In Their Own Words: The Teens Behind Mike Gravel’s Campaign

“That was one of the things the campaign was good at: trying to get as much controversy as possible by provoking conflicts. It’s not an honorable way to go through campaigning, but it worked. Better than you could say for Tim Ryan.”

In March, 2019, two students, David Oks and Henry Williams, decided to launch a presidential campaign aimed at re-examining American foreign policy, as well as promoting left-wing progressivism domestically. They chose as their vehicle former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (D). Sen. Gravel, who gained considerable attention for reading the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record in 1971 (as well as for his spirited 2008 presidential campaign), agreed to the teens’ request to run in 2020. Although the initial focus of the campaign was to gain enough support to bring Gravel to the debate stage, the teens later announced that Gravel was ‘in it to win it.’ The Gravel campaign found itself gaining traction on social media, especially Twitter, and, on July 12th, the campaign reported that it received its 65,000th donation. Although Gravel suspended his campaign on August 6th, Oks and Williams believe that the campaign will continue to have future influence on circles on the Left. They join Merion West and John George to discuss the origins of their unlikely campaign and the influence they believe it has had on the current Democratic field.

Why did you decide to embark on this campaign, and how did you come to choose Gravel as the vehicle for your project?

Henry Williams: The reason we did this is we thought that American politics keeps going to the Left. In order for that to happen, there always has to be a left-flank in the mainstream discourse. This primary had a spot wide open to the left of Bernie Sanders, which we thought was important. But the most important thing to us was a global, historical view of leftism—and how it’s situated—that requires being anti-imperialist. Mike Gravel is obviously one of the most substantively anti-imperialist U.S. policymakers of the last 50 years. I mean, there’s almost no one like him. He took the single boldest stance against American hegemony from within the government other than Daniel Ellsberg, and he was friends with Daniel Ellsberg. [Gravel] helped release the Pentagon Papers. He was someone with this incredible history, and he was also somebody who admittedly was a bit of a kook.