Fort Worth, Texas – Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain U.S. soldier who galvanized the anti-war movement with her month-long protest outside President Bush’s ranch, said today that she’s done being the public face of the movement.
“I’ve been wondering why I’m killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved in to George Bush,” she told The Associated Press while driving from her property in Crawford to the airport, where she planned to return to her native California. “I’m going home for awhile to try and be normal.”
In what she described as a “resignation letter,” Sheehan wrote in her online diary on the Daily Kos blog: “Goodbye 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 began a grass-roots peace movement in August 2005 when she camped outside Bush’s Crawford ranch for 26 days, demanding to talk with the president about her son’s death. Army Spec. Casey Sheehan, 24, was killed in an ambush in Baghdad in 2004.
Cindy Sheehan’s protest started small but swelled to thousands and quickly drew national attention. Over the next two years, she drew huge crowds as she spoke at protests. But she also drew criticism for some actions, such as meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a staunch U.S. critic.
“I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “face” of the American anti-war movement,” Sheehan wrote in the diary.
Kristinn Taylor, a spokesperson for FreeRepublic.com, which has held pro-troop rallies and counterprotests of anti-war demonstrations, said dwindling crowds at Sheehan’s Crawford protests since her initial vigil may have led to her decision. But he also said that he hopes she will now be able to heal.
“Her politics have hurt a lot of people, including the troops and their families, but most of us who support the war on terror understand she is hurt very deeply,” Taylor said today. “Those she got involved with in the anti-war movement realize it was to their benefit to keep her in that stage of anger.”
When Sheehan first took on Bush, she was a darling of the liberal left. “However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the ‘left’ started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used,” she wrote in the diary.
She said she sacrificed a 29-year marriage and endured threats to put all her energy into stopping the war. What she found, she wrote, was a movement “that often puts personal egos above peace and human life.”
She said the most devastating conclusion she had reached “was that Casey did, indeed, die for nothing … killed by his own country, which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think.”
Sheehan told the AP that she considered leaving the peace movement since last summer while recovering from surgery.
She decided on Memorial Day to step down and spend more time with her three other children.
She said she was returning to California today because it was Casey’s birthday. He would have been 28.
“We’ve accomplished as much here as we’re going to,” Sheehan said, saying she was leaving to change course. “When we come back, it definitely won’t be with the peace movement, with marches, with rallies and with protests. It will be more humanitarian efforts.”
Last year, with $52,500 in insurance money she received after her son’s death, Sheehan bought five acres near downtown Crawford as a permanent site for protests.
“Camp Casey has served its purpose,” she wrote in the diary. “It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas?”
