Max Cleland’s new book, Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed, and Karl Rove, has an October 6 publication date. The AJC’s Political Insider, Jim Galloway, has been paging through it:
Cleland rose in Georgia politics in large part because of that irrepressible grin and a persona that beamed indefatigable optimism. No little grenade was going to stop him.
“Heart of a Patriot” (Simon & Schuster, $26) has much of the dark stuff that “Strong at the Broken Places” left out: Cleland’s violent transition from a “tall, tan and tantalizing” paratrooper to a triple amputee, the first visit from his parents at Walter Reed, his bouts with despair and the black dog of clinical depression _ the pain that a man in public life is required to keep from view.
It is revisionist history in the way of a man who has no more reason to couch his personal story in Kiwanian platitudes. Not self-pitying, but certainly confessional. […]
I’d forgotten small things, like the fact that Cleland lost his limbs in the days after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968 _ and that he won his first election as a state senator campaigning on a pair of artificial legs, which proved to be pure torture.
The chapter on his 2002 Senate loss reflects Cleland’s lingering anger toward Saxby Chambliss, the Republican who beat him, and the GOP machine _ Ralph Reed is given specific mention _ that helped take him out
Some excerpts:
_ “….When I lost my reelection bid for the U.S. Senate in 2002, my life fell apart. The staff that had helped me politically and physically so I could keep on running with no legs was gone. The please of having a job worth doing and the money to keep me afloat were gone. My relationships began to crumble, especially the one with my fiancee.
_ “From time to time, I am overwhelmed by the sense of meaninglessness I feel regarding the Vietnam War, in which I was a young participant, and the Iraq War Resolution, which I voted for as a U.S. senator. To keep my sanity, I must not dwell on my part in those disastrous episodes in American history. I try not to blame myself too much.”
_ “Whereas we had been treated with respect at Walter Reed, at the VA we were treated like mental patients who needed to be controlled and supervised. We weren’t even allowed to play ping-pong after 4:15 p.m.”
Cleland writes of his lingering anger toward Saxby Chambliss, who defeated him in a bruising 2002 election that featured Ralph Reed and the now notorious Diebold touch-screen voting machines. But there’s no smoking gun.
I’ll be interested anyway. Cleland is a real American hero. Says Galloway, “To be a genuine conspiracy theorist, one has to give up one’s beliefs in other, indisputable facts. And Cleland has not done that.”
Meanwhile, The Huff Post headlines its post on the book, Former Senator Unloads On Enemies, Dishes Lewinsky Dirt.