Mike Gravel represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate from 1969-81. He served on the Finance, Interior, and the Environment and Public Works committees, chairing the Energy, Water Resources, and the Environmental Pollution subcommittees.

Gravel is best known for reading the Pentagon Papers (which showed the lies used to escalate the Vietnam war) into the national record in 1971 while single-handedly filibustering until an agreement was made to phase out the military draft. He ran for President in 2008. Here’s his best interview:

Some of Senator Gravel’s legislative activities included:

CANNIKIN NUCLEAR TESTS

In the late sixties and early seventies, the Pentagon was in the process of performing five calibration tests for a nuclear missile warhead that, upon investigation, was revealed to be obsolete. Yet the tests, the detonation of nuclear bombs under the seabed of the North Pacific at Amchitka Island, Alaska (an earthquake prone area) were scheduled to continue. He opposed the tests in Congress and went beyond his role as a Senator to organize worldwide environmental opposition to the Pentagon’s tests. The program was halted after the second test, limiting the expansion of this unusual threat to the marine environment of the North Pacific, which is a major source of food for the planet. These tests created large caverns under the seabed, encapsulating nuclear wastes with life-threatening properties that would last more than a thousand years. These caverns could rupture during an earthquake, spewing contaminated wastes into the food chain of the North Pacific.

THE PEACEFUL ATOM

Nuclear fission was considered an environmentally clean alternative for the generation of commercial electricity and was part of a popular national policy for the peaceful use of atomic energy in the decades of 1950s and 1960s. The Senator was the first in Congress to publicly oppose this national nuclear policy in 1970 and used his my office to organize citizen opposition to this nuclear policy and persuaded Ralph Nader’s organization to join the opposition. These initial efforts, and later those of the environmental movement which had come around in opposition, contributed to making the production of commercial electricity through nuclear fission uneconomical. The importance of this change in policy, confirmed by Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, is to limit the uncontrolled threat to our planetary environment by the continued production of nuclear wastes and the proliferation of bomb-grade nuclear materials.

PEACETIME DRAFT

In May 1971, Senator Gravel began a one-man filibuster that was broken in September, forcing a deal to let the draft expire. Drafting the nation’s youth had been defense policy since 1947. In order to save face and break the Senator’s filibuster, the Nixon administration agreed to let the draft expire in 1973 if given an extension in 1971.

THE PENTAGON PAPERS

Daniel Ellsberg attempted to secure the release of the Pentagon Papers through a member of Congress in order to provide legal protection for his actions in releasing this top secret historical study of how the US ensnared itself in the Viet Nam War. Since the Congressional leaders Ellsberg approached failed to act, he turned to the New York Times and Washington Post, which published excerpts of the study in June 1971. A Justice Department injunction and a Supreme Court decision at the end of June put the publishers at risk. The day before the Supreme Court decision, in an effort to moot their action, Senator Gravel officially released the Pentagon Papers in his capacity as a Senator communicating with his constituency. Since the Supreme Court had successfully intimidated the Fourth Estate, he sought the book publication of the papers and was turned down by every major (and not-so-major) publishing house in the nation, save one. Beacon Press, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, faced down the Nixon Administration by publishing The Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers.

The Justice Department brought legal action against Beacon Press and the Senator’s editor, Dr. David Rotberg. He intervened in the case, using his Senate office as a shield for Beacon Press and Rotberg. Decisions at the Federal Court and the Court of appeals protected the Senator from prosecution but left Beacon Press and Rotberg at risk, so he took the matter to the Supreme Court, against the advice of his attorneys. The Supreme Court rendered a landmark constitutional decision in the spring of 1972 narrowly defining the prerogatives of an elected representative with respect to the speech and debate clause of the Constitution. The Senator’s defeat before the Supreme Court placed him at risk of prosecution with Beacon Press and Rotberg. With Watergate afoot the Nixon justice Department lost interest in the prosecution of Ellsberg, Gravel and Rotberg. However, the Court’s decision did set the stage for its later decision on the Nixon Tapes forcing Nixon’s resignation of his presidency.

ENVIRONMENT

The decade of the seventies saw the legislative awakening to the need to control environmental pollution. Serving on the Environment and Public Works Committee during his entire Senate career placed him in a leadership and co-sponsoring role in every piece of meaningful environmental legislation to come out of the Congress during this period dealing with air, water, wastes, and energy.

LAW OF THE SEA

The United Nations, in the mid-seventies, was moving toward the codification of a legal regime for the oceans covering two-thirds of the earth’s surface. worked with UN leaders and committees, the Secretary of State our UN ambassador and other agencies of government to secure the UN’s enactment of the Law of the Sea -despite the opposition of the Alaskan fishing industry. The force of the momentum behind the UN effort was undermined by legislation introduced by the powerful Senator Magnuson and his Alaskan colleague, Senator Stevens, which permitted the U.S. to unilaterally take control of the 200-mile waters bordering its land mass. He delayed this legislation for two years in the hope that the UN would act first, but his opposition failed to stop its passage. Efforts at the UN lost momentum, and agreement was not reached until 1983. Shamefully, the U.S. is the only nation in the world refusing to participate in the Law of the Sea Convention.

RED CHINA

Six months before the secret mission to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by Henry Kissinger, the Senator introduced unpopular legislation to recognize and normalize relations with the PRC, in the hope of bringing about a re-examination of our bankrupt policy towards the Chinese people.

NATIVE CLAIMS SETTLEMENT ACT

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was the first major political settlement of aboriginal claims, which were customarily dealt with through a much less generous judicial process. Senator Gravel co-authored the legislation and provided outspoken leadership for some of its important, but less popular land features. He was responsible for removing the federal government’s paternalistic role in the management of native economic affairs once the settlement was approved by the Congress.

THE ALASKA PIPELINE

After years of study and judicial delay, Senator Gravel introduced an amendment in 1973 to empower the Congress to make the policy decision about the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Initially, the amendment was opposed in all quarters, state and federal officials, the labor movement and including the oil industry. Alone at the beginning, he built support and gained allies that in the end helped secure the amendment’s passage in the Senate by one vote. This accomplishment placed Alaska on a new economic footing. The the pipeline has been responsible for 20% of the U.S. oil supply, with a substantial contribution to the nation’s balance of payments and an economic beneficence that has transformed the quality of life across Alaska society. Absent his amendment, a retrospective analysis now indicates that the pipeline would probably not have been built, condemning the nation to greater foreign dependency and greater environmental pollution.

SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS

In the early seventies, the Senator pioneered satellite communications through a demonstration project that set up links between Alaskan villages and the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD, for medical diagnostic communications. He then developed a proposal for the Alaska Legislature for a satellite communications and video transmission system, which has since been implemented, making Alaska’s system the most advanced in the U.S.

AGSOC

In an effort to broaden the ownership of capital in our society, the senator authored and secured the passage into law of the General Stock Ownership Corporation (GSOC), Subchapter U of the Tax Code. With the hope of first using this law in Alaska, he brought about an initiative decision in the state’s general election of 1980 on the creation of an Alaska General Stock Ownership Corporation (AGSOG). As part of this effort, he negotiated a tentative agreement with the British Petroleum Company to sell their interest in the Alaska Pipeline to the AGSOC. The electorate failed to approve the AGSOC initiative. BP now considers its pipeline interest to be one of the most profitable of its Alaska holdings. Had the AGSOC been approved and the purchase gone through, it would be paying out dividends of several hundred dollars a year in income to every citizen/shareholder in Alaska.

CIRCUMPOLAR CONFERENCE

The Innuit peoples populate the Arctic regions of the globe. At the senator’s instigation and with a private grant he secured, the North Slope native leadership organized a circumpolar conference attended by Innuit representatives from Canada, Greenland, and Norway. Their periodic convocations on culture, environment, and other regional concerns now include representation from Russia.

Mike Gravel served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1963-66, and as Speaker from 1965-66, where he:

* Authored legislation designing the structure and budgeting for a regional high school system for rural Alaska, permitting native students to receive their education near their homes rather than travel to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ schools outside Alaska; and

* Effected legislative reforms, securing budgets to provide staffs for members and to expand research and support facilities, initiated electronic voting, and developed a hearing process between sessions throughout the state that fostered citizen participation.

Senator Gravel authored Jobs and More Jobs and Citizen Power. He used his position as a senator to officially release the Pentagon Papers and facilitated their publication as The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press.

Senator Gravel enlisted in the U.S. Army (1951-54) and served as an adjutant in the Communications Intelligence Services and as a Special Agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps. He received a B.S. in Economics at Columbia University, New York, and holds four honorary degrees in law and public affairs.

Senator Gravel’s business career in Alaska encompassed real estate sales and developments in Anchorage and Kenai. His business activities have encompassed real estate, finance, and energy. He is president of Philadelphia II and Direct Democracy, nonprofit corporations, dedicated to the establishment of direct democracy in the United States and globally.

Senator Gravel lectures and writes about governance, capitalism, energy, environmental issues, and direct democracy. He is married to Whitney Stewart Gravel and has two grown children and three grand children.