Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist who spent the last two years trying to confront President Bush and traveling around the world in protest of the Iraq war, says she will now try a new tactic — silence.
Sheehan announced on a liberal Web site on Monday that she was ending her role 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.”
In what she described as a “resignation letter,” Sheehan wrote in her online diary on the Daily Kos blog: “Good-bye America … you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.
“It’s up to you now.”
Sheehan’s son, Army Spec. Casey Sheehan, 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, Texas, and announced that she would not leave until Bush agreed to meet with her.
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 a small and incipient anti-war movement at the time.
Last year, Sheehan bought property in Crawford with $52,000 in insurance money she had received after her son’s death and continued her summer encampments.
She also took to camping out along the road to Bush’s ranch, until county officials banned roadside parking and camping, and she was arrested for protesting outside the ranch.
But the president refused to meet with her, many locals tired of her once-curious presence and the news media’s intense interest waned with time.
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 anti-war garb before Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2006. She was also convicted of trespassing while trying to deliver an anti-war petition to U.S. diplomats at the United Nations.
She decided on Memorial Day to step down and was returning to California on Tuesday because it was Casey’s birthday. He would have been 28.
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.
Her critics became widespread and far outside the circles of conservative commentators who had loathed her from Day 1; Sheehan fell out with other liberal activists as her criticism of the right and left intensified. Her activism appeared to spread far from the issue of Iraq. For instance, she recently met with Hugo Chavez, the leftist president of Venezuela.
“Especially since I renounced any ties I have remaining with the Democratic Party,” she wrote on Monday, “I have been further trashed on such liberal blogs as the Democratic Underground.”
Sheehan’s decision seemed to be inspired in part by the actions of the Democratic-led Congress, which recently backed off a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq that they had attached to a war-financing bill.
“I’ve been wondering why I’m killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved to George Bush,” Sheehan told The Associated Press.
A White House spokeswoman refused to comment on Sheehan’s decision, but liberal and conservative blogs were teeming with reaction both critical and bewildered.
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, director of the Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County. “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.
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‘Rosa Parks’ or ‘far-left radical’?
Since Cindy Sheehan became a lightning rod in the Iraq war debate in August 2005, she has inspired both praise and vitriol:
“Cindy Sheehan has become the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement.”
— Rev. Lennox Yearwood, leader of the Hip Hop Caucus
“Cindy has chosen to use her dead son’s image to promote political causes. That’s just inappropriate.”
— Cherie Quartarolo, Sheehan’s former sister-in-law
“Sheehan is highlighting the lack of a reason to go to war, the lack of preparedness to go to war and the lack of proper treatment for our returning veterans.”
— Christine Cegelis, former Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois
“I can rightly describe her as a far-left radical.”
— Fox News host Bill O’Reilly
“It felt like the early days of civil rights when things would go on instinct and you planned the next march on five minutes’ notice. … Michael Moore put a fissure in the wall of denial, and Cindy Sheehan put her foot through it.”
— Singer Joan Baez, who spent a week at Sheehan’s “Camp Casey”
“Like the hard left in the Vietnam War, she declares the Iraq mission itself corrupt and evil: The good guys are the ‘freedom fighters’ — the very ones who besides killing thousands of Iraqi innocents, killed her son too.”
— Charles Krauthammer, columnist
