Mike Gravel

Encyclopedia : M : MI : MIK : Mike Gravel

Mike Gravel

Maurice Robert Gravel (born May 13, 1930) better known as Mike Gravel, was a Democratic U.S. Senator from Alaska for two terms, from 1969 to 1981. He is primarily known for having put into the public record a large portion of the Pentagon Papers by entering 4,100 pages of the Papers into the record of his Senate subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, in 1971. He is currently a candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

Contents

1 Early life
2 Political career
3 Career after leaving the Senate
4 Presidential bid in 2008
5 External links

Early life

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Gravel enlisted in the United States Army in 1951 and served in the Counter Intelligence Corps until 1954. He attended Columbia University and studied economics.

Political career

Gravel served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1962 to 1966. During the last two years of his term, he served as the Speaker of the House. He left that body to run for Alaska's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, losing to Howard Wallace Pollock.

In 1968, he ran against incumbent Democratic Senator Ernest Gruening, a popular former governor, for his party's nomination to the U.S. Senate, unexpectedly beating him in the primary and going on to win the general election.

During his first term in the Senate, Gravel authored a book titled Citizen Power. In it, he advocated the implementation of numerous social democratic ideas, including a guaranteed annual income, which he termed a "citizen's wage", of $5,000 per person, regardless of whether the person worked.

In 1971, the same year that he placed more than 4000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record, he embarked on a one-man filibuster against a bill renewing the draft. Using various parliamentary methods, Gravel was able to block the bill for five months before President Richard Nixon and Senate Republicans agreed to allow the draft to expire in 1973.

Gravel actively campaigned for the office of Vice President of the United States during the 1972 presidential election. At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, he nominated himself for the post and won 226 delegate votes, coming in third behind Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who was the convention's choice, and Frances "Sissy" Farenthold, who got 407 votes. [link]

In 1980, he was challenged for renomination by State Representative Clark Gruening, the grandson of Ernest, who unexpectedly defeated Gravel in the primary. Gruening would go on to lose in the general election to Republican Frank Murkowski.

Career after leaving the Senate

Gravel led an effort to get a United States Constitutional amendment to allow voter-initiated federal legislation similar to state ballot initiatives. He argued that Americans are able to legislate responsibly, and that the Act and Amendment of his organization would allow American citizens to become "law makers". After retiring from the U.S. Senate, he moved to Arlington County, Virginia and has lived there since.

In June of 2003, Gravel gave a speech on direct democracy at a conference hosted by the Barnes Review, a journal that denies the Holocaust [link]. Gravel later explained he did not know the nature of the group at the time he spoke there and spent only 30 minutes at the event. "You better believe I know that six million Jews were killed. I've been to the Holocaust Museum. I've seen the footage of General Eisenhower touring one of the camps ... They're nutty as loons if they [Carto's group] don't think it happened ... Anyone who denies the Holocaust is patently off their rocker — it's a ridiculous position ... and the idea that the [documentary] films were a hoax is just bullshit," Gravel clarified in an interview with Politics1.com.[link].

Presidential bid in 2008

On April 17, 2006, Gravel became a declared candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2008 election, announcing his run in a speech to the National Press Club.

Gravel has said that, in addition to his stance on direct democracy, he will also be emphasizing his support for the FairTax plan and withdrawal from the war in Iraq during his campaign.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.