A few months after former Alaskan Sen. Mike Gravel called off his 2020 presidential bid, Henry Williams, David Oks, and Henry Magowan made a trip out to Monterey, California, to see their candidate. For eight months, the three students had run Gravel’s long-shot progressive campaign from Oks’s childhood bedroom in Westchester County, New York. Now they were going to visit with him to reflect on the campaign.
The three stayed with Gravel on the California coast for about a week, listening to his stories about Richard Nixon and the Pentagon Papers—in 1971, he risked entering thousands of pages of secret history of the Vietnam War into the Congressional Record. He shared thoughts on the future of the progressive movement and discussed the most powerful forces on the right, including the conservative heavyweight PragerU. The four of them finally thought of a way to bolster progressives and keep the spirit of their online campaign movement alive: They would create the Gravel Institute.
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