An  Interview with Cindy Sheehan

By MWC Editor at larg Tom Engelhardt

My brief immersion in the almost unimaginable life of Cindy Sheehan begins on the Friday before the massive antiwar march past the White House. I take a cab to an address somewhere at the edge of Washington DC -- a city I don't know well -- where I'm to have a quiet hour with her. Finding myself on a porch filled with peace signs and vases of roses (assumedly sent for Sheehan), I ring the doorbell, only to be greeted by two barking dogs but no human beings. Checking my cell phone, I discover a message back in New York from someone helping Sheehan out. Good Morning America has just called; plans have changed. Can I make it to Constitution and 15th by five? I rush to the nearest major street and, from a bus stop, fruitlessly attempt to hail a cab. The only empty one passes me by and a young black man next to me offers an apologetic commentary: "I hate to say this, but they probably think you're hailing it for me and they don't want to pick me up." On his recommendation, I board a bus, leaping off (twenty blocks of crawl later) at the sight of a hotel with a cab stand.

A few minutes before five, I'm finally standing under the Washington monument, beneath a cloud-dotted sky, in front of "Camp Casey," a white tent with a blazing red "Bring them home tour" banner. Behind the tent is a display of banged-up, empty soldiers' boots; and then, stretching almost as far as the eye can see or the heart can feel, a lawn of small white crosses, nearly two thousand of them, some with tiny American flags planted in the nearby ground. In front of the serried ranks of crosses is a battered looking metal map of the United States rising off a rusty base. Cut out of it are the letters, "America in Iraq, killed ___, wounded ___." (It's wrenching to note that, on this strange sculpture with eternal letters of air, only the figures of 1,910 dead and 14,700 wounded seem ephemeral, written as they are in white chalk over a smeared chalk background, evidence of numerous erasures.)

This is, at the moment, Ground Zero for the singular movement of Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey, who was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad on April 4, 2004, only a few days after arriving in Iraq. Her movement began in the shadows and on the Internet, but burst out of a roadside ditch in Crawford, Texas, and, right now, actually seems capable of changing the political map of America. When I arrive, Sheehan is a distant figure, walking with a crew from Good Morning America amid the white crosses. I'm told by Jodie, a stalwart of Code Pink, the women's antiwar group, in a flamboyant pink-feathered hat, just to hang in there along with Joan Baez, assorted parents of soldiers, vets, admirers, tourists, press people, and who knows who else.

As Sheehan approaches, she's mobbed. She hugs some of her greeters, poses for photos with others, listens briefly while people tell her they came all the way from California or Colorado just to see her, and accepts the literal T-shirt off the back of a man, possibly a vet, with a bandana around his forehead, who wants to give her "the shirt off my back." She is brief and utterly patient. She offers a word to everyone and anyone. At one point, a man shoves a camera in my hand so that he and his family can have proof of this moment -- as if Cindy Sheehan were already some kind of national monument, which in a way she is.

But, of course, she's also one human being, even if she's on what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton would call a "survivor mission" for her son. Exhaustion visibly inhabits her face. (Later, she'll say to me, "Most people, if they came with me for a day, would be in a coma by eleven A.M.") She wears a tie-dyed, purple T-shirt with "Veterans for Peace" on the front and "waging peace" on the back. Her size surprises me. She's imposing, far taller than I expected, taller certainly than my modest five-foot, six inches. Perhaps I'm startled only because I'd filed her away -- despite every strong commentary I'd read by her – as a grieving mother and so, somehow, a diminished creature.

And then, suddenly, a few minutes after five, Jodie is hustling me into the backseat of a car with Cindy Sheehan beside me, and Joan Baez beside her. Cindy's sister Dede, who wears an "Anything war can do, peace can do better" T-shirt and says to me later, "I'm the behind-the-scenes one, I'm the quiet one," climbs into the front seat. As soon as the car leaves the curb, Cindy turns to me: "We better get started."

"Now?" I ask, flustered at the thought of interviewing her under such chaotic conditions. She offers a tired nod -- I'm surely the 900th person of this day -- and says, "It's the only way it'll happen." And so, with my notebook (tiny printed questions scattered across several pages) on my knees, clutching my two cheap tape recorders for dear life and shoving them towards her, we begin:

Tomdispatch: You've said that the failed bookends of George Bush's presidency are Iraq and Katrina. And here we are with parts of New Orleans flooded again. Where exactly do you see us today?

Cindy Sheehan: Well, the invasion of Iraq was a serious mistake, and the invasion and occupation have been seriously mismanaged. The troops don't have what they need. The money's being dropped into the pockets of war profiteers and not getting to our soldiers. It's a political war. Not only should we not be there, it's making our country very vulnerable. It's creating enemies for our children's children. Killing innocent Arabic Muslims, who had no animosity towards the United States and meant us no harm, is only creating more problems for us.

Katrina was a natural disaster that nobody could help, but the man-made disaster afterwards was just horrible. I mean, number one, all our resources are in Iraq. Number two, what little resources we did have were deployed far too late. George Bush was golfing and eating birthday cake with John McCain while people were hanging off their houses praying to be rescued. He's so disconnected from this country -- and from reality. I heard a line yesterday that I thought was perfect. This man said he thinks Katrina will be Bush's Monica. Only worse. {mosgoogle right}

TD: It seems logical that the families of dead soldiers should lead an antiwar movement, but historically it's almost unique. I wondered if you had given some thought to why it happened here and now.

CS: That's like people asking me, "Why didn't anybody ever think of going to George Bush's ranch to protest anything?"

TD: I was going to ask you that too…

CS: [Laughs.] I don't know. I just thought of it and went down to do it. It was so serendipitous. I was supposed to go to England for a week in August to do Downing Street [Memo] events with [Congressman] John Conyers. That got cancelled. I was supposed to go to Arkansas for a four-day convention. That got cancelled. So I had my whole month free. I was going to be in Dallas for the Veteran's for Peace convention. The last straw was on Wednesday, August 3 -- the fourteen Marines who were killed and George Bush saying that all of our soldiers had died for a noble cause and we had to honor the sacrifices of the fallen by continuing the mission. I had just had it. That was enough and I had this idea to go to Crawford.

The first day we were there -- this is how unplanned it was -- we were sitting in lawn chairs, about six of us, underneath the stars with one flashlight between us, and we were going to the bathroom in a ten-gallon bucket.

DeDe: Five-gallon…

CS: A Five-gallon bucket, sorry. So that's how well planned this action was. We just planned it as we were going along and, for something so spontaneous, it turned out to be incredibly powerful and successful. It's hard for some people to believe how spontaneous it was.

TD: You've written that George Bush refusing to meet with you was the spark that lit the prairie fire -- and that his not doing so reflected his cowardice. You also said that if he had met you that fatal… fateful day…

Joan Baez: Fatal day…

TD: Fatal -- it was fatal for him -- things might have turned out quite differently.

CS: If he had met with me, I know he would have lied to me. I would have called him on his lies and it wouldn't have been a good meeting, but I would have left Crawford. I would have written about it, probably done a few interviews, but it wouldn't have sparked this exciting, organic, huge peace movement. So he really did the peace movement a favor by not meeting with me.

TD: I thought his fatal blunder was to send out [National Security Advisor Stephen] Hadley and [Deputy White House Chief of Staff Joe] Hagin as if you were the prime minister of Poland. [She laughs.] And it suddenly made you in terms of the media…

CS: …credible.

TD: So what did Hadley and Hagen say to you?

CS: They said, "What do you want to tell the President?" I said, "I want to ask the President, what is the noble cause my son died for?" And they kept telling me: Keep America safe from terrorism for freedom and democracy. Blah-blah-blah… all the excuses I wasn't going to take, except from the President. Then we talked about weapons of mass destruction and the lack thereof, about how they had really believed it. I was: Well, really, Mr. Stephen (Yellowcake Uranium) Hadley… I finally said, "This is a waste of time. I might be a grieving mother, but I'm not stupid. I'm very well informed and I want to meet with the President." And so they said, "Okay, we'll pass on your concerns to the President."

They said at one point, "We didn't come out here thinking we'd change your mind on policy." And I said, "Yes you did." They thought they were going to intimidate me, that they were going to impress me with the high level of administration official they had sent out, and after they explained everything to me, I was going to go [her voice becomes liltingly mocking], "Ohhhh, I really never saw it that way. Okay, let's go guys." You know, that's exactly what they thought they were going to do to me. And I believe it was a move that did backfire because, as you said, it gave me credibility and then, all of a sudden, the White House press corps thought this might be a story worth covering.