November 11, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

Former Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland has died at his home in Atlanta at age 79.  Despite his many accomplishments and sacrifices for his country – as a U.S. Army captain, he received the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for his tour in Vietnam, during which he lost his right arm and both legs in an accidental grenade blast – he was the victim of one of the most disgusting political campaigns in modern history. Although attacks, fabrications and dirty tricks have been campaign mainstays since … well, since the beginning of political campaigns, the 2002 Georgia Senate campaign was definitely a harbinger of things to come.

The brilliant Esquire magazine political commentator Charles P. Pierce recently wrote:

“Cleland was running against a Republican named Saxby Chambliss, a nonentity who’d been deferred during the Vietnam War because of an old high-school football injury. While in the Senate, Cleland had voted for the Bush tax cuts in 2001, and for the invasion of Iraq, which he later called the worst vote of his career. But as legislation to set up the new Department of Homeland Security sailed through Congress, Cleland fought to give the employees of that department union protections. And that was opening enough for the ratfckers to get him.

“Rove called on an ambitious conservative ad man named Rick Wilson to put together one of the most scurrilous attack ads since Lee Atwater gave Willie Horton his turn at centerstage. The ad opened with pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and the point of the ad was that Max Cleland, who left half his body in a war zone, lacked the gumption to "lead" during the time of terror.”

Despite the ad being angrily criticized by fellow Vietnam War veterans in Congress, including Republican Senators John McCain and Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, and eventually was pulled down, the ad helped set the stage for Cleland’s defeat.

Cleland’s defeat triggered “a dormant case of PTSD, and Cleland spun into a deep depression,” Pierce noted. After publishing his memoir, in an interview with history.net, Cleland said:

“It’s part of my own therapy, my own healing. Those of us who suffer need to talk about it and write about it. I didn’t really have a connection to the suffering of those who have what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder—I call it “post-war stress”—in which you never quite get over what’s happened to you, but you move on. But after I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed. I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.

“It took me right back to Vietnam, right back to the battlefield, right back to the wounding. And I had to work through all that stuff. It took me years of counseling and years on medication, and it’s been several years of just writing. I had to make sense of it all.”

“After lengthy stints in military hospitals, Cleland felt purposeless as a 25-year-old triple amputee,” World magazine’s Carolina Lumetta recently reported,  “Cleland had an interest in politics from a semester and internship in Washington and decided to cope with his grief through political service. He served as a Democratic state senator from 1971 to 1975 before heading up the Veterans Administration as its youngest administrator. In 1983, Cleland was elected Georgia’s secretary of state, a position he held until 1996 when he won a U.S. Senate seat.”

In 2016, Wilson, who subsequently became a leading Republican anti-Trumper and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told Cracked that coming up with that ad not only destroyed Cleland’s electoral career, but that it had a profound effect on Wilson’s life as well.

"The Cleland ad was powerful because it went to his strengths." Everyone assumed Cleland was immune to critiques on national security issues ... we found a lot of votes where he'd voted the wrong way ... we tested those messages and discovered those messages were very effective against Cleland ... they didn't calculate that I have no moral center when it comes to political ads, and I will destroy the innocent and the guilty …”

In 2009, Cleland was appointed by President Barack Obama as secretary of the American Battlefield Monuments Commission, which operates and maintains US military cemeteries and memorials outside the US. He left that post after Donald Trump was elected.

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