After a grenade accident in Vietnam in 1968, Mr. Cleland spent 18 months recuperating. He served in local politics in his native Georgia and as head of the federal Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs, before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996.
But it was his treatment at the hands of Republicans while he was seeking re-election in 2002 that made him a Democratic cause célèbre.
Running for another term just a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he was the target of an infamous 30-second television spot that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while it questioned Mr. Cleland’s commitment to homeland security and implied that he was soft on the war on terror.
It was the commercial’s images in particular that created the uproar. Even prominent Republicans, including Senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, both Vietnam veterans, were outraged.
“I’ve never seen anything like that ad,” Mr. McCain told The Washington Post. “Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.”
Mr. Hagel said he recoiled when he saw the ad. It rankled many others as well, who noted that Mr. Cleland’s Republican opponent, Representative Saxby Chambliss, had avoided military service.
When Mr. Cleland lost the election to Mr. Chambliss (he received 46 percent of the vote to Mr. Chambliss’s 53), which helped the Republicans narrowly recapture the Senate, the ad was perceived as having made a difference.
In fact, Mr. Cleland had been losing ground in the polls before the commercial was aired. He was already seen as too liberal and out of step with Georgia voters.
But the ad was so explosive that Democrats seized on it and made the attacks on Mr. Cleland emblematic of the low road that they said the Republicans, led by President George W. Bush’s aggressive political operative, Karl Rove, would take to achieve their ends.
In the fraught post-9/11 era, the ad was also a harbinger of things to come. Two years later, as Mr. Cleland predicted, a small group of veterans sought to undermine the wartime record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, who was a decorated Vietnam veteran.
At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, where Mr. Kerry was nominated, James Carville, the party strategist, introduced Mr. Cleland by saying he would go down in history for the injustice he had suffered in 2002. Whipping up the crowd by recalling old slogans like “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine,” Mr. Carville declared: “We’re going to Remember Max.”
“In some ways,” The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Cleland is more powerful as a symbol than he ever was as a senator.”
Beyond what he came to symbolize, Mr. Cleland was crushed by losing the race, which plunged him into a deep depression.
“It broke his heart,” Mr. Kerry recalled in a phone interview. “That ad was such a dastardly, disgraceful hit. And it set the template.”