Don't worry, be Mike Gravel

In 1966, he tried to take out the incumbent occupant of Alaska's lone U.S. House seat, a fellow Democrat. He failed. In 1968, he set his sights on the U.S. Senate. To get there he again targeted a Democratic incumbent, the grand old man of state politics. In the Democratic primary, 38-year-old Gravel beat 81-year-old Ernest Gruening, a former territorial governor whom many considered the father of Alaska statehood, by playing up his youth. He blanketed the low-cost Alaska television market with the slickest political commercials the fledgling state had ever seen. Though it might come as a surprise to his newfound fans, the liberal Gravel also ran to the right of Gruening on the issue of Vietnam. Gruening had been one of just two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which authorized the Vietnam War.

Gravel says now that he was never really a hawk. "If Ernest Gruening only knew at the time that when he voted against Tonkin, I wrote him a heartfelt letter saying how great he was for doing that," Gravel says. "But when I ran, being a realistic politician, all I had to do was stand up and not deal with the subject, and people would assume that I was to the right of Ernest Gruening, when in point of fact I was to the left of him."

In the Senate, Gravel proved to be antiwar and a reliable liberal on most issues except the environment -- though he was an early crusader against nuclear testing, as an Alaskan, his political survival required him to support resource exploitation. Gravel also became known as a firebrand with an unorthodox style of doing business. Nancy Leonard, who worked as his representative on the Senate Finance Committee, says now that Gravel "didn't just dismiss an idea on the basis of 'We don't do things that way.' He'd think, 'Is there a way to do them differently?' ... He did a couple of really good things ... but he was never going to be one of those 'Let's dig down and burrow and figure out the rules here and see what we can accomplish day-to-day' senators."

Gravel reports that his old colleague Joe Biden recently put the matter more plainly. After the first Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Biden, who served with Gravel in the Senate 30 years ago, introduced Gravel to Mrs. Biden. According to Gravel, Biden told her what to expect from Gravel on the presidential campaign trail. "He says, 'I've got to tell you, this is the old Gravel -- he's just going to be lobbing hand grenades into this whole thing.'"

Sometimes Gravel's methods were both dramatic and effective. In June 1971, after the Nixon administration obtained temporary injunctions to stop both the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing further portions of the controversial Pentagon Papers, a secret internal Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court agreed to take both cases. The night before the court's decision, so that the papers would be public no matter how the court ruled, for three and a half hours Gravel read passages of the Pentagon Papers aloud in a Senate subcommittee meeting, pausing to cry, and entered thousands of pages into the Congressional Record. He, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky then published the Pentagon Papers as a book. The same year, Gravel's lengthy filibuster against a continuation of the military draft was successful, and it helped bring about the end of conscription in 1973.

Other times he just annoyed people. In 1972 he nominated himself, unsuccessfully, for vice president at the Democratic National Convention. In 1978, he killed a compromise bill on the question of huge parcels of Alaska land then still under control of the federal government. The bill, which would have brought some of the property under the control of Alaskans while also determining how much would be preserved as parks and refuges, was the product of the almost-obsessive work of many disparate groups and, especially, Ted Stevens, the state's Republican senator. Stevens, who through a spokesman declined a request to be interviewed for this article, reportedly blames this, and Gravel, for the death of his wife, Ann, in a plane crash later that year when she was accompanying Stevens on a trip. In 1979, testifying before a House committee, Stevens said he thought that "if that bill had passed, I might have a wife sitting at home when I get home tonight." A 1979 Washington Post article by Nicholas Lemann said that Stevens had been "drop[ping] hints, in Washington and Alaska, that he felt the only reason he was in that plane in the first place was that he had to piece the effort for a lands bill back together, and that the only reason he had to do that was that Mike Gravel killed the bill."

In 1980, a new lands bill, less favorable to Gravel and the Alaskan interests he was representing, passed over his objections and his filibuster. In this instance, as in his biggest legislative achievement -- pushing the Alaska pipeline through the Senate -- Gravel took a stand that might trouble potential backers in his current presidential bid.

The passage of the lands bill was widely believed to be the reason for Gravel's loss in the 1980 Democratic Senate primary to Clark Gruening, the grandson of Ernest. After his loss, Gravel tried to go back to being a businessman, at least for the first decade or so. He did some consulting. He had a stockbroker's license. There were dabblings in real estate. He had a condo business that went bankrupt; it was undercapitalized, he says, and there was a lawsuit. There was another lawsuit over a business deal, in which he represented himself against predecessors of the Carlyle Group, the well-connected and controversial private equity firm that has counted among its employees and investors members of the Bush and bin Laden families and has owned defense and communications companies.

Then in 1989 he scaled back his less-than-gung-ho pursuit of money and returned to his original passion. He started to get interested in politics again and in an idea that had always interested him: national referenda. He wanted to turn the American people into one massive legislative body 300 million legislators strong. Over the period of a decade he researched the concept of the "national initiative." He drafted a law and created three interlocking nonprofit groups, Direct Democracy, Philadelphia II and the Democracy Foundation, to work on it. The National Initiative is also the idea that prompted his run for presidency.

"In order to get it enacted, a friend of mine suggested, 'Gravel, you've got to run for president.' I was not interested at first," Gravel says. "And then I realized that this could be an opportunity to make it known, so I told friends that I was running for president, and they were all excited ... But I didn't really think I could win. Around January of '06, I was looking at the other candidates, and I started to say, 'I don't know if I can win, but I sure can beat them.'"

Gravel is running for president despite a post-Senate résumé, a financial history and a medical chart that might give a more introspective man pause. His single-minded pursuit of the National Initiative, as well as three surgeries in 2003, one to install rods in his back and two for neuropathy, drove him into bankruptcy in 2004. In his filing, Gravel listed $85,000 in credit card debt and virtually no assets beyond a car.

Most politicians would think twice about running for president in 2008 if they had declared bankruptcy four years earlier. This one, however, doesn't mind discussing his bankruptcy in detail. "After [the National Initiative] had done a conference, raised some money for that, didn't have enough money, I started using credit cards. I had about five, six credit cards. So when I really had a bad year healthwise, there was concern about my wife, because she might be liable for what had occurred, and it was all done for the National Initiative. And she said, 'Well, maybe you should think about bankruptcy.'" Gravel had watched one of his business concerns go bankrupt two decades before. "I had been there. I didn't want to mess with that again. And then I thought about it: 'My God, isn't this interesting? I'm going to get these six credit card companies who have been predators on normal people. I'm going to get them to contribute to the National Initiative.' And I filed bankruptcy just in a heartbeat, and that was it."

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