Courtesy of The Max Cleland Collection, duPont-Ball Library, Stetson UniversityMax Cleland reads Arthur Schlesinger's biography of John F. Kennedy, A Thousand Days, while recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 1968.
For Max Cleland, Politics Was A Refuge From War
October 6, 2009
As a boy growing up in a small town in Georgia, Max Cleland, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, was inspired by the adventures of the Lone Ranger on his TV screen.
Just as the Lone Ranger was motivated by a sense of duty, so was Cleland. As he tells NPR's Renee Montagne, Cleland's parents raised him "to be an eagle, not a sparrow." When he was in college, he joined the ROTC and volunteered to go to war in Vietnam. There, he was brutally maimed by a grenade that a fellow soldier dropped accidentally. The explosion took away both of his legs and his right arm.
In his new memoir, Heart of a Patriot, Cleland recalls that moment, and how he overcame the trauma it caused. The book is subtitled "How I Found The Courage To Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove."
After his military service, Cleland turned to public service as a way to find meaning in life outside of his own struggles. "It meant survival. It meant a purpose and destiny," he says.
His political career spanned four decades, and ended with a loss to Republican Saxby Chambliss in 2002. Cleland says that his opponent — backed by Karl Rove's political machine — questioned his patriotism by airing attack ads that listed his votes on homeland security bills that opposed President George W. Bush's policies.
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113497762
No comment on the grenade juggling incident?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, no comment at all. Why would I? More to the point, why would you?
ReplyDelete