For more than a year, a modest bungalow a few miles from President Bush’s ranch and known as “Peace House” served as the somewhat forlorn local headquarters for anti-war activists. It was lonely work, with little more than a skeleton crew on duty most of the time.
But that was before Cindy Sheehan hit town.
The 48-year-old mother of Army Spec. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in an ambush in Baghdad last year, Sheehan is consumed by the kind of grief that turns into a furious determination to do something. In her case it is to confront the president personally and force him to explain why her son died.
Now, in just a few days, what began as a seemingly quixotic personal mission has become something of a phenomenon. News media from across the country are swarming around Sheehan, leading liberal and anti-war activists are arriving to try to make her their long-sought voice and political experts in both parties are trying to assess whether she might become a catalyst for the public’s growing unhappiness with U.S. casualties in Iraq.
What anti-war leaders hoped to do was turn Sheehan into a symbol that could transform the slowly gathering unease into a focused political force.
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For its part, the White House struggled to cope with Sheehan’s vigil without abandoning their carefully crafted strategy for having the president meet with such families privately, away from news cameras and reporters.
By Wednesday night, Sheehan had given so many interviews that she was sucking on lozenges to soothe an inflamed throat. And her newly arrived media adviser said she had developed a fever. That did not keep her from delivering her message, however.
“I don’t believe his phony excuses for the war,” she said of Bush in a session with a CBS reporter who was interviewing her for the network’s northern California affiliates. “I want him to tell me why my son died.
“If he gave the real answer, people in this country would be outraged–if he told people it was to make his buddies rich, that it was about oil “
Sheehan is not the first to denounce the president over the war in Iraq. But for the moment, the personal nature of her protest, with its edge of raw emotion, and the concentration of news media staked out in Crawford while Bush is on vacation have combined to raise her voice above the crowd.
“Anything that focuses media and public attention on Iraq war casualties day after day–particularly that is a good visual for television, like a weeping … mother–is a really bad thing for President Bush and his administration,” said independent political analyst Charlie Cook.
Jolting Americans
“Americans get a little numb by the numbers of war casualties, but when faces, names and families are added, it has a much greater effect,” he said.
Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, president of the Washington-based firm The Polling Company, said Sheehan captures attention by tapping a silent minority.
“Cindy Sheehan is a non-presidential-year spokesperson for that latent but unmistakable number of Americans who wish the Iraq war would disappear,” Conway said.
Other analysts predicted that Sheehan would soon fade from the scene.
`Right idea’
For her part, Sheehan said, “I just had the right idea in the right place at the right time.”
Since Sheehan arrived in Crawford, “Peace House” has been transformed into a beehive.
On a table in the living room were stacks of white T-shirts that read “BUSH Talk to Cindy! Moms and Vets Will Stop the War!”
There was much speculation about “other moms” or parents of troops serving in the war coming to join Sheehan, although no one seemed to know for certain.
According to Ann Wright, who identified herself as a one-time U.S. diplomat who resigned to protest the war, Sheehan seemed to make a spontaneous decision Friday night to come to Crawford while addressing a convention of peace activists in Dallas. Wright said countless hands were raised, offering to join her mission.