Former U.S. senator Mike Gravel died on Saturday at 91-years-old after a political career marked by his zeal and perhaps limited because of it. His daughter, Lynne Mosier, told The Washington Post he died of multiple myeloma, a type of cancer of the plasma cells. His name trended on Sunday, mainly with video clips and praise for his progressive approach to politics. 

His own words in a New York Times Magazine interview describing a plan to give voters the power to pass new legislation directly showed exactly the kind of politician—more accurately non-politician—he was. “What you need to have, and what I seem to have, is unreserved faith in the people,” Gravel said. “There’s nothing else. And you can say: ‘Well, boy. That’s a stretch!’ You know what? The alternative is minority rule by the elites of society.”

Washington Post writer Chris Power called Gravel a “gadfly senator from Alaska with flair for the theatrical.” To a younger generation of political news junkies, he’s the former Democratic presidential hopeful who asked former President Barack Obama in a presidential debate in 2007: “Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?”

And to those familiar with him from a historical vantage point, Gravel was the freshman Congressman who notably read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers, a document that was at the time leaked and detailed the truth of the United State’s early involvement in Vietnam despite the contradictory picture painted for public consumption. Ben Bagdikian, who was at the time the national editor of The Washington Post, delivered Gravel the papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a military defense analyst with RAND Corporation. The plan was to have Gravel enter the papers into the Congressional Record.

With no quorum for the full Senate to convene, Gravel read the Pentagon Papers during a meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, which he led on June 29, 1971, The Washington Post reported. He was reduced to tears just after 1 a.m., when he had been reading the document for about three hours during a one-person filibuster to condemn the Vietnam draft. “Arms are being severed,” Gravel said. “Metal is clashing through human bodies because of the public policy this government and all its branches continue to support.” The senator said he was “physically incapable of continuing any longer,” and he entered the subsequent text into the Senate record even though a case about the legal right to share the papers was still making its way through the Supreme Court.

Gravel later said he was “frightened to death” to release the Pentagon Papers. “I had no idea whether I was going to prison,” he said. “All I kept thinking of was my country is killing people. We’re maiming Americans, and this is terrible.”

The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” and the government had not met the “heavy burden of showing justification for the enforcement of such a restraint,” the court stated in a version of the opinion digitized by The New York Times.

Power wrote that Gravel’s display made him “a hero of the left,” but that his popularity dwindled in part because of the same Democratic establishment he tried as a recent college graduate to avoid by moving to Alaska in 1956 before it became a state. “At his party’s 1972 national convention, he further alienated fellow Democrats by defying custom and seeking support for an unauthorized run for the vice-presidential nomination,” Power wrote. “Over the next several years, he saw his fame and popularity erode.”

Unseated in 1980, Gravel’s political career eroded also, and by the presidential election of 2008, a race he sought to enter as the Democratic nominee, Gravel didn’t have much of a chance of winning the presidency or the Democratic nomination. An oddly silent campaign ad in which Gravel stared into the camera for more than a minute then walked away didn’t help.

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Still, he stood on principle, protesting continued involvement of the United States in Iraq and promising that major policy decisions under his presidency would be up for a vote of the American people, The Associated Press reported. “I believe America is doing harm every day our troops remain in Iraq — harm to ourselves and to the prospects for peace in the world,” Gravel said in 2006. 

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Gravel again sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 but instead dropped out when he couldn’t qualify for the debate stage. He opted to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, the AP reported. “There was never any … plan that he would do anything more than participate in the debates,” Gravel’s former aide Theodore W. Johnson told the AP. “He didn’t plan to campaign, but he wanted to get his ideas before a larger audience.”

Sanders said in a tweet Sunday on he and his wife’s behalf: “Jane and I are saddened by the passing of Sen. Mike Gravel. He was dedicated to ending forever wars and bringing more Americans into the political process. His courage will be deeply missed. Our thoughts are with his loved ones.”

Read more social media postings about Gravel, including one from Jen Hayden, a managing editor at Daily Kos: