When I heard this week that former senator Max Cleland had died – he’s the guy who lost three limbs in Vietnam, but was still slimed by the GOP for being “soft” on terrorism – I thought back to the time I lunched with him in 2004. This was two years after TV ads impugned his patriotism and helped drive him from office. I assumed he might still be bitter. I was wrong. I opened my Philadelphia Inquirer story this way:
“‘Whoop, whoop, whoop!’ Behold the happy warrior. The high laugh comes from down low in the wheelchair, where Max Cleland sits with his leg stumps, gesturing wildly with his only arm, as rivulets of sweat streak across his blue dress shirt.”
Frankly, he had every right to be bitter. What happened to Cleland, during his ’02 Georgia re-election bid, should remind us that Republican demagoguery was toxic long before its MAGA metastasis.
It’s tragic that a war hero who was virtually cleaved in half by a grenade in the heat of battle will likely be most remembered for the bombing he suffered in the political arena. As a patriotic southern Democrat, he’d duly voted Yes for President Bush’s Iraq war resolution. But when he voted to defend federal workers’ collective bargaining rights during the formation of the Homeland Security Department, the GOP ad-makers painted him as a toady for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. He was ousted by challenger Saxby Chambliss, who’d avoided military service with multiple deferments.
Granted, there’s no proof that Cleland’s defeat was triggered by the ad. Georgia was trending red at the time, and Cleland had cast some liberal votes (like, supporting the federal workers’ union). But the notion that you could smear such a person for lacking patriotism…well, suffice it to say that fellow vet John McCain was right when he told the press, “I’ve never seen anything like that ad. 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.”
Cleland was only 59 when he lost his seat. A former Georgia secretary of state and ex-head of the Veterans Administration, he’d banked on having a long Senate career. During our lunch in an Atlanta fried food eatery, he told me – or rather, he thundered at me, while ignoring his plate of chicken drumsticks – that the shock of defeat initially hit him hard: “People think that when senators leave office, they go to heaven. I went to hell. It tore my heart out. It was the most distressing time I ever had, other than getting blown up. I was cut loose from everything I knew, all the dreams I ever had.”
He gestured at me with his only hand, and briefly winced in pain. A few months before we met, he’d broken that hand while falling out of bed during a flu-induced coughing fit. The hand still hurt, and it complicated his routine pivot from wheelchair to car seat. But he wasn’t complaining; the pain was nothing compared to what happened to him in ’68 after he jumped from a chopper into a North Vietnamese zone. He’d needed 43 pints of blood and 18 months in rehab. He’d started that day at six foot two; then he was condemned to live the rest of his life among giants.
He rebounded from his wounds, although it was a long slog. He rebounded from his ’02 emotional wounds as well, but only after spiraling down. He shared with me one of the worst humiliations: Since he no longer had an office, he was reduced to using the “party room” in his Washington apartment building; when the tenants held their annual Super Bowl bash, he had to stack his boxes in the corner and vacate.
By the time I met him, he was doing somewhat better. In the restaurant he greeted people with, “Hey! Gimme a hug!”
He was spending a lot of time on the road campaigning for a fellow Vietnam vet, presidential candidate John Kerry, and that got his adrenaline going. The sad irony is that, ultimately, Kerry too was slimed by the Republicans as a terrorism softy, despite his own war record. (Remember the Orwellian-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?)
Kerry’s ’04 loss was another setback for Cleland, but he soldiered on and did manage to make a living. His congressional friends voted him onto the board of the Export-Import Bank, and in 2009 President Obama hired him to run the American Battle Monuments Commission, a federal agency that manages monuments and cemeteries, honoring our servicemen and women in 17 countries. And not even the dirtiest politics could ever erase what gave him the greatest satisfaction: bonding with fellow wounded warriors.
“What matters most,” he told me at lunch, “was that I see all these vets, I look them in the eye, and sometimes we start crying. There’s an unbelievable amount of pain there, just below the surface – for themselves or for their loved ones. That’s my ultimate purpose, to help others with their pain. If I can do that…well, then, I’ll be OK.”
Hey, Max. Gimme a hug.