WASHINGTON — As a 16-year-old varsity football player, Tom Andrews went to the doctor to have a badly cut hand stitched up. Doctors also found cancer in his swollen right knee. "I'd never been sick a day in my life," said Andrews, a former Maine congressman and now a prominent anti-war advocate. "The most I really thought about any given day was who was going to win the ball game and who was I going to date that weekend."

He thought the knee was swollen from too many hits at middle linebacker, along with playing basketball and running track. But he said doctors removed a malignant tumor the size of a tangerine.

"Suddenly, going from that point to virtually overnight wondering if I was going to live or die, it was a very profound experience," he said. "I made one of those classic deals with the Almighty: Let me live and I'll make it worth your while. I have literally been trying to keep my end of the bargain ever since."

Six years later, the swelling in his knee returned. Cancer forced the amputation of his leg. He now walks with a prosthetic.

As he approaches his 50th birthday this month, Andrews strives to keep that commitment to public service.

Widely respected as an excellent grass-roots organizer, Andrews has advocated for the disabled, gun control, opponents to nuclear-waste storage and Burma's government in exile. Along the way, he served in the Maine Legislature and U.S. Congress.

But his passionate advocacy has also cost him. The former two-term congressman lost a bid for Senate that observers thought he had a chance to win - after he voted to close a local military base.

The columnist Jack Anderson once called Andrews "the most courageous member of Congress." Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, once called him "the most principled politician I have ever met." Congressional Quarterly rated him the most progressive in 1994.

Now he heads a coalition of 32 groups opposing a potential U.S. attack on Iraq with a group called Win Without War. The group recently flooded the Senate and White House phone systems with calls and faxes.

As Andrews and his group gear up for an expected vote this week at the United Nations Security Council about Iraq, his voice is raspy with his advocacy.

"We need to build bridges, not destroy them," he said. "The world needs us to exercise leadership, not brute force."

President Bush's case basically warns that Iraq remains an international threat armed with biological and chemical weapons - and the missiles to deliver them - a decade after it agreed to disarm after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He argued that such weapons of mass destruction could hurt the United States far more than four planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

For those doubting Iraq's willingness to attack, Bush said Saddam Hussein has killed thousands of his citizens, has forced them to live in misery and torture and has financially supported terrorists to strike abroad.

"Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people and to all free people," Bush said at a news conference on Thursday. "I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons."

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said Bush made the case for taking action. She said the onus is on the U.N. to disarm Saddam.

"I think he made a clear and convincing case why Saddam Hussein continues to pose a serious threat to our national security," Snowe said. "And he articulated the fact that obviously he, as president of the United States, has a constitutional obligation to ensure the security of the United States."

The Win Without War coalition is an umbrella for 32 organizations, including the NAACP, the National Organization for Women and the Sierra Club. Andrews directs the coalition from a fifth-floor office near Dupont Circle. To make time for the campaign, he cut back on his work at New Economy Communications, a nonprofit organization that helps advocacy groups get their message out.

His clients are concerned about labor, globalization and trade. One client is Burma's government in exile led by Aung Sun Suu Kyi, who won an election in 1990 but was prevented from governing and placed under house arrest by a military junta. He organized a worldwide protest in 2001 on the 10th anniversary of her winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty-one other laureates were involved in the protest, including Desmond Tutu, who posed with Andrews in a photo that Andrews keeps on his desk.

For the anti-war campaign, Andrews has coordinated appearances by artists and musicians speaking against a war. The coalition bought television and newspaper ads that mimicked the famous "daisy girl," who counted down to nuclear annihilation in Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign ad.

A week ago, Andrews debated Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on "Meet the Press."

He also engineered a "virtual march on Washington" on Feb. 26, when the coalition registered 500,000 people to call and fax Senate and White House offices a projected 1 million times from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Lawmakers reported receiving hundreds of calls each - although most said the action wouldn't change their minds.

"A passionate, coordinated effort from citizens speaking out on an issue dear to their hearts can be quite moving," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "If the goal is to tie up congressional phone lines and shut down the Capitol switchboard, there are better ways to get the point across."

But Andrews called the event a success because of the widespread participation.

"The sheer numbers are an extraordinary success," he said. "We wanted to give people a chance to stand up and be counted in a meaningful way."

Andrews has spent much of his life getting people to stand up and be counted.

After confronting cancer as a teenager, he started an alternative newspaper at his Massachusetts high school, featuring stories on subjects such as poor black kids in Boston. He organized a group that held walks and social events for charities, buying food for the elderly and contributing to a new hospital in Peru.

Andrews moved to Maine to study at Bowdoin College, where he earned a degree in religion and philosophy. He also began working with the disabled.

Craig Brown met him nearly 30 years ago during a campaign to advocate for the homeless in Portland. Brown recalls the effort as an uphill battle, but he said Andrews' ability was obvious from the start.

"It was pretty futile, but I think Tom and I both came out of it feeling like the solutions to many of our problems were going to take political action," said Brown, who would later become Andrews' chief of staff when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. "Tom was really a natural organizer."

Andrews became executive director of the Maine Association of Handicapped Persons, where he worked from 1981 to 1987. He framed the battle for accessibility as a matter of civil rights, and his favored weapon was direct action.

In 1982, he led protesters in wheelchairs and on crutches out of a meeting with federal officials on new handicapped regulations. "Our rights, our dignity, our quality of life are being sacrificed here," he shouted.

Months later, he disrupted a U.S. Department of Education meeting in Portland for policies he said would hurt education for the disabled. He led 150 demonstrators in the chant, "Let our children go," and dumped ashes from burned copies of the rules on a hearing examiner's desk.

The organization also won a lawsuit to get accessible buses in South Portland and forced several municipalities to provide accessible meeting places for city councils and other public bodies.

In a dramatic event captured by television cameras, police led a caravan of disabled people from a meeting planned for Westbrook City Hall that had to be moved to another site because the city hall was not accessible.

Andrews also helped lead a 1986 campaign against a proposal to store nuclear waste in the Sebago Lake area.

As his circle of advocacy widened, Andrews won several political races as an underdog.

He captured a seat in the state House in 1982, after a three-way Democratic primary. When the seat was dissolved in a redistricting after two years, he ran for state Senate. In that election, he defeated Gerard Conley Jr., the son of a former Senate president who was supported by then-Gov. Joseph Brennan.

Andrews entered Congress in 1990, after a five-way primary marked by his decision to confront the Democratic Party convention in Presque Isle with a plea for gun control. It was a risky step, just days before the primary in a state with a strong hunting ethic - especially in rural northern Maine, the site of the convention.

Yet Andrews won approval for several platform changes, including the endorsement of a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases and an assault-weapons ban.

"He went all the way from Portland to Presque Isle to put it in their face. That's Tom," said George Campbell, a former Portland City Council member who served as Andrews' campaign finance chairman.

Taking independent stands cost Andrews later, though, when he sought higher office.

In the House, he voted in 1991 to close Loring Air Force Base in Limestone as part of a national effort to discard unnecessary bases. In 1992, he proposed to block $1.2 billion for the Pentagon. That angered the Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who briefly threatened to withhold funding for destroyer construction at Bath Iron Works.

In 1993, Andrews alienated some constituents at home when he opposed a loan-guarantee program that would have financed destroyer sales to Turkey - and provided an estimated 500 jobs at Bath.

Andrews said the commission that studied base closures was fair, and that keeping open Loring and 33 other obsolete bases nationwide would have represented "pork-barrel politics" at its worst. He also opposed weapons proliferation and preferred shifting military funding after the end of the Cold War to education and other social causes.

"I could never look myself in the mirror if I did anything other than what I had done," Andrews said.

The cost of those positions became clear when former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine, announced his retirement in March 1994. The vacancy pitted the state's two U.S. House members, Andrews and Snowe, against each other in a race he was thought to have at least a shot at winning.

Snowe had won narrow victories in her previous two House races, while Andrews had won his races easily.

But the military votes were at least a factor in his loss. Snowe got 60 percent of the vote and Andrews 36.

"His principles cost him the election," said William Coogan, a political science professor at the University of Southern Maine. "I think what he did was admirable."

Andrews and Campbell said separately that other issues and campaign decisions contributed to the outcome.

But Coogan suggested the result might have changed if Andrews, in cynical Washington fashion, had voted to keep Loring open and then blamed Snowe for its closure.

"Had he done so, I'm certain he would have won that election," Coogan said. "But that's not what he believed."

Doing what he believes is keeping Andrews going as he leads the Win Without War coalition. One of the messages he is trying to get out is that Congress should do a better job reviewing administration plans for an attack and its aftermath. Administration officials have resisted publicly estimating the costs and need for troops to govern Iraq after a successful conflict because of uncertainties about the length and extent of the fight. "It's not useful," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters Feb. 27.

"The price of doing nothing exceeds the price of taking action if we have to," President Bush said in a news conference on Thursday.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released March 4 found that 59 percent of the respondents favor using military force against Iraq, even without another U.N. resolution. But four in 10 of the supporters expressed reservations about the looming conflict.

Andrews contends Congress should do its job better to investigate and educate the public.

"I think there is a lot at stake here," he said.

Beth Murphy, staff researcher, contributed to this story.

Copyright © Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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