Activist Mother Steps Away From Front Lines of Anti-War Movement

May 30, 07:53 AM

Current Headlines: By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

The New York Times

Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist who spent the past two years trying to confront President Bush and traveling around the world in protest of the war in Iraq, said she will now try a final tactic: silence.

Sheehan announced on a 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," 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. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or any more people that I love and the rest of my resources."

Sheehan walked through Crawford, Texas, in the summer of 2005 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.

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 of 2005 waned with time.

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 ; Sheehan fell out with other liberal activists as her criticism of the right and left intensified; and 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.

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