Being Max Cleland

by Charles Bowden

The day always begins with the left arm. The clock reads 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. The plaque next to the bed always whispers the same thing: I WAS GIVEN LIFE, THAT I MIGHT ENJOY ALL THINGS. That is it, the glowing numbers announcing the time, the velvet darkness, and then, with the light switched on, the line whispering off the plaque. The body sits up and—this is the hard part to state, because here the words fail—the left arm of the body grabs the left arm of the waiting chair. The body leans forward and begins to arc through the air, and as the body arcs, it is poised over the left arm of the chair, and then it twirls and turns a full 180 degrees and settles into the seat of the chair. Of course, all these words fall short because, while they describe the discrete steps that make up an act, they are like words about a ballet that can never capture the dance. What really happens is that the body moves in one fluid motion, begins in the bed and winds up in the chair, and there is nothing between the two points but a blur. No matter how often the eye tracks this act, it fails to see what it knows must be happening.

Now the workday begins, and the first part of the day is always the hardest part. Not the movement from the bed to the chair. No, not that. The hard part is the motivation. The body can do the work, but first a fire must be lit in the soul. This requires three entire hours—relentless, grueling hours. First prayer, and then exercise. Working the soul, and what remains of the muscle. This part cannot be slighted or the blackness will take over, and then the reel begins playing in the mind, that hideous tape that nothing seems to erase or edit or alter, the tape that zooms in and out of scenes so swiftly the body feels vertigo, and the eye focuses in disbelief on a pin, a small metal grenade pin, and the entire universe—yes, all of it—wrenches to a halt to consider one simple question: Is that pin straight, or is that pin bent? For thirty-one years, since that day the body almost died, the universe has considered this one question.

The workday begins because there has to be a reason for the left arm or there is nothing at all. In three hours, if attention is paid, if that fire is lit in the soul, the body becomes something else, something rare: It becomes Max Cleland, freshman Democrat of Georgia, the lone four-foot-tall, legless, one-armed member of the United States Senate.

So let the workday begin. It is a matter of life and death.

I stood on the edge of our bomb crater, that had been my home for five days and five nights, stretched out my six-foot, two-inch frame, and was caught up in excitement. The battle for Khe Sanh was over and I had come out of it unhurt and alive!

MEDITATION FLOODS THE MORNING HOURS. IT IS the drug Max Cleland craves. The desk in his Senate office is scattered with biblical quotes and other writings. "I need every bit of motivation I can possibly get," Cleland offers by way of explanation. An old hymn sings out, HOW FIRM A FOUNDATION, YE SAINTS OF THE LORD, / IS LAID BY YOUR FAITH IN HIS EXCELLENT WORKS. A block of type insists, IF IT IS TO BE / IT IS UP TO ME. Then there is Tennyson’s Ulysses, a bit of Psalms, some Jeremiah, a taste of Ephesians, and a brass clock engraved, TAKE IT TO THE MAX. The faith of Max Cleland is not so much the fervor and bright eyes of the born-again Christian as the steady prayer of the man staving off death. He is the mutilated man insisting his wounds will never stop him from being whole. So for at least half an hour after awaking, Max Cleland reads the Bible and other inspirational literature. And he prays. He enters a continuum in his morning of rebuilding. The prayer and readings. Then the exercises, stretching techniques taught him by David Prowse, the bodybuilder hidden within the Darth Vader costume in the early Star Wars movies. A slant board has a strap for his stumps, and Cleland cranks out sit-ups and uses weights—fifty pounds for his good arm, twenty for the stump. Using his stump and elbow, he does two hundred push-ups. Then a series of moves to maintain mobility in his joints and to correct the imbalance of strength between his left arm and his right stump. He arranges a series of cushions across the living-room floor and walks on his stumps back and forth. He is now up to thirty-two laps. And this is tough. "It’s not like you pick up a foot—it’s like walking through sand." Then he makes his morning phone call to his parents, now in their eighties.

After that, he showers and dresses. First the shirt must go on the left arm and be buttoned, then the right sleeve must be properly folded over the stump, the front buttoned. The necktie is never undone but left hanging in a loop so that it may be simply slipped over. When he was first injured, a friend from Georgia came to see him in the hospital, and Max was warm and enthusiastic and told his friend how he was going to go home and be in politics, that this being blown up was not going to stop him. And after the visit, the friend buttonholed a doctor in the hall and asked, realistically, what was life going to be like for Max Cleland. And the doctor paused and said, Do you really want to know? Look, if he gets up in the morning and puts on his shirt, that will tire him for the whole day.

After the workout and the phone call and the shower and the dressing come the vitamins. There is no food. Max Cleland does not cook, and the apartment is hardly home. Everything in it is rented—the furniture, the dishes, the flatware, everything. The apartment has no television. He can’t bear to watch TV after a day at the Senate. "My apartment," he offers, "is really a staging area."

Cleland can drive. But for work, a staffer arrives downstairs; Cleland gets into the car, and during the twenty-minute drive he inhales The New York Times. The driver pulls into the garage and parks next to Jesse Helms, a man Cleland met during his first day in the Senate and disagrees with on almost every issue and likes enormously. It is Bob Kerrey, the other Vietnam amputee, from Nebraska, who is Cleland’s blood brother and the fellow who prodded him into the Senate race. Cleland rolls up to the office, races through the news clips from Georgia, and has two eggs and some water. It is a truism among the community of the severely injured that life expectancy is somewhere in the mid-fifties. Cleland is fifty-six. He is on a high-protein diet and has lost sixty pounds in two years.

Now he is ready, he is the politician, the man who as he rolled down the hallway to his office saw a janitor and gave him a thumbs-up—Cleland seems to know every guard and janitor by name. And the pol knows what he needs: "I feed off people—that gives me the energy. The worst thing you can do to me is put me in a corner and leave me alone. The air goes out of the balloon."

Max Cleland constantly seeks air.

"If you want to do this thing," he explains, "it is a virtual crusade. This is my ministry."

I had scored a personal victory over myself and my fears .... As Stephen Crane states in his great book on war, The Red Badge of Courage, "I went to face the Great Death and found it was only the Great Death."

... In another month I’d be going home ....

Oh, Captain Cleland .... The battalion needs a better radio hookup ....

With two men, I pulled together some antennas and a generator and some radios and loaded them on a chopper.... The helicopter lifted off.

HE GOES HOME EVERY OTHER WEEKEND. MAX CLELAND IS A small-town boy, the high school athlete, the kid who volunteered for Vietnam because, he explains, "I didn’t want to miss the war of my generation." He also caught the Washington bug back then when he first did some college in the capital and then interned for a congressman. But the key thing for Cleland was meeting Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the dean of the chamber, the brilliant man trapped and in some ways maimed by his defense of a segregated world. In the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building, there is now a statue of Russell, and that is where Cleland immediately drags a visitor. "So much of me is tied up in Dick Russell," he explains.

Back in the summer of 1965, when Cleland was interning on the Hill just before his hitch in the army, Russell called a meeting of young southern congressional staffers because polls showed he was out of touch with such voters. And Cleland has a picture on his wall from that day. When he came back to see Russell several years later, he was still a kid, but with no legs and one arm. Cleland wanted to "show off" his recovery, to demonstrate that he could now move. Russell was an old man dying of emphysema, and the young captain watched as the old senator took a minute and a half to cross the floor of his office. Russell talked to Cleland for a while and then called for his limo and told the driver to show this young soldier the sights of Washington. Russell also gave him some advice: "Take the job seriously, not yourself."

Now Cleland works at Russell’s old desk, which he had fetched out of government storage. He uses Russell’s old phone number. And this morning, Cleland thinks of Dick Russell. The air war is raging over Kosovo: In the first twenty days, two thousand sorties have been flown, and in the next two weeks, two thousand more will be flung at Serb targets. Cleland is one of six Vietnam veterans in the Senate and one of two who came back maimed. So this morning, he got up at 4:00 A.M. and sat down and wrote. He has been in the Senate for three years and spoken on the floor maybe a half dozen times. And when he has talked, it has been on stuff like campaign-finance reform or the balanced-budget amendment, things Cleland calls "issues." Kosovo is more than an issue to Cleland—it is war, and in war, decisions get people killed. He is not a pacifist; he is still at heart that army captain, the trained warrior. But he is not bombast, either.

He would rather not talk about the war in the Balkans at all. He came here because ever since childhood, he’s gone in for adventure, goals, whatever notion could get him, an only child, out of the house and into the world. And because as a young kid with two legs and two arms he decided he’d found his place in the world: the Hill. And somehow he decided that the fact that he shouldn’t be alive would not interfere with these plans. Cleland is an ambitious man, a party man, and he doesn’t need issues or causes; he needs voters and bills. He came to Washington to get things for Georgia, not for symposia on foreign policy. He loves the taste of pork. And he came to Washington because he wanted the power to make the decisions that determine the run-of-the-mill business of this country. Of course, why is a very interesting question. He could easily be an invalid hustled in and out of VA hospitals, slowly dying, reaching for the bottle. Or he could live as if he were still the confident kid back in high school who perfected a layup with either hand.

This week he’s had the labor commissioner of Georgia, Michael Thurmond, in town and hauled him off to some tony parties and gotten him $52 million for job retraining. Politics is in Cleland’s blood. He considers his five years of military service and hospital hell, 1965 to 1970, lost years. By 1970 he had gotten himself elected to the Georgia State Senate. Then, under President Carter, he ran the VA. He’s been one of the biggest vote getters in the history of Georgia, has lost only one race, and when an opponent circulated a tape of him talking with his girlfriend on the telephone about sex, the ploy backfired and Cleland ran up his biggest total ever.

He hits his office around 9:00 A.M., spends his day politicking, and almost every night is a fundraiser for himself or someone else. He has no time for a life—during his three years in D. C., he’s never even made it to the Kennedy Center. He gets home at about 10:00 P.M. and falls asleep.

At 4:00 A.M. he awakens, looks at that line on his plaque, one taken from a prayer by an unknown Civil War soldier, found scribbled in an abandoned house, does that feat of sitting up and getting into his wheelchair, and then he writes with his left arm in the darkness before dawn because he intends to speak today on Kosovo on the floor of the Senate, and this one he has got to get right.

I jumped to the ground .... Then I saw the grenade. It was where the chopper had lifted off. It must be mine, I thought. Grenades had fallen off my web gear before .... I bent down to pick up the grenade. A blind explosion threw me backwards.

WHEN THE BELL RINGS, A SENATOR HAS FIFTEEN MINUTES TO make it to the floor and vote. Max Cleland has missed two votes in three years. He is rolling now, an aide pushing the chair; to keep up with him, you almost have to dogtrot by his side. People slide by, and he knows them all—a smile, a wink, the thumbs-up, a few words. He is feeding, and for a one-armed man, he knows how to press the flesh. The left arm goes around your back, he pulls you to him, and the stub of the right arm thumps against your chest. Max Cleland is a man who must touch and feel.

The journey from his fourth-floor office is planned like a military attack. The office itself has a wooden floor so that his chair can roll easily. Then it is the elevator down the hall to the basement, a quick roll to the subway (but to only one line of the subway; the other is not wheelchair accessible), a quick ride to the Capitol, then the elevator up to the level of the Senate chamber. Here, there are two ways he can enter: One is a lift put in for Senator John Stennis of Mississippi when he was ailing; the second is near the back wall and then down a center ramp, one put in for Max Cleland. Whatever the political differences between the members of the Senate, they look after one another, and Max Cleland has left in his wake ramps to hearing rooms and wheelchair-friendly restrooms.

He has one staffer, Deborah Jans, who advances his schedule to make sure he can get there. She is a dervish, racing in and out of men’s rooms to make sure the doors on the stalls open out and not in, looking everywhere for ramps and elevators, measuring doorways for the chair. She has learned to trust no one, to do it all herself, because unless you live in a chair you just never pay enough attention. And if there is one point about which Max Cleland can lose his good humor and ready smile, it is when his chair gets in the way of his life. These bursts are momentary, less than a second, but they come, and they come not so much from the injuries as from the refusal to let the injuries slow him down. So she goes, and she measures, and she checks—a whirlwind advancing a kind of rolling thunder.

Cleland by nature refuses to give in to his condition. Though his legs are amputated above the knee, making him about four feet tall, he taught himself to wear artificial legs. He gave them up as too much trouble in 1972. He also learned to use an artificial arm, though he has no elbow. He can swim, play basketball, drive a car. And he likes to get out on the floor in his wheelchair and dance.

Now Cleland is on the prowl again; he’s left the subway car, is glad-handing his way down the corridors, is rolling into the Senate cloakroom. He goes into the chamber, votes, and quickly reappears. There is a series of small votes on the budget, and so he flips out of his wheelchair and onto a wooden bench just off the chamber and waits. He’s got Kosovo on his mind. He was over there a year ago for something he calls Being Alive Day, which comes every April 8, the day in 1968 he looked down at a grenade and was blinded by the blast.

For years, Cleland tried to ignore the day, tried to let it secretly slip past. In the late seventies, when he ran the VA, his assistant was a double-amputee Viet vet who had a big party every year to mark his maiming because he was damned happy to be alive. So Cleland took a cue from his assistant and started observing Being Alive Day. A year ago, he was in Serbia and saw the killing ground as he savored simply being alive. This year he celebrated it in Georgia, and now he is back in the capital as the administration slips down the slope toward ground troops in Kosovo. This brings back all the memories for Cleland.

And the memories are always that reel playing in his head, the grenade—is the pin straight or bent? He sits there just off the Senate chamber, his face mobile as he explains how in his early days in the Senate he had to use the ladies’ restroom because of his wheelchair, and then the talk turns to Kosovo and Vietnam and his verbs become present tense rather than past and his voice gets tremulous rather than hearty and he is back. There. The darkness.

He has been the good freshman senator, the man who keeps his mouth shut and listens, the beginner who does not showboat. But this week is the exception; this week he has to talk, and he knows it. That is why he sat there alone at 4:00 A.M. in his apartment and worked out his thoughts with a pen. The key, he thinks, is for this thing not to get out of control. "We gotta make sure that a Serb-nationalist movement in the Balkans does not unleash the War of 1999." And then he drifts off into tactics, movements, the stuff of his military training. But the real thing is unspoken: If this gets out of control, you get guys in body bags. You get guys like Max Cleland.

Now he is flipping back into his chair for another vote, then he is off to a reception for something about Taiwan—Meet my good friend, Senator Thurmond—and then Cleland says a few mild words, and he is rolling away—no, wait, he reaches over and grabs an egg roll, and then he is out the door and flying back toward the office. This time he goes by a route outside where he can see the cherry blossoms and feel the sun. Newt Gingrich is coming up the walk, a fallen political enemy from back home, and they immediately smile and hello and embrace. What the hell, just a couple of pols from the Peach State.

The blast jammed my eyeballs back into my skull, temporarily blinding me, pinning my cheeks and jaw muscles to the bones of my face .... When my eyes cleared I looked at my right hand. It was gone. Nothing but a splintered white bone protruded from my shredded elbow.

LASH LARUE IS GOOD. GENE AUTRY IS VERY GOOD.

But the best, the very best, is the Lone Ranger. Max Cleland seeks a black-and-white world. This is very hard to achieve, because the reel gets in the way. For five years, he tried to write a book to stop the noise in his head. He would sit there, from about 1975 to 1980, with a pen and paper. Then he would have a typist work it over, then he would go over it again. And again, and again. The result: Strong at the Broken Places, a slight volume of 162 pages and clean, painful prose. The title comes from A Farewell to Arms, Cleland’s favorite book. Writing the book helped, but it is not enough; writing a book did not accomplish for Max what Lash LaRue can. Cleland does have a television in Georgia, and what he watches is old westerns. He collects memorabilia from the programs. Once, he met Clayton Moore, who played the Lone Ranger, and he almost gets teary eyed as he recalls that moment. This is the kind of stuff he grew up on, and he’s never really gotten past it. Or wanted to.

Max Cleland lives in a deep well of loneliness surrounded by a mob of staff, constituents, and colleagues. He struggles to the surface through simple tactics such as having an aide wheel him around so that he always has a companion. To be a modern politician is to have a schedule, not a life. To be a triple amputee devours even more precious time. Washington is a city of professional marriages, divorce, and telephone relationships. In this citadel of family-values chat, it is hard to find a block of hours for children, wife, lover, or friend. And so Cleland’s face smiles, but his eyes yearn like those of a neglected child.

He has his succor. In 1975 he got in his car and drove the 635 miles from his hometown of Lithonia, Georgia, to Washington, D. C. And when he arrived, he’d found God. Not the God he met on Sunday every week in church or the one he kind of prayed to, but the God who would keep him alive and the God he needed for meaning in life. Somewhere near Richmond, rain hit the windshield and Cleland blurted out, "God forgive me! God help me!"

He felt a peace after that. He’s not a theologian; he lets this thing alone. It feeds him, and he does not question it. But you can see it. It is late one night, and the valets are parking the limousines at a mansion. And Cleland, after a long day, is here for one more occasion, the empty social whirl of the capital. He is wheeled toward the open doorway, and the light inside is soft and golden, and women in very fine dresses stand holding glasses of wine. Cleland’s back is broad, and he rolls into the party of either the New Rome or the New Babylon. A woman leans over, Cleland gives a big hug, his face becomes electric, his voice rich and southern and at ease. You sense he is carrying silver bullets and will be safe. When that grenade blew parts of his body away, the arm and the legs were replaced with something the rest of us don’t get to know. And that something now rolls around the United States Senate, smiling and laughing and glad-handing. And festering. Because Lash LaRue is good, and Gene Autry is better, and the Lone Ranger is the very best. But nothing really ever stops that reel in Max Cleland’s head.

I looked down. My right leg and knee were gone. My left leg was a soggy mass of bloody flesh mixed with green fatigue cloth .... I seemed to be falling back into a dark tunnel .... I tried to cry out to them but could only hiss. My hand touched my throat and came back covered with blood. Shrapnel had sliced open my windpipe. I sank back on the ground knowing that I was dying fast. A soft blackness was trying to claim me. No! I don’t want to die.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT HE DOES NOT STAY A legless man with one arm. At first he is in a chair with wheels. But after a few moments, the chair vanishes and the race begins again just to keep up. There is the stream of words punctuated by a left-handed chop, the eyes are bright and clear—Cleland has not had a drink since 1975. He is bulky, solid, square-headed, he takes up space and he is animated. The left hand chopping or reaching out. The thumbs-up gesture, the body twisting and turning to say hello. The constant motion. An aide approaches with something to read, and Cleland reaches down under one stump, flips open his eyeglass case, and in a swift and all but invisible movement puts his glasses on and glances at the document. A letter must be signed, and he pulls the cap off his pen with his stump, signs, and puts the pen back together. And this is hardly noticed under the rush of words—Winston Churchill, you know, said the next empires would be in the mind; Dick Russell was proudest of passing the 1946 school-lunch program. At this moment, you forget he is a triple amputee, or you forget the phrase "triple amputee." You look up on the wall of his office and there is a picture of Cleland visiting President Clinton at the White House, and they are both perched on a sofa and Clinton looks huge and Cleland looks like a stuffed doll, and you are stunned, absolutely stunned, to discover he has one arm and no legs because this does not occur to you when you are with him. That is not what he looks like.

Jesus Christ, it is obvious. He is on the sofa in his office, just like in that picture at the White House, and he is showing how he does some of his exercises, moving this way and that to get his muscles properly worked. The clock on the wall says two-thirty, and he is waiting for his moment on the floor, waiting to speak on Kosovo.

It is all in the eyes. He can fool you with his movements and his quick talk and his warm handshake and his laughter. The terrible injuries disappear and it’s just good old Max, the fellow who gets down home as often as possible and, swear to God, somehow goes fishing. But the eyes—it is all in the eyes. They have a pain based on knowing something he never wanted to know and probably cannot say.

He has recovered, plays basketball, you know, but he has not forgotten. So he always wavers. At one moment, he is back there as he thinks about Kosovo. The next moment, he is on the phone describing the beautiful tulip beds and rage of blossoming cherry trees in Washington to his mother back in Georgia.

Time passed and then I was able to comprehend that the person was a girl .... Have I got my leg? I whispered. Her eyes moistened. No, she said softly. Oh, my God! Both legs gone!... I’ve got my right knee, I whispered excitedly. She shook her head sadly. I’m sure, I argued. I can move it a little. She put a cool hand on my forehead. It’s only the muscle, she whispered. Now try and get some sleep. ... They had given me 41 pints of blood. You can thank God, she added softly. It’s a miracle you’re alive. I shut my eyes and winced. Thanks for nothing, I thought ....

HE LIVES WITH THE FACT THAT HE ASKED FOR it. He was in college during Vietnam and left to join the Army because he’d always gone toward the action. He became the aide to a general stateside and fought to get shipped to ’Nam. Once in country, he was an army captain and saw little combat and fought to be sent into Khe Sanh. And when Khe Sanh was over and they were mopping up, he almost bought the farm.

For thirty-one years, he figured it was his fault. Before he jumped out of the chopper, he’d checked his grenades to make sure the pins that activate them were bent and could not accidentally fall out. Straight pins can get you killed. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground and saw a grenade beneath him. And then for thirty-one years he heard that explosion and thought, I’ve blown myself up with my own grenade. He got decorations but would have none of them, because to Max Cleland they sure as hell didn’t cover a man who blows himself up. Then, this spring, he was on a television show and told his story about that day at Khe Sanh, and later a guy called up and said, Hey, I was there, it wasn’t your grenade, I saw it. And Cleland checked the caller out, and it seems the guy really was there. And this year, Max celebrated Being Alive Day with him down in Georgia. And an enormous weight was lifted off Max Cleland. He did not do this thing to himself.

So now the tape can be slightly altered, the one that runs in his head, and now the question need not be, Is the pin straight? Or bent? But the rest is still there. The thing that requires motivation, that takes up three hours each morning as he comes back to life before facing the world.

I replayed the incident over and over like a videotape. The memories were vivid and painful. I’d run under the chopper blades, watch the helicopter lift, then look down. The grenade. Explosion .... Whose grenade was it? How did the pin come out?

WE ARE ROLLING NOW, AND MAX CLELAND IS the United States senator from Georgia, that amputee who holds the old Richard Russell seat, something about Vietnam, they say. The elevator opens, then shuts, he is down now and rolling toward that special Senate subway; he’s rolling, on his way, the car stops, the door opens, he is in, and the train pulls away. Now out again, up the ramp and into the Capitol building itself. It is a drill—only missed two votes in three years. There is that janitor, the one who always smiles and considers Cleland an inspiration—he’s pushing a cart in the Capitol basement and he waves and Senator Cleland suddenly becomes Max and smiles that big, electric grin, and he gives the guy a thumbs-up, that attaboy purr in his voice, and then he is gone, the smile vanishes, and the senator returns. Another elevator opens, he rolls in, the woman operating the lift smiles, and Cleland dishes out an instant quip. The door opens again, and he heads into the ornate antechambers of the Senate wing, with their glowing walls, their frescoes, their busts of distinguished Americans cluttering the way. He has been a long time coming to this moment. Last October, when Kosovo was heating up, he wrote President Clinton a private letter:

"Though it is certainly a matter of more fundamental national interest to the leader and his nation, Kosovo is Milosevic’s Vietnam. You should not make it yours.... The American people will not long support an open-ended conflict in the Balkans with an unspecified timetable, an uncertain result, and no exit strategy. I cannot support such a policy either."

It was not an easy letter for Cleland. He likes the president—they are both southern pols who came up together. But he had to write the letter, he decided.

Now the big doors open to the Senate chamber, the blue carpet stretches before him, and suddenly he is gone, swallowed up by the inner sanctum. He rolls around the back arc of the chamber to his desk, and in a blur of motion he flips with left-armed ease from the wheelchair to his wooden chair and is almost magically seated.

His day is being interrupted by a war. He had lunch with Georgia friends in the Senate dining room, and this evening he’s having dinner with some more folks from home. That’s the part of being a senator he likes. Just as, the other evening, he enjoyed taking Michael Thurmond, the Georgia labor commissioner, to a party, and they congregated there before the buffet, studying the mountain of shrimp and the molded pates, and Thurmond, son of a sharecropper, allowed as how he wished his daddy could see him now and Cleland agreed and rolled right in with laughter and they both smiled at all the food and the grandeur that still seemed so alien to a couple of kids from rural Georgia. And Cleland beamed at the pleasure of it all, at having a few moments with another politician from Georgia, at laughing, at being a senator.

But now the pen is whipped out, and the left arm begins to write and scratch and make changes. Up in his suite of Senate offices, his press secretary is groaning as Senator Max Cleland rewrites the statement on Kosovo that has already been sent out to the press. Cleland sits in the all but empty chamber and writes and writes. A senator holds the floor explaining a bill on using "chicken litter" as a fuel for generating electricity. "We now produce," the senator intones, "almost eight billion chickens a year." And for a moment, the Senate business is chicken shit.

Then his time ends, and it is Cleland’s allotted half hour, the first occasion in his freshman term when he will make a substantive statement on such a divisive issue. There are maybe a dozen staffers plus the presiding officers sitting in the tedium of the empty room. The galleries hold a few clusters of tourists looking down into the mythic well of power. Cleland’s voice is surprisingly strong, the words come rich with vowels, the basic equipment of any Georgian, and the words come fast, a Dixie voice moving at Yankee speed.

And the voice is back in Rome, the original Rome, and wants to point out the havoc in 112 B.C., when the Roman Senate declared war against Jugurtha, a contender for the throne of Numidia. The war was a disaster, an open-ended quagmire. "North Africa was in many ways Rome’s Vietnam." Cleland is a student of history, a vice of southern politicians who all cut their teeth on the minutiae of what they call the War Between the States, and he now rolls through Rome and then heads for the first Balkan war of the twentieth century, that bit of madness that flowered and became World War I. "There are no easy answers," the voice offers. "The post-cold-war order is one of disorder." Cleland is steady as he reads, reviews options, offers up two thousand years of experiences. "We have to make sure," he says, "that the current Milosevic-misled nationalism does not lead to the Guns of 1999." But, but, and here it is again: "I was on the ground in Vietnam thirty-one years ago. I don’t want this generation to repeat that experience."

We can help refugees, we can bomb, we can do anything but casually enter a ground war. Cleland is firm and he is clear as he speaks to an empty chamber and the tour groups flutter in and out.

Then it is over, his entire thirty minutes consumed. He wheels out and repeats his trek back to his office. First he stops at the Senate television studio to fire off some comments for the stations back in Georgia. Then it is off to the fourth floor, and in the corridor his staff awaits him and applauds. He looks unsure of himself, as if he wonders about mentioning Vietnam. He accepts the congratulations of his staff, and then he wheels into a cluster of Georgians, independent insurance agents here for a convention. Relief floods his body. Suddenly he is Max again, the smiling politician, back to where he loves to be, fixing this and that, and he asks one man where he is from and boom! starts talking about the great fishing in a lake near the man’s hometown. Politics is retail. He works the group one by one, they follow him into his office, where there are Cokes for everyone, and cookies.

After the underwriters leave his office, he marvels that they are more wrapped up in auto policies than foreign policies. He smiles and says, "They think the world is a small-town insurance agency." And Max Cleland seems just a little bit envious of the senator who preceded him today, the man pushing for a chicken-shit subsidy for the poultry growers of his state.

But he can’t just be another pol. Not long from now, there will be another high school shooting, this time in Conyers, Georgia, ten miles from Cleland’s hometown. And he will cast the decisive vote on a gun-control bill, and he will say, "Our high schools are turning into mini-Vietnams, and we can’t have that." And this vote is very risky for a freshman senator from a state where gun control is an issue that gets you beat.

His day is hardly over. Tonight there will be the dinner. Maybe a fundraiser. He’ll be back alone in his apartment around ten. He’ll undress, get into his bed, and turn on a taped inspirational talk by Norman Vincent Peale. The man who was once six feet two inches will listen.

Because the hardest part of every day is motivation, beating back the blackness, listening to God. Not giving in. He’ll look at that plaque by his bed: I WAS GIVEN LIFE, THAT I MIGHT ENJOY ALL THINGS.

Then he will close his eyes. And hope that other tape is not playing, the one in which he is struck blind and blown backward toward the darkness.

God didn’t make me to be just four feet tall.

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/040803_mfe_max_7.html