In 1956, Mike Gravel moved to Alaska, where he planned to run for office. He also served as a Special Agent in the Counter-Intelligence Corps in France (“Mike’s Biography”). While in Germany, Gravel was Adjutant in the Communications Intelligence Service. While at Columbia University, Gravel worked full-time as a clerk at Bankers Trust on Wall Street then as a taxi driver.īetween his sophomore and junior college years, Gravel was in the United States Army, where he served from 1951 to 1954. During his sophomore year, Gravel worked full-time as a clerk for Buxton, Inc. He was a full-time janitor and a caddy at a local golf course during his freshman year. Gravel’s father instilled a strong work ethic in his children, and throughout his college years, Mike Gravel was always employed. As he revealed in an interview with Ralph Nader, Gravel also began to see himself as a world citizen when, at the age of 17, he read The Anatomy of Peace by Emery Reed. Gravel started working on local and state political campaigns when he was just 15 years old. Mike Gravel developed an interest in civics in his early teens when his older brothers were working with their father in what Gravel described as “house painting and general construction/rehabilitation business” (“Mike’s Biography”). (It was not until his son, Martin, was in his teens and diagnosed that Gravel realized that he, too, had dyslexia.) However, Gravel was able to flourish in life due to his memory development and impromptu speaking. At the time, Gravel’s dyslexia went undiagnosed. He was held back a grade because he had poor reading skills due to severe dyslexia. Gravel was born to two French-Canadian immigrants, Alphonse and Marie, and he was the third of five children. Mike Gravel was born Maurice Robert Gravel in Springfield, Massachusetts, on May 13, 1930. Some outlets shared information about Mike Gravel’s life, but, of course, he offered more information on his website () and in various interviews. During the nearly 2-hour session, she talked to Lynne Mosier (Gravel’s daughter from his marriage to Rita Martin) and Daniel Ellsberg, the former Rand Corporation contractor who leaked the Pentagon Papers 50 years ago. I was inspired to write this (albeit late) post after seeing a livestream from Katie Halper. In this post, I would like to talk about the things I learned about Gravel, his legacy, and share a fitting tribute to Gravel that his daughter and others gave recently. It is that anti-imperialism that I like most about Gravel, but that part of his character was also what brought him the most scorn from the media, his own party, and ruling class in general. Not only did that do a great public service, but it highlighted one aspect of Gravel’s character and legacy that lasted all these decades: his anti-imperialism. senator was his decision to read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record. The most notable part of Gravel’s tenure as a U.S. Gravel had served in the Senate for 12 years, from 1969 to 1981. Two weeks ago, on June 26, 2021, the world lost former United States Senator Mike Gravel. Image by David Oks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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