The year before he died, Joe Lieberman expressed regret to a documentary filmmaker about the U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, a sentiment rarely if ever heard during the late senator’s steadfast defense of the unpopular war over two decades.
The revelation comes about 48 minutes into “Centered: Joe Lieberman,” a documentary about the singular place Lieberman occupied in contemporary American politics as a voice of civility and bipartisanship, albeit one with a talent for testing friendships and alliances.
Lieberman did not recant his belief that Saddam was a legitimate target as an inhumane leader of Iraq and destabilizing force in the region, even if the U.S. eventually acknowledged Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, as George W. Bush claimed as one justification for the invasion.
But the Bush administration’s failure to stabilize Iraq after the quick initial victory birthed an insurgency that led to the loss of 200,000 lives and required 14 years and as much as $1 trillion to quell. In lives and treasure, the cost was much too high, Lieberman said.
“Of course, if I had known that we would have made the mistakes we did after Saddam was overthrown and that so many lives — Iraqi, mostly, but also American, of course, soldiers — would be lost, and so much money would be spent by the U.S., I probably would have said it’s not worth it,” Lieberman said.
Lieberman, 82, who died in March after a fall, made the comment in one of two interviews that Jonathan Gruber conducted with the former U.S. senator in the summer of 2023 for a documentary previewed this week for invited guests in Stamford, the city where Lieberman was born and raised.
The official release comes in November in Washington, D.C.
Gruber said in an interview Wednesday that Lieberman had continued to defend the rationale for the war in public appearances, television interviews and opinion pieces, including one published March 16, 2023, in the New York Post. Lieberman initially offered a similar defense to Gruber.
“But then I just asked, ‘But what about the tragedy, you know, the hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost?’ And then he answered what he did, which was, really the first time I think publicly he’s ever said, maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do,” Gruber said.
Lieberman saw a cut of the 75-minute film not long before he died.
“When I showed him the cut the first time,” Gruber said, “he looked around the table and he said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever said that [before], but I’m glad I did.’ ”
Lieberman followed up with an email telling Gruber “he loved what he saw and that it was a great legacy for his public service.”
A week later, Lieberman was dead.
He had been diagnosed six years earlier with myelofibrosis, an aggressive blood cancer whose treatment typically included blood thinners, making him vulnerable to a brain bleed when he fell and struck his head. The median life expectancy after a myelofibrosis diagnosis is six years.
Gruber was unaware of the diagnosis until Lieberman’s son, Matthew, disclosed it in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece after his death. Nor was he aware that Lieberman had recently discussed with his wife, Hadassah Lieberman, his preferences for who might speak at his funeral. She told The Connecticut Mirror after the preview Tuesday night that she’d written down the names and put them in a drawer.
“I had zero clue on any of it,” Gruber said. “We ran him ragged last summer.”
Aside from the two interviews in New York City, Gruber filmed Lieberman visiting Congregation Agudath Sholom in Stamford, where the Liebermans were married and worshipped, and in New Haven, where he settled after graduating from Yale and entered politics.
Gruber said he pitched the idea of a documentary after interviewing Lieberman for an earlier film about a former Israeli prime minister: “Upheaval: The Journey of Menachem Begin.”
The Lieberman film has light moments. Its subtitle is “Doing It His Way,” a reference to his unconventional path through politics and his love of singing “My Way,” the Frank Sinatra standard, something he once did on Conan O’Brien’s late night show.
Lieberman was an intriguing subject to Gruber: a social progressive who had become defined for his hawkish views on foreign policy; the first Jew on a major party ticket, in 2000; a candidate, if briefly, for president in 2004; and a Democrat who went in eight years from his party’s vice presidential nominee to an independent seriously considered by Republican John McCain as his running mate.
The executive producer was Rob Schwartz, a former Lieberman aide.
Gruber’s approach to the Lieberman film was friendly but not hagiographic.
“When we first sat down for the first long interview, he said, ‘I know it’s not going to be all hugs and kisses,’ and I think that that was conveyed in the film,” Gruber said, “Overall, it’s positive, because I think he generally is a very important and positive figure in American politics. But that doesn’t mean we gave him a free ride.”
Lieberman is not heard in the film commenting on the faulty U.S. intelligence that preceded the invasion in 2003, two years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that were traced to the Middle East but not to Saddam. But there are sharply critical voices in the film, including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut.
“It’s a disgrace that the case for war seems to have been based on shoddy intelligence, hyped intelligence, and even false intelligence,” Kennedy thunders in video from a speech in July 2003. Kennedy was one of only 23 senators who had voted against a resolution authorizing the war.
Lamont challenged Lieberman for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in the midterm election of 2006, when Bush was not on the ballot to answer to an electorate disillusioned with the war. Targeted by MoveOn.org, Lieberman became a proxy for the Bush.
“I think George Bush rushed us into this war. I think Joe Lieberman cheered him on every step of the way, and that those that got us in this mess should be held accountable,” Lamont says in a clip from the race.
Lamont won the primary, but Lieberman continued over the vehement objections of some Democratic allies — some who are heard in the film — and won as an independent. If that step distanced him from Democrats, his endorsement of McCain for president in 2008 drove them to apoplexy.
In one scene filmed in 2023, he reminisces with some friends who stayed with him, including two former state Democratic chairs, Nick Balletto and John Droney, and Vinnie Mauro Jr., the current Democratic chair of New Haven.
Balletto attended the screening in Stamford, popcorn in hand.
“I often said, particularly to these guys, I understand it’s not always easy to be my friend and political supporter,” Lieberman says to the camera, smiling broadly. “And that was one year where that was true.”
Another year was the one when he denounced Bill Clinton on the Senate floor for his affair with a White House intern, an episode that lead to Clinton’s impeachment by the House and acquittal in the Senate.
He tells the story of the phone call from Clinton after the speech.
“He said, ‘I was hurt by your speech, but I agree with everything you said. I made a terrible mistake. I’m working very hard to make sure I never do it again.’ And I always felt that what he had done, as reprehensible as it was, didn’t constitute impeachable acts,” Lieberman said. “None of us is perfect. He stumbled and fell. As I said in my speech, we’re all sinners.”
Lieberman seemed to enjoy recounting why he went for McCain in the early weeks of the 2008 campaign, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, who were contending for the Democratic nomination.
“I was friendly, very friendly with Hillary for a long time, and with Obama. Neither of them asked for my support. Why? Because I had the scarlet I for Iraq on my forehead,” Lieberman said. Smiling, he pointed to his forehead.
McCain’s widow, Cindy, and his political adviser, Charlie Black, each described how seriously the Arizona senator was about a fusion ticket with Lieberman. Ultimately, McCain bowed to those who insisted that the GOP would not tolerate a VP candidate dedicated to a woman’s right to an abortion, among other things.
“We thought long and hard about Joe, we really did,” Cindy McCain told Gruber. “But we just couldn’t figure out a way to get him through the convention, and so we had to table that and put it aside.”
“Some of us, I’ll take credit myself, thought it might have been a very risky idea,” Black said, pausing a beat to set up a punch line. “So John decided to take another kind of risk.”
The film cuts to Sarah Palin accepting the nomination, prompting belly laughs at the screening.
Instead of joining the ticket, Lieberman gave a keynote speech praising McCain and labeling Obama was bright, eloquent — and not quite ready for prime time.
One former Lieberman aide says in the film, “If there was any leftover goodwill among Democrats, it was lost that night.”
Lieberman never suggests he regretted the speech, but he was noticeably subdued in recalling when he watched Obama give his victory speech.
“This was a magic moment in American history, that an African-American man was about to be president of the United States,” said Lieberman, a student of history who had campaigned for civil rights in the South as a college student. “But I wasn’t there, or I wasn’t part of it.”
Gruber made changes in the film after Lieberman’s death.
He added brief footage of Lieberman standing on the same spot in the synagogue where his plain wooden coffin would lay at his funeral. And there was an excerpt of the eulogy delivered by Al Gore, whose name was on the list Hadassah compiled for her husband.
“Politics can be a rough trade,” said Gore, who had broken with Lieberman and then reconciled. “The stakes are high, the pressures great. Joe and I experienced those,
but he always knew beyond doubt the true value of things. He was blessed, and he was a blessing for all of us.”
It cuts to Lieberman signing “My Way,” egged on by Conan O’Brien.
“And now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain — “
He stops laughs, and says, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Then he continued.