Cindy Sheehan may be the current darling of the anti-war movement, but 78-year-old Ramsey Clark is surely its “eminence grise.’’
The former US attorney general and one-time pillar of the establishment, Clark fell off the respectability wagon decades ago when he became a persistent gadfly to Republican and Democratic administrations.
And, true to form, he’ll speak at the anti-war march in Washington this weekend, whose stated goals are to end the occupation of Iraq and bring the troops home, partly by pressuring Congress to cut off the money.
Clark was in Paris this week and unavailable for an interview. Nor is he much in the news these days. But as founder of the International Action Center, author and globetrotting peace emissary, he remains one of the most consistent voices in the anti-war movement. Ever since I first met him almost 20 years ago, his message has been the same. That the United States should never be the military aggressor. That American imperialism is wrong because it wreaks havoc and misery in other countries. And that everyone is entitled to due process, no matter how heinous the crimes of the accused.
I suspect the reason Clark doesn’t get much publicity anymore is that the media is embarrassed by him. In this time of superpatriotism and self-defensive flag-waving, the media and the establishment have dismissed him as a left-wing zealot out of step with current realities.
Ramsey Clark was pilloried in the media most recently for joining an international committee trying to ensure that Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders get a fair trial — an impossibility in a special court controlled by the United States, Clark argues.
A member of one prominent anti-war group said the problem with Clark is that he’s gotten so wrapped up with other, more hard-left groups that it makes it difficult for his own group — which, like the Democratic Party, is trying to move toward the center.
Frida Berrigan has known Clark since she was a child. For more than 20 years, until her father, the former priest and anti-war activist Philip Berrigan, died in 2002, Clark made himself available as a defense attorney or informal legal counsel. Philip Berrigan and his wife, fellow peace activist Elizabeth McAlister, collectively spent 11 years in prison for engaging in civil disobedience directed at the Vietnam War and US nuclear weapons.
“Ramsey represents this deep belief in justice for everybody, even Saddam Hussein,’’ Berrigan told me. “I think that’s hard for a lot of people on the left to respond to, and yet, if it’s not open to everybody, it’s meaningless.’’
Nor is Clark very “sound-bitable,’’ she says. “He has a complex and clear analysis that hasn’t changed over the years. And the media is drawn to the sound bite and to the new spin. Ramsey doesn’t re-spin himself.’’ The anti-war movement, which has been floundering of late, has been re-energized by Cindy Sheehan’s face-off at the Bush ranch, by outrage over the bungling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, and by some really bad days in Iraq.
Ramsey Clark has been plugging away at this for years. Now Berrigan, who plans to march this weekend, hopes the event will refocus the energies of people all over the country to end the war.
