![]() So there’s a lot of ancient history associated with Gravel’s career, and a lot of what is generally called “eccentricity.” After his 2008 Democratic campaign sputtered to an end, he switched parties and unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian presidential nomination. He was ultimately replaced in the Senate by Frank Murkowski, father of current Alaska GOP senator Lisa Murkowski). In the end, his Senate career was perfectly bookended: He first won statewide office in 1968 by narrowly defeating Alaska icon Ernest Gruening (best known nationally as one of just two senators who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution used by LBJ as authorization for the Vietnam War) in a primary campaign that was about generational change rather than issues, and then lost a 1980 primary to Gruening’s grandson. ![]() interventionism abroad has been his most consistent position (his own edition of the Pentagon Papers was edited and annotated by lefty anti-imperialist stalwarts Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn), but he annoyed progressives in Alaska by his steady support for development interests. The dramatics of Gravel’s maneuver were typical of his Senate career, which showed considerable courage but also generated charges of showboating and insufficient attention to routine duties. foreign policy, which is why the Nixon administration battled unsuccessfully to keep them secret. Supreme Court lifted an injunction on publishing them in the press.” The papers, a collection of internal DoD memos and other materials documenting the planning and execution of the Vietnam War, offered a searing indictment of U.S. interventionism, however, dated back to a much earlier moment of national notoriety, in 1971, when, as Dan Froomkin explained, Gravel “entered 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record just before the U.S. Senate from 1969 until 1981) who has heard of Gravel probably remembers his virtually unfunded 2008 Democratic presidential candidacy, which, thanks to his Senate background, succeeded in getting him into early debates where he served as a bit of an antiwar gadfly. Indeed, most everyone outside Alaska (which he represented in the U.S. Oks and his friends were clearly inspired by Gravel’s performance in the 2008 debates, where he delivered a searing indictment of the vast majority of his fellow candidates for their support of the Iraq war and their continued commitment to American interventionism in the Middle East. “My friends and I were encouraging him to consider running for president with the idea being that he would not try to contest any primaries, he would just try to get into the Democratic debates,” he said. About a week ago, he and a couple friends reached out to Gravel and asked if he would consider making another run for president. Oks, a high school senior who has previously run for mayor of his small New York town, told Splinter that he and several friends are avid listeners of the Chapo Trap House podcast, which mentioned Gravel in a recent episode. Splinter explained how this all happened: This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Googleīy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
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