detailed earlier this month the scene on the evening of June 29, 1971:
There was a clutch of microphones on the table before him, and Gravel spoke into them. “The people must know the full story of what has occurred in the past twenty years in their government,” he said. “The story is a terrible one. It is replete with duplicity, connivance, against the public and public officials. I know of nothing in our history to equal it for extent of failure and extent of loss in all aspects of the terms.”
As he spoke, visions of maimed bodies flashed through his sleep-deprived mind.
“People, human beings, are being killed as I speak to you tonight. Killed as a direct result of policy decisions that we as a body have made. Arms, arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies because of a public policy this government”— Gravel, overcome, began to sob. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and composed himself. “One may respond that we made such a sacrifice to preserve freedom and liberty in Southeast Asia. One may respond that we sacrifice ourselves on the continent of Asia so that we will not have to fight a similar war on the shores of America. One can make these arguments only if he has failed to read the Pentagon Papers. That is the terrible truth of it all.”
Bernie Sanders — who Gravel ended up endorsing in 2020 after ending his own campaign said Gravel “was dedicated to ending forever wars and bringing more Americans into the political process. His courage will be deeply missed.”
Meanwhile, Gravel’s legacy lives on through the anti-war movement as well as the Gravel teens who helped spearhead his digital campaign in 2020 and spread his very important message of ending U.S. imperialism and bringing down the military industrial complex.
