1) Senator Gravel successfully halted the Pentagon's Cannikin Nuclear Tests in the 50s and 60s - 5 scheduled tests of a nuclear weapon determined to be "obsolete" to be detonated under the seabed of the North Pacific at Amchitka Island, Alaska; Gravel took his fight beyond the Senate, organizing a global coalition that succeeded in preventing three of the planned environmentally devastating detonations.
2) In 1971, Gravel staged a successful 5-month filibuster against legislation to renew the peace-time military draft that had been policy since 1947; President Nixon and Senate Republicans were forced to save face by letting the policy expire in 1973. Many young men and women with no desire to be fighting a war in Iraq or Afghanistan undoubtedly owe Senator Gravel a debt of gratitude - myself among them.
3) On June 29, 1971 Mike Gravel entered 4,100 pages of the Pentagon Papers - which revealed the previously classified government's own account of the policymaking process behind the US decision to go to war in Vietnam - into the Congressional record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds; the significance of the entry was that, Article I, Section 6 of the US Constitution states that "for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place;" this meant that the Papers were now allowed to be read publicly without threat of legal action.
It occurs to me that I am most compelled to share this information because as I watched Gravel in the debates, it didn't occur to me that this former Senator from Alaska was a serious candidate who had made a serious decision to run for President of the United States. Rather, I bought into poor media coverage of a "raw candidate." The irony here for me is that Gravel entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record precisely because the media was an inadequate conduit for the publication of some of the most significant government documents ever made public. As I have been utterly unaware throughout the 2008 primary campaigns of Senator Gravel's role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, his filibuster to end the draft and his actions to halt "obsolete" nuclear weapons tests - yet well-informed of the price of his opponent's haircut, it is suddenly not so difficult to see why the CIA illegally destroys interrogation tapes...
The following excerpt is from the introduction of what is known as The Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers. Compiled by the Senator, edited and annotated by the Noam Chomsky Howard Zinn, it is the most comprehensive edition of the Papers published to date.
"However, the public has not had access to this study [the Pentagon Papers]. Newspapers in possession of the documents have published excerpts from them and have prepared their own summary of the study’s findings. In doing this, they have performed a valuable public service. But every American is entitled to examine the study in full and to digest for himself the lessons it contains. The people must know the full story of their government’s actions over the past twenty years, to ensure that never again will this great nation be led into waging a war through ignorance and deception" (italics added).
"It is for this reason that I determined, when I came into possession of this material, that it must be made available to the American public. For the tragic history it reveals must now be known. The terrible truth is that the Papers do not support our public statements. The Papers do not support our good intentions. The Papers prove that, from the beginning, the war has been an American war, serving only to perpetuate American military power in Asia. Peace has never been on the American agenda for Southeast Asia. Neither we nor the South Vietnamese have been masters of our Southeast Asian policy; we have been its victims, as the leaders of America sought to preserve their reputation for toughness and determination." - Senator Mike Gravel
