Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (3 page)

My mom’s brother, Bill, had collaborated with JFK on a children’s version of his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Profiles in Courage
, which at the age of seven, I labored mightily to digest. I tried to imitate Kennedy’s signature Boston accent (albeit badly) and could name the key players in his cabinet as readily as I could tick off the top ten home run hitters of all time.

Then, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy became the first American president to be assassinated in the television age. When the shocking news came, we were dismissed from school. I ran home, turned on the TV, and watched for days, in horror and morbid fascination, as the grim history unfolded. Yet the assassination and stormy years to follow did nothing to diminish my interest in politics. If anything, they underscored the stakes.

When JFK’s younger brother Bobby moved to New York to run for the U.S. Senate in 1964, I went to the local Democratic club to volunteer. Bobby had picked up JFK’s torch, and I wanted to march behind him. At the age of nine, I was more mascot than warrior, though, and was assigned an appropriately nominal task. I was thrilled when Bobby upset the Republican incumbent. Ironically, Bobby was swept to victory in the wake of a man he despised, Lyndon Johnson, who carried New York and the nation in a landslide.

In January 1965, I was invited to attend Johnson’s inauguration. My mother’s cousin Joan Kushnir had been a cochair of JFK’s 1960 campaign in Colorado and had come to Washington, along with thousands of other New Frontiersmen, at the dawning of the Kennedy presidency. Joan, a tiny woman with an outsize personality, never did take a government job, but she had forged connections all over town, and she used them to show me a side of Washington not visible from a tour bus. She introduced me to Supreme Court justice Byron “Whizzer” White, who had been her fellow cochair in Colorado in 1960. He brought me into his chambers and talked about his work. He also shared memorabilia from his years as an All-American running back for the University of Colorado. Joan took me to meet Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, a former member of President Kennedy’s cabinet, who humored me by asking about my political aspirations. “Maybe you’ll work here someday,” he said warmly. “We could use you.” If only, I thought to myself then. Wouldn’t that be something? And then there was the inaugural ceremony itself. The indefatigable cousin Joan hustled a perch on a riser so I could get a better look. Some kids dreamed of a trip to Disneyland. For me, this was Disneyland.

Later that year, Democrats in New York City nominated an uninspiring hack for mayor—or, at least, that’s how their candidate, Abe Beame, seemed to me. So one day after school, I walked over to the Liberal Party headquarters a few blocks from my home and volunteered for John Lindsay. Lindsay was a charismatic, young reformist congressman from our area who had big dreams for New York and inspired comparisons to the Kennedys. He was a Republican, but he also ran on the Liberal Party line, which was then common in New York. In the context of New York City politics in 1965, Lindsay represented bold, progressive change. Even at the age of ten, I knew that his was the side on which I wanted to be. So, after school and on weekends, I stood on street corners in Stuyvesant Town distributing his campaign literature.

One afternoon, when I was manning my post, a woman stopped to chat, intrigued as to why a ten-year-old boy would be electioneering on a perfect day for stickball. I gave my pitch for Lindsay and, perhaps getting a head start on my career as a campaign consultant, landed a few shots on his opponent. The woman laughed at my thorough and earnest presentation, and handed me a white pastry box she had been carrying. “Here,” she said. “You’ve earned this!” After handing out my last brochure, I went back to the local Liberal Party office, where the district leader opened the box. Inside were the promised goodies—and an unanticipated stack of ten-dollar bills. “Here, kid, you take the donuts and I’ll take the cash,” the district leader said, patting me on the back as he walked me out the door.

The age of thirteen is an important rite of passage in the Jewish faith, and that year, under my mother’s incessant prodding, I fulfilled my bar mitzvah mandate. Yet I will always remember 1968 for a different rite of passage, in which my still relatively idealistic view of politics was tempered by ugly and tragic events as well as experience.

The year was one of the most momentous in U.S. history: a president driven from office over a disastrous, costly war; two stunning political assassinations; America’s inner cities aflame; and a calamitous Democratic National Convention, marked by chaos in the hall and rioting, by protesters and police, on the streets of Chicago. It was a year that both ignited, and tested, my youthful idealism. And there were two central characters in my process of self-discovery—a tragic hero, Robert F. Kennedy; and a feckless newcomer named Andrew Stein.

I worked for both in 1968. Bobby was running what would be his last campaign, driven by a relentless sense of urgency and mission. Andrew, a twenty-three-year-old heir to a local publishing fortune, was running his first campaign, simply hoping to buy himself a starter office. Together, these campaigns taught me lasting lessons about politics at its best and worst.

From that day on the mailbox, I was obsessed with all things Kennedy. Even as a small child, I heard JFK’s call. I believed him when he said that, together, we Americans could chart our future and change the world, and that we each had a role to play. I was intrigued from the start by the game of politics and the larger-than-life players it attracted. I also sensed that it was about big, noble ideals. It was about history and historic change.

JFK embodied that spirit, and when he was killed, there was a sense of things coming apart. His assassination was the first in a series of societal shock waves—unfortunately with many more to follow—that came to define the decade. There were deadly clashes in the South and elsewhere over civil rights, even as Lyndon Johnson advanced Kennedy’s civil rights agenda in Washington. And just two decades after the Greatest Generation had united to save the world from fascism, deep discord over the escalating war in Vietnam divided Americans by age and class.

The generation that had triumphed over war and the Depression had a firm belief in itself, the country, and our institutions. Still, our generation, at least the one I knew in New York City in the ’60s, was filled with growing skepticism and moral outrage over the war and social injustice amid historic postwar affluence. For many, Bobby Kennedy had become the voice of that outrage, and the best hope for change within the existing system.

Part of the hope, to be sure, was rooted in memories of Camelot, as if restoring another Kennedy to the White House would make things right. But it was more than that. Once viewed as his brother’s coldhearted political enforcer, Bobby Kennedy had emerged from a period of mourning and reflection as a fierce and fearless advocate for change and reform. He toured the darkest corners of America to shine a light on suffering and injustice. He turned against the war that had begun in earnest under JFK but was now raging and tearing at the fabric of the country. He challenged the worn ideas and shibboleths of both parties. Steeled by his personal loss and the recognition of his own mortality, Kennedy communicated a sense of urgency as he called to action a new generation. With his longish, tousled hair, perpetually disheveled look, and penchant for speaking blunt truths, he was also an authentic tribune for the young.

So when Bobby announced his candidacy for president in 1968, quickly driving Lyndon Johnson from the race for reelection, I eagerly volunteered and monitored every aspect of his campaign.

On April 4, Dr. King was killed in Memphis. Grieving with an almost entirely black audience in an Indianapolis ghetto later that night, Bobby gave a moving plea for constructive action rather than mindless violence, and thus helped avert the riots that erupted in many other cities. I cheered as he won a series of hard-fought primaries, turning back another antiwar candidate, Eugene McCarthy, and providing a growing challenge to the candidacy of Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

On June 4, Bobby won the California primary, and I went to bed thrilled, and confident in my belief that he would almost certainly be the Democratic nominee and, very likely, the next president. When I woke up the next morning, however, I learned that after delivering the victory speech at a Los Angeles hotel, Bobby had been mortally wounded as he exited the room through the hotel’s kitchen. It was an absolutely crushing blow in a convulsive and violent year punctuated by the riots at the convention in Chicago and the dark presidency of Richard Nixon.

Bobby Kennedy had challenged a failed status quo, mobilizing millions behind an inspiring campaign for American renewal to which he had given his all. Had he lived, I am convinced he would have defeated Nixon, and changed the course of history for the better.

Nearly forty years later, when Barack Obama was considering his candidacy for president, I talked with him about Bobby and the campaign of ’68. “Bobby inspired, and spoke for, a whole generation that believed we could do better,” I told Obama, another young senator poised to challenge an unpopular war and the established political order. “If you run, we need to be as bold, and rekindle that kind of hope.”

But if the lessons of the Kennedy campaign and 1968 have stuck with me for a lifetime, so has the memory of the much less celebrated (or elevated) campaign I had participated in that year.

The father of a school friend had signed on to help a wealthy and powerful newspaper publisher and entrepreneur named Jerry Finkelstein elect his son, Andrew Stein—his name presumably shortened for ballot appeal—to the New York State Assembly. I’m sure I have seen less qualified candidates for public office over the years, though none immediately springs to mind.

Stein challenged a Republican incumbent, William Larkin, who was a thoroughly acceptable and competent, moderate Republican assemblyman. Under normal circumstances, Larkin would easily have turned back the challenge, but Stein’s dad was willing to spend whatever it took to buy his son the seat. By all accounts (on the books and off), they ran what was then the most expensive assembly campaign in New York State history. Among the advantages all this money afforded young Andrew was an army of teenage mercenaries whom the campaign enlisted to penetrate the secure high-rises of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village and place his campaign literature under every door.

I’m sure some pamphlets wound up in trash cans before they ever reached the doors, but most of us dutifully fulfilled our assignments and reported back to the campaign for more tasks. There weren’t many other gigs that paid thirteen-year-olds the then-princely sum of three dollars an hour.

On Election Night, my friend’s dad, who had recruited us to work for Stein, walked into a satellite campaign office on East Fourteenth Street with a big smile on his face. “Andrew won by five thousand votes,” he reported. My friends jumped up and down, cheering and pumping their fists in celebration. I did not. I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that, for a few bucks, we had just helped install an unworthy nitwit in public office.

If the Kennedy campaign inspired me to believe what politics could be, my mercenary assignment as a foot soldier for young Andrew Stein opened my eyes to what politics would increasingly become. With unlimited resources and contacts—he received the endorsements of national Democratic luminaries, from Humphrey on down—an ambitious but wholly unqualified twenty-three-year-old won a seat in the New York State Assembly. Bobby was an authentic crusader, fighting for things larger than himself. Andy was ambitious
for
himself, not for a cause—a synthetic candidate saying and doing whatever it took to win.

It was my first exposure to politics as a business rather than a calling.

 • • • 

That year, 1968, was noteworthy for another reason. My parents, who had been separated for years, finally made their split official, and were divorced the following year. Soon after, my mother married Abner Bennett, a marketing executive for a liquor importer, with whom I had a frosty relationship. So I spent as little time as I had to at home, and as much as I could with my father, who lived nearby, and with my treasured friends from the cloistered world of Stuyvesant Town.

Growing up in the hive of protest, drugs, and rock and roll that was New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s made for a lot of fun, but not exceptionally good grades. At Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s elite specialized public schools, I was a student leader and edited the literary magazine, but I graduated in the middle of the pack. Still, when the time came to choose a college, I managed to parlay those credentials, and a gift of gab, into acceptance at a few good schools, including Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

I wanted to stay in New York to be close to my dad, whose company I cherished and whose guidance I sorely needed. Warm, caring, and funny, he was always there for me. I relished our time together, which often was at Shea or Yankee stadiums, taking in ball games. But he felt that I needed to get far enough away from home to temper the contentious relationship I had with my mother and stepfather. “I’d love you to stay, boy,” he told me, “but it would be good for you to get away from New York.”

The University of Chicago was a highly regarded institution, and far enough from home, a teacher reminded me, that my parents would never surprise me with a visit. For me, there was another attraction: Chicago had the most interesting politics of any major American city. It was home to the last of the big-city machines, whose boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley, had played a critical role in electing John F. Kennedy president. But his roughhouse tactics in dealing with unrest in Chicago’s black community, and fallout from the calamitous 1968 convention, had thrown a serious wrench in the Daley machine.

With politics as a big lure, I packed my bags and headed off to Chicago.

I would never return.