Max Cleland, Vietnam veteran and former senator, dies
Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm during the Vietnam War and who became a senator from Georgia, only to lose his seat after Republicans impugned his patriotism, died, Tuesday, at his home in Atlanta. He was 79.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Jason D. Meininger, a close friend.
After a grenade accident in Vietnam, in 1968, Cleland spent 18 months recuperating. He served in local politics in his native Georgia and as head of the federal Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs, before he was elected in 1996 to the US Senate.
But it was his treatment at the hands of Republicans while he was seeking reelection in 2002 that made him a Democratic cause célèbre.
Running for another term just a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he was the target of an infamous 30-second television spot that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while it questioned Cleland’s commitment to homeland security and implied that he was soft on the war on terror.
It was the ad’s images in particular that created the uproar. Even prominent Republicans, including Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel, both Vietnam veterans, were outraged.
“I’ve never seen anything like that ad,” McCain told The Washington Post. “Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful; it’s reprehensible.”
Hagel said he recoiled when he saw the ad, and it rankled many others, who noted that Cleland’s Republican opponent, Rep. Saxby Chambliss, had avoided military service.
When Cleland lost the election to Chambliss, 46% to 53%, which helped the Republicans narrowly recapture the Senate, the ad was perceived as having made a difference.
In fact, Cleland had been losing ground in the polls before the ad was aired. He was already seen as too liberal and out of step with Georgia voters.
But the ad was so explosive that Democrats seized on it and made the attacks on Cleland emblematic of the low road that they said the Republicans, led by President George W. Bush’s aggressive political operative, Karl Rove, would take to achieve their ends.
In the fraught post-9/11 era, the ad was also a harbinger of things to come. Two years later, as Cleland predicted, a small group of veterans sought to undermine the wartime record of Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, who was a decorated Vietnam veteran.
At the Democratic convention in Boston, where Kerry was nominated, James Carville, the party strategist, introduced Cleland by saying he would go down in history for the injustice he suffered in 2002. Whipping up the crowd by recalling old slogans like “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine,” Carville declared: “We’re going to Remember Max.”
“In some ways,” the Los Angeles Times said, “Cleland is more powerful as a symbol than he ever was as a senator.”
Beyond what he came to symbolize, Cleland was crushed by losing the race, which plunged him into a deep depression.
“It broke his heart,” Kerry recalled in a phone interview. “That ad was such a dastardly, disgraceful hit. And it set the template.”
The loss of his seat and the start of the Iraq War in 2003 triggered a long-dormant case of post-traumatic stress disorder that sent Cleland back to Walter Reed hospital, outside Washington, where he had been treated after his injuries in Vietnam.
“After I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed,” he told History.net. “I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.”
His anxiety was compounded, he said, because he had voted for the Iraq War, a stance he took, he said later, because if he had voted against it, he would have been “dead meat” in his reelection bid. He said it was the worst vote he had cast.
As therapy, he wrote a book, “Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove” (with Ben Raines, 2009).