Max Cleland Did Not Deserve What Rick Wilson Did to Him
Max Cleland Did Not Deserve What Rick Wilson Did to Him
The former Georgia senator died Tuesday at age 79. His political career was a harbinger of things to come.
By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 9, 2021
In 1999, I went to Washington to work on a profile of John McCain for this magazine. One of the interviews I set up was with Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia. Cleland was a friend of McCain’s. Both of them were Vietnam-era veterans, and both of them had come out of that fiasco severely damaged—McCain from having been tortured, and Cleland from having lost both legs and one arm to a grenade outside of Khe Sanh. He had made a life and political career for himself. He was ferocious fighter for veterans and for the rights of the disabled. He’d been elected to the Senate in 1997 to replace Sam Nunn....
Max Cleland died on Tuesday at the age of 79. He had been ill for some time. He had not been in the Senate since January of 2003, and thereby hangs a lesson for our current political moment.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, you may recall that President George W. Bush, installed by the Supreme Court after losing the popular vote by half a million, had called for national unity in the face of a monstrous tragedy. By and large, he got it. However, his political operation, run by the execrable Karl Rove, looked at the nearly 3,000 dead Americans and saw an arsenal of political weapons they could use in the midterm elections of 2002....
Rove called on an ambitious conservative ad man named Rick Wilson to put together one of the most scurrilous attack ads since Lee Atwater gave Willie Horton his turn at centerstage. The ad opened with pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and the point of the ad was that Max Cleland, who left half his body in a war zone, lacked the gumption to "lead" during the time of terror.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a38201636/max-cleland-obituary-attack-ad-republicans/
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RIP, Hero. 
Some of it I knew. The pieces I didn’t know still had the power to shock me.
I believe he has cleaned up his act. At least I hope he has. But the way he treated Max Cleland was unforgivable. Senator Cleland wasn't the only Democrat who voted to invade Iraq in 2001. We know there were others, and we know that Hillary Clinton was one of them. Many lived to regret that vote.
But that's neither here nor there. Senator Max Cleland deserved the honor and respect that any wounded war veteran deserves, and he didn't get it. I don't think Rick Wilson or anyone else ever apologized either.
