WASHINGTON -- Mike Gravel, former U.S. senator from Alaska, is indeed running for president in 2008, the 75-year-old Democrat told an audience of journalists and supporters packed into a small conference room at the National Press Club Monday.
"Our country needs a renewal," he said. "Renewal ... of democracy itself."
He talked up the issue that has been his primary focus in recent years: creating a national initiative so that voters can make federal law on Election Day.
It's been working "for more than 150 years in what may be the most advanced political culture in history: the democratic republic of Switzerland," Gravel said.
A score of journalists and seven television cameras covered his announcement. The reporters sat shoulder to shoulder with a cadre of Gravel supporters wearing blue "I like Mike" stickers on their blazers and blouses.
A red, white and blue banner behind Gravel's podium featured a photo of him gazing upward, as if at a distant star. It was superimposed on a photo of a wildly cheering crowd in business attire.
He represented Alaska in the Senate from 1969 until 1981.
He was against the Vietnam War then. Now, his opposition to the Iraq war is a key part of his message.
"I believe America is doing harm every day we remain in Iraq," he said.
Word of Gravel's candidacy emerged last week. Since then, Web sites and political bloggers from the right and the left have been writing about him, and zeroing in on his participation in a 2003 conference sponsored by groups that deny the Holocaust of 6 million Jews in World War II.
Asked about it after his speech, Gravel said he went because one of the conference leaders, Willis Carto, invited him to speak about his national initiative proposal.
"I didn’t know they were deniers," Gravel said. "I walked in, I was there 20 minutes. I made my speech and left."
He said he felt the crowd was none too interested in what he had to say.
Heidi Beirich, who works for the Southern Poverty Law Center, attended the same 2003 conference for research.
"It was anti-Semite central," she said. It looked at first glance like an academic conference -- there were no hoods or Swastika armbands -- but it soon became obvious. The tables were loaded with books about Aryan values and the evils of Israel, she said.
“It’s hard for me to believe you could go there and not know,” she said. Her group tracks racists and anti-Semites to guard against their entry into mainstream politics.
The Barnes Review, one of the conference sponsors, is fairly blatant, she said. A headline on a 2004 issue, for example reads “Hitler: Neglected Nobel Peace Prize winner?”
Gravel said he’s been trying to reach Carto since Thursday to ask him if he really is a Holocaust denier.
“I think denying the Holocaust is the epitome of insanity,” Gravel said.
Gravel enjoyed Jewish support for his first Senate campaign, but it dried up after he voted in 1978 to sell fighter jets to Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Gravel preceded the jet vote with a “blunt speech about pressure from Jewish constituents and supporters,” according to the Washington Post’s account.
His last election, the 1980 Democratic primary, ended with questions about Jewish influence. Anchorage businessman Barney Gottstein, active in the pro-Israel lobby, was Gravel’s chief fundraiser in 1968, but sponsored ads against him in 1980 and was helping his opponent, Clark Gruening.
Gravel, facing accusations that his campaign was fat with special interest money, ran radio ads saying his opponent was accepting “more money from one special outside group than any other candidate.” Gravel refused to name that special interest group, but he suggested to reporters back then that he was referring to Jewish contributions that Gottstein had drummed up from outside the state.
People who knew Gravel and worked for him during his Senate years said this week they never saw anything anti-Semitic about him.
“I would be stunned and amazed if Mike Gravel associated with the holocaust deniers,” said Joe Rothstein, a Washington political consultant who was Gravel’s chief of staff early in his Senate tenure. “He was generally supportive of Israel when I knew him and worked for him.”
Rothstein, who is Jewish, said he considered Gravel’s stance on the fighter jets a single-issue vote and not indicative of anything larger.
Rothstein said he hasn’t talked to Gravel in years, but he saw his old boss speaking about the national initiative on C-SPAN.
“He’s still a very strong presence. He gives a good speech,” Rothstein said. He’ll win some support for his out-of-Iraq-now position, but he’s a long shot, Rothstein predicted.
“He won’t have really any money, so he’s going to have to do this all on the force of his personality,” Rothstein said. Republican John McCain has been able to do that, but McCain is a sitting senator and has a better resume, Rothstein said.
Gravel said he planned to start his campaign slowly, but would leave soon for New Hampshire and also visit Iowa and South Carolina.
Camera shutters clicked as he kissed and hugged his wife, Whitney Stewart Gravel, whom he described as the love of his life.
Contact Reporter Liz Ruskin at lruskin@adn.com.
