Interview with Mike Gravel: His Priorities in Running for President

“So Buttegieg, in what that reveals of him, is that he’s a classic puppet of the military industrial complex.”

After campaigning for the 2008 Democratic primary, Mike Gravel, at age 89, is making a comeback to public life and running for president again in 2020. The former Alaska senator is nationally known for his anti-war efforts, including attempting to end the draft during the Vietnam War and taking personal risks to enter the Pentagon Papers into the official Congressional Record. His 2020 campaign continues to speak out against many of the United States’ current foreign policies and proposes to end unilateral sanctions against other countries, specifically Venezuela, and significantly cut military spending. In this interview, Gravel joins Merion West’s editor Erich Prince and shares his views on whistleblowing and Julian Assange, corporate money in politics, and direct democracy, which his upcoming book will outline more in detail.

You’ve been very vocal all the way back to your time in the Senate with The Pentagon Papers to today on the role of whistleblowers. We just had indictments coming in for Julian Assange. Your staff, via Twitter, had some comments on this. What are your initial reactions with these indictments rolling in on Assange?

It’s horrible. It’s horrible. It’s the worst practices that could be done by our government. Julian clearly is a legitimate publisher, and he’s done no different than what The New York Times and The Washington Post have done in the past, except that he’s done it with greater volume than they have. It not only provides a chill on a publication that would challenge government power, but what it does is it turns around and discourages whistleblowing. Of course, whistleblowing is vital to our democracy because the excesses we have in secrecy in the operation of government, in the executive, legislative, and judicial, is just appalling. As James Madison said, “When you have continuous war, you lose your democracy,”and that’s, of course, what’s going on in our society today.