Max Cleland, former Democratic U.S. Senator from Georgia, died at his home at the age of 79 from congestive heart failure on Nov. 9, AP reported.
Cleland, who later became a strenuous critic of U.S. wars, enlisted to fight in Vietnam as a U.S. Army Captain. He told this writer that everyone knew that a major battle would take place at Khe Sanh with the Viet Cong, and he wanted to be in the action. In the confusion of battle, he picked up a hand grenade he thought he had dropped. He had, in fact, not dropped it, and the pin had been pulled. Its explosion blew off both his legs and his right arm, and he was hospitalized for many months. He blamed himself for decades, but later learned another soldier had dropped that grenade. Cleland, who had been an accomplished athlete, writes, “I sat in my mother and daddy’s living room and took stock of my life. No job. No hope of a job. No offer of a job. No girlfriend. No apartment. No car. And I said, this is a good time to run for state Senate,” AP reported.
Cleland did enter politics, and won the state Senate seat. He ran a failed campaign for Lieutenant Governor, and then-President Jimmy Carter named him to run the Veterans Affairs Administration. He won Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat of retiring Sam Nunn, which he held for six years.
With the Bush presidency in 2001, Dick Cheney came in as vice-president. Senator Cleland was outraged by Bush-Cheney’s determination to continue “endless war” at all costs. The LaRouche movement was then exposing Cheney’s attempts to start wars, and deploy American military forces abroad. During that time, Senator Cleland was receptive and eager to get the LaRouche organization’s intelligence, as a weapon to block Vice-President Cheney’s moves for war.