Sheehan Says She's Quitting as Face of Peace Movement
Brett
Sheehan Says She's Quitting as Face of Peace Movement
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and CAROLYN MARSHALL
Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist who spent the last two years
trying to confront President Bush, courting controversy and traveling
around the world in protest of the war in Iraq, says she will now try
a final tactic: silence.
Ms. Sheehan announced on a liberal Web site Monday that she was
essentially resigning as the face of the American peace movement,
leaving Texas to return to California, her home state, to "be a mother
to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I lost."
"This is not my Checkers moment, because I will never give up trying
to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good
old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system,"
Ms. Sheehan wrote in her post on the Web site The Daily Kos.
"This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people
who try to help it," she wrote. "I am getting out before it totally
consumes me or any more people that I love and the rest of my
resources."
Ms. Sheehan's son, Specialist Casey A. Sheehan of the Army, was killed
on April 4, 2004, in Iraq. He was 24. His mother captured the nation's
attention in August 2005 when she arrived at the president's ranch in
Crawford, Tex., and announced that she would not leave until Mr. Bush
agreed to meet with her.
Ms. Sheehan walked through Crawford that summer carrying pictures of
her son as a toddler and in his Army fatigues, humanizing the war
dead, who had remained in many ways invisible to large segments of the
American public.
Her intransigence in the face of Secret Service agents and senior Bush
administration officials who tried to mollify her was a crucial
element in what at the time was a small and incipient antiwar
movement.
Ms. Sheehan said in an interview yesterday in Northern California that
she had been contemplating leaving the peace movement for more than a
year, spurred in part by an illness, fatigue and what she said was her
increasing frustration with bloggers on the left who she said attacked
her. She also cited divisions within the antiwar movement and a recent
vote in Congress to finance the war without setting a deadline for
troop withdrawal.
"One of the things that pushed me over the edge was that people on the
left were calling me names," she said. "How many kicks in the teeth do
you have to endure."
She added, "I don't have anything left in my personal reservoir."
She has been criticized in part for her left-leaning politics and for
meeting with Hugo Chavez, the leftist president of Venezuela.
Ms. Sheehan, 49, said in the interview, "I feel like a tremendous
weight has been lifted." She added, "People demonize me; people
idolize me; everything I say and do has been scrutinized."
Last year, Ms. Sheehan bought property in Crawford with $52,000 in
insurance money she had received after her son's death and continued
her summer encampments.
Ms. Sheehan said she made the decision to leave in consultation Monday
in Crawford only with her boyfriend and her sister, DeDe Miller. She
said: "My sister tried to talk me out of it. She said, 'You're just
tired.' And then she realized I wasn't going to change my mind."
Ms. Sheehan's protests were not confined to Crawford. She was removed
from the visitors gallery of the House of Representatives and arrested
for refusing to cover up her antiwar garb before Mr. Bush's State of
the Union address in January 2006. She was also convicted of
trespassing while trying to deliver an antiwar petition to American
diplomats at the United Nations.
Ms. Sheehan said her efforts against the war led to the end of her 29-
year marriage and created strains with her three surviving children,
who live near her ex-husband in Northern California.
A White House spokeswoman refused to comment on Ms. Sheehan's
decision.
A group of Gold Star Family members, parents who have lost children in
war, said in a statement, "We are very pleased to hear that Cindy
Sheehan is ending her disgraceful campaign to discredit the United
States military and the heroic men and women in harm's way in Iraq and
Afghanistan."
But her supporters felt stung. "I am not sure her decision is really
clear to all of us," said Elizabeth Stinson, the director of the Peace
and Justice Center of Sonoma County in California. "But I am not
surprised by the critique at all because we're all feeling it with
this vote," a reference to passage of the war-financing bill minus the
timeline.
Ms. Sheehan said she would not return to the antiwar movement, but
would like to work in the world of humanitarian aid.
"We'll come back in a different way," she said. "Not working with
politicians or against politicians. Not working with any kind of
political movement at all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/us/30sheehan.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print