There have been few characters in the American political landscape like Mike Gravel.

While many politicians claim the mantle of “maverick” while doing little to nothing that qualifies them to hold it, Gravel has been one of the postwar US political order’s true mavericks. Gravel aggressively pursued his often heterodox political goals with little care for either the boys’ club niceties of the Senate in which he served for twelve years, or for general political propriety and, at times, common sense.

The result was that, in his relatively short time as a lawmaker, Gravel both almost single-handedly ended the military draft, and unwittingly helped protect millions of acres of untouched Alaskan wilderness he was trying to block federal protection for. It’s meant Gravel has been capable of offering blunt, even radical assessments of political issues and even visionary prescriptions for solutions, while also occasionally veering into the kookier parts of the political wilderness, from his insistence that “something is monitoring the planet” because of the preponderance of wars, to his belief that “9/11 was an inside job.”