1
FROM BAYONNE TO BOSTON
In 1954, I was a fairly normal fourteen-year-old, enjoying sports, unhealthy food, and loud music. But even then I realized that there were two ways in which I was different from the other guys: I was attracted to the idea of serving in government and I was attracted to the other guys.
I also realized that these two attractions would not mix well. At the time, public officials were highly regarded. The president, Dwight Eisenhower, was one of America's most admired and respected military heroes. I was a homosexual, an involuntary member of one of America's most despised groups. I knew that achieving success in any area where popularity was required would be impossible, given the unpopularity of my sexual orientation.
If this were fiction, a spoiler alert would now be appropriate, because the story ends with a dramatic turnabout. When I retired from Congress in January 2013, the divergent reputations of elected officials and homosexuality persisted, but with one major difference: The order was reversed. Legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people were more popular than elected officials as a class. Congress was held in particularly low esteem. While I did not do any polling on the subject myself, I was told that my marriage to my husband, Jim Ready, scored better than my service in the House.
When I first entered public life in 1968, I had to figure out how to keep the public's negative feelings about my sexual orientation from interfering with my political effectiveness. By the time I'd overcome that obstacle, a larger one appeared: the growing unpopularity of government itself, and the consequent diminution of its capacity to assist the unfortunate. My influence over the political system grew even as the system's influence diminished. This was good for my self-esteem but bad for my public policy agenda.
This book is a personal history of two seismic shifts in American life: the sharp drop in prejudice against LGBT people and the equally sharp increase in antigovernment opinion. During my six decades in the public realm, Americans have become more accepting of once-despised minorities but also more resistant to coming together through government to improve the quality of our lives. How did this happen and what can be done to further the victories and reverse the defeats?
The many years I've spent advocating unpopular causes have taught me that it's important to begin with your best case, not in the hope of making instant converts but to persuade your audience that there is room for debate about a subject. Fortunately, when it comes to attitudes toward government, that case is even better than a no-brainer-it is a pro-brainer: the story of the millions of children who have been protected from brain damage by federal rules that were adopted over the vehement objections and dire predictions of affected industries.
Before 1970, lead was a major component of paint and gasoline. Its corrosive effects, which are uncontested today, had their worst impact on the very young, impairing in particular the development of the brain cells known as neuroglia. All young people were exposed to lead, and poorer children were the most exposed, since the paint in their homes was more likely to contain lead and to chip, and because they often lived in crowded urban areas adjacent to heavy traffic flows.
Over the objections of private industry, many public health advocates, especially those focused on children, pressed for action. They were successful. The process began in 1970 with the Clean Air Act, which was followed by the Lead-Based Poisoning Prevention Act a year later. A series of amendments and implementing regulations steadily increased the restrictions, culminating in 1978 with a ban on lead in paint, and a statute enacted in 1990 and effective in 1995 prohibiting lead in gasoline.
Critics of government regulation should heed all of this carefully. As the prohibitions came into effect, the incidence of death and illness from lead ingestion dropped drastically. Between 1975 and 1980 and 2007 and 2008, lead levels in children's blood dropped 90 percent. In 1990, the FDA estimated there were already seventy thousand fewer children with IQs below seventy because of the rules.
The paint and gasoline industries denied that lead was harmful in the amounts present in their products and predicted severe economic harm if they had to remove it. They were never able to explain why banning lead in fact coincided not just with fewer brain-damaged children but also with their own continued prosperity. Lead-damaged brains still exist, sadly, and there is more to be done to reduce the number. But the undeniable fact is that millions of Americans have healthy brains today in large part because, contrary to the old joke, some people from the government did come to help them.
* * *
In 1954, the government was still popular, but homosexuals were held in universal contempt. This had been made explicit the previous year when President Eisenhower issued an executive order decreeing that people like me could never receive security clearances. We were too inherently untrustworthy to help protect our country from its enemies.
I do not remember being specifically aware of the order at the time, but as an avid newspaper reader growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, I must have seen the New York Times headline that referred to us as "perverts," and I was fully aware of what awaited me if my true nature was known. (I say "true nature" for the edification of that dwindling set of bigots who justify mistreating us because we "chose an alternative lifestyle." Being hated is rarely an experience sought by teenagers.)
At fourteen, I decided I would keep my sexual identity a secret forever, although I didn't give much thought to how that was going to work. Terrified by the obloquy that would come with being found out, I regarded total concealment as my only option. The recognition that there could be no role for a "queer" in public life had an additional and deep emotional impact: It is very probably the reason that I later approached every tough election campaign with the assumption I would lose.
A televised Senate hearing first inspired my fascination with government. My father was what we now call an "early adopter." When I was born in 1940, he celebrated by buying a television set-before almost everybody else and before there was much to watch. I have early memories of Western movies, the second Billy Conn-Joe Louis fight,Howdy Doody, and Senator Estes Kefauver's investigation into organized crime. I enjoyed all the programs, but I never wanted to be a cowboy, a boxer, or a puppeteer. I preferred the idea of sitting behind an impressive dais grilling colorful Mafiosi. At ten, I was more intrigued than instructed, but when another set of hearings came on the TV four years later, I was hooked by both the spectacle and the subject matter. This was the Army-McCarthy brawl.
In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy turned his demagogic attention to the U.S. Army. The army had just finished fighting two Communist regimes in Korea-but this did not stop McCarthy from deeming it soft on communism. The army hired the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch as its lead counsel in the Senate hearings that were held on McCarthy's accusations.
Welch became a hero to Americans in general, and liberals in particular, for the deftness of his anti-McCarthy thrusts. One of the deftest was his sly allusion to the sexual orientation of McCarthy's chief aide, Roy Cohn. A closeted gay man, Cohn would angrily denounce any attempt to "out" him until the day he died of AIDS-related illnesses decades later.
In questioning one of McCarthy's assistants, Welch asked him if he was contending that a certain photograph had come from "a pixie." Unwisely trying to turn Welch's sarcasm against him, McCarthy intervened and asked Welch to define "pixie." Welch pounced. "A pixie," he gleefully explained, "is a close relative of a fairy." This devastating use of anti-gay prejudice to demean Cohn added greatly to Welch's reputation and went wholly unrebuked even by those liberals who rightly considered themselves America's staunchest opponents of bigotry.
I was among the nonrebukers. I was glad to see Welch score heavily against the McCarthy side. I accepted the widespread contempt for homosexuals as an indelible fact of life. It never occurred to me to fault Welch for expressing it. Indeed, those hearings-in which an anti-gay slur played such a highly praised part-made a very favorable impression on me and kindled my interest in public life.
That interest was greatly intensified by the murder of Emmett Till. Till, an African American from Chicago, was about my age. While he was visiting relatives in Mississippi, some men thought he had been disrespectful to a white woman. No one alleged that he had done more than whistle at her, and even that was disputed, but the price he paid was to be brutally murdered. It was clear that local law enforcement knew who had killed him. They had no objection to his death, and certainly no intention of doing anything to the killers. I was outraged. I soon learned that the federal government could do little to prevent such horrors because Southern senators had successfully filibustered antilynching laws passed by the House. I took from this an enduring belief in the need for a strong federal government. After all, Southern racists were able to protect murderers only because their legislators exploited fears of centralized power. Changing this reality would be an important goal for me.
Civil liberties and civil rights were not the only causes that inspired strong convictions. My parents were not involved in politics, but they were staunch liberals. In our very Jewish but largely secular household, the nearest thing we had to a Bible was the then very liberal New York Post. I supported the Franklin Roosevelt-Harry Truman tradition of active government intervention to make our society a fair one. My interests did not become wholly political, but they broadened. By the 1954 midterm elections, I was rooting equally for the Democrats and the Yankees.
I was also thinking more often about how much I would like to take part in governing. The fast-paced verbal combat I'd seen on TV appealed to me. I was good at talking in class, arguing politics and sports with my peers, and making people laugh, often at the expense of my debate adversaries. After the Till murder, I also wanted to make America conform more closely to my ideals.
But I was a Jewish homosexual. While I planned to keep my sexual orientation a secret, it was too late to conceal my Jewishness-I had already outed myself with a bar mitzvah. In 1954, anti-Semitism was still a significant problem facing Jews in our choice of careers. We were rarities in elected office and held congressional seats almost entirely in areas with large Jewish populations-a few neighborhoods in a handful of big cities. The one exception-Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon-was widely known because he was so unusual. But Jews were not hindered when it came to achieving appointed office-"Jew Deal" was one of the epithets thrown at FDR's administration. Knowing this, I figured that I could work as someone's aide-as long as I kept my sexuality hidden.
* * *
In 1956, I volunteered to work on Adlai Stevenson's second presidential campaign. It wasn't fun, but it was the beginning of my education in political reality. Bayonne is a blue-collar community in New Jersey's Hudson County, very close to New York City. The population was overwhelmingly ethnic-Polish, Irish, and Italian-and Catholic. Politically, it was the domain of one of America's most ruthless and corrupt political machines. (Hoboken, a few miles from Bayonne and very much like it, was accurately portrayed in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront.) I naïvely expected to be a small cog in a well-oiled campaign on behalf of our Democratic nominee. In fact, the Democrats who controlled the county had no great sympathy for Stevenson and even less for the idea of liberals getting involved in politics. The Volunteers for Stevenson effort I joined had been set up by the machine under the leadership of a reliable political lieutenant and was given little to do. It soon dawned on me that not all Democrats shared my passion for advancing the liberal agenda-protecting its fiefdom was far more important for the county organization.
The organization's concerns turned out to be well founded. Across the bay in New York, Stevenson campaign alumni led by Eleanor Roosevelt would stick together and eventually overthrow the Tammany Hall machine. In 1961, Carmine DeSapio, the legendary Tammany Hall boss and Greenwich Village district leader, lost a primary to a leader of the new "reformers." When DeSapio attempted a comeback two years later, he lost to another political newcomer, Edward Koch.
The Hudson County machine proved less vulnerable. But its leaders could see that a cultural chasm was opening between the college-educated progressives who were Stevenson's most devoted fans and the white working-class voters who were their mainstays. After one of Stevenson's eloquent, intellectually sophisticated speeches, a supporter told him he would "get the votes of all the thinking people." "Thank you, madam," he replied, "but I need a majority." As with Joseph Welch, a widely admired and oft-quoted remark was more than a clever quip-it was an expression of a deeper political reality. The condescension in Stevenson's comment did not bother his admirers, but it did not help him with the wider public.
Such tensions would remain submerged for the next few years. In 1960, John F. Kennedy's charisma and ethnoreligious appeal kept them at bay, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater's self-acknowledged conservative extremism rendered them irrelevant. But by 1966, the alienation of the white working class had become a serious problem for Democrats, as it remains. Today, most white men vote for Republican presidential candidates even in races that Democrats win. The only identifiable groups of white men who vote reliably for Democrats are Jews and gays.
In 1956, the same year I worked for Stevenson, the Soviet Union brutally suppressed the revolt against tyranny in Hungary. It confirmed my conviction that America, with all of its faults, was morally superior to the Soviet system, and that helping nations resist Communist domination was a valid objective. At the time, my revulsion did not seem to me controversial. It struck me as entirely consistent with my liberal views-Hungary, after all, was Emmett Till multiplied by tens of thousands. Given its earlier suppression of dissent in East Germany, and its crackdown in Poland, I believed-then and subsequently-that the Soviet Union was indeed the head of an evil empire, and I was never one of the liberals who mocked Ronald Reagan for saying so. It was not until I entered Harvard, in September 1957, that I learned that my judgment was not universally shared by others on the left side of the political divide.
* * *
This was not the only difference between my version of liberalism and the views I encountered in Cambridge. In Bayonne, I saw the political world divided neatly into liberals-mostly Democrats-and conservatives-mostly Republicans, with the large exception of the Southern defenders of racism. Now, for the first time, I encountered people who were to my left-not only in their attitude toward the Soviet Union but also in their view of America's cultural and economic situation.
My relationship to ideologues on my left is well illustrated by my reaction to the folk singer Pete Seeger. Though I disagreed with the political message of his lyrics, like most of my schoolmates, I was appalled when Harvard president Nathan Pusey inexplicably banned him from performing a concert in 1961 because Seeger had refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee about any Communist affiliation. This act of censorship struck us as particularly strange because Pusey had come to Harvard from Wisconsin, where he had distinguished himself by standing up to Senator McCarthy at the height of his strength. In the face of the widespread opposition, Pusey compromised, announcing that Seeger would be allowed to sing from a Harvard stage but not make a speech. Since Seeger communicated his views most effectively in his songs, Pusey was alone in thinking that he had saved face, and the concert proceeded with little further controversy.
A year later, when I heard Seeger sing "Little Boxes," I recognized the gulf that divided me from many others on the left. The song was a mockery of the postwar housing that had been built for working-class and lower-middle-class Americans. "Little boxes on the hillside," the lyrics went. "And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." At one concert I attended at Harvard, most of the audience-filling Harvard's largest venue-appeared to find this a hilariously accurate critique. They were oblivious of the fact that these "little boxes" had been built on a large scale to be affordable by families who would not otherwise have been able to be homeowners. The aesthetic disdain Seeger and many of my fellow students felt for these units was not, I knew, shared by the occupants, most of whom were happy-and proud-to own them. These occupants were, after all, the kinds of people I had grown up with in Bayonne and whom I had dealt with pumping gas at my father's Jersey City truck stop. And I knew they disagreed completely with Seeger's critique. The mass production of homes for working families was an example of our capitalist system's efficiency. But Seeger, and many of his listeners, preferred to think that the capitalist profit-making system was depriving people with limited incomes of the chance to live in large, individually designed houses-which they of course could not afford. When I insisted that the inhabitants of this "ticky-tacky" were very satisfied with their "little boxes," I was often told that they did not have the knowledge-or the sensibility-to know they were being mistreated.
In fact, as I later came to understand, few of those homes were built by the private sector alone. A large number of the occupants were returning World War II veterans, and they were able to afford even moderately priced homes only because of one of the great triumphs of U.S.government social policy-the package of veterans' benefits enacted after the war. Unfortunately, this positive example of how government can improve the quality of our lives was soon to be ignored, even by many of its beneficiaries. Years later, Tip O'Neill would lament that government policies helped create a solid middle class, only for many members of that class to become the government's staunchest critics.
During my undergraduate years-1957 to 1962-the existence of people to my left was more interesting to me intellectually than it was relevant politically. Even so, debates with the campus left sharpened my beliefs. Why, I was asked, if I so strongly desired a more equal distribution of wealth, was I not a Socialist?
I knew that embracing socialism-even the most democratic form of it-would end any chance I had for a government position, but I was not prepared to let expediency be my only answer. Fortunately, my academic work came to my rescue. I entered my freshman year ready to concentrate-Harvard's word for major-in government. Given my interest in public policy, I also enrolled in the basic economics course, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had both an intellectual fascination with the discipline and an affinity for it. If I had not been skeptical of my mathematical skills (justifiably-calculus scared me off), I would probably have switched to that field. As it was, I took as many nonmathematical economics courses as I could fit into my schedule. Those classes made it clear to me that the best system was one where the creation of wealth relied primarily on market mechanisms-with a strong government providing appropriate regulation, lessening inequality without destroying incentives, and playing an active role when necessary to keep the economy functioning at high levels of employment.
My academic work affected more than my political ideology-it also shaped my career plans. During my first two years in college, I'd aspired to become a lawyer. As a solo practitioner, I figured I could readily hide my sexuality, while remaining available for government appointments if any were offered.
But in my junior year, an alternative arose. One of my instructors in the Government Department, Douglas Hobbs, flatteringly told me he thought I should seriously consider pursuing a Ph.D. and becoming a college professor. I hadn't previously considered this, but the idea had a great deal of appeal. I greatly enjoyed reading, thinking, and talking about politics, and the notion of doing this for a living was very tempting. This was, incidentally, the beginning of a pattern: Until my retirement, all of my major career choices were originally proposed by someone else.
In April 1960, at the end of my junior year, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. I finished the last month of the semester and returned home. Taking a leave from school, I spent much of the ensuing six months helping my mother settle my father's estate. At the time, my sister Ann was married and beginning to raise her young family, my sister Doris was seventeen and just about to start college, and my brother, David, was ten.
My task was to get a fair price from my father's old business partner for our share of the truck stop and also for a piece of property they had been developing together. Unfortunately, relations between my father and his partner had soured, and we believed the partner was trying to take advantage of us. As a result, I turned to friends of my father who had Mafia connections to improve our negotiating position. By the fall we were able to work things out. With a little additional help from my father's friends, we realized enough money from the settlement that I was able to return to college in September, and my siblings were able to continue their educations. We also benefited from the Social Security payments that were available to dependents of an eligible parent who had died. Together these funds helped my family stay solvent until my brother entered high school and my mother was able to return to her work as a legal secretary. She had been an excellent one before her marriage and became a reasonably well-compensated, first-rate legal secretary again.
I returned to Harvard in September 1961. By that time, the Kennedy administration was employing a conspicuous number of the university's professors. One joke at the time asked, "What is the best way to get to Washington?" The answer was, "Go to Harvard Square and turn left." Here was the path I hoped to follow. I would become a professor of political science with a serious interest in public policy economics, and would from time to time emulate John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others by taking academic leaves to serve elected officials whom I supported. As to my personal life, the university, with its semi-isolation from the rest of the world and its tolerance for differences, was the closest thing I could find to a cloister where my privacy would be safeguarded. I assumed my forays into the outside world would not last long enough for the discrepancies between my life situation and that of most heterosexuals to become apparent. As I was to learn later, many men went to Washington for temporary service without bringing their families with them. As a result, those of us with no spouse were much less conspicuous there than we would have been in other cities.
If I needed any further evidence that my sexual orientation and elected office were incompatible, I received it from one of the most popular political novels of the time: Allen Drury's Advise and Consent, which I read during my year off from school. It dramatically demonstrated that the six years since 1954 had seen no change in the respective popularity ratings of government and homosexuality. The plot involved an effort by a devious FDR-like figure to press the Senate into confirming his nominee for secretary of state. One target of the administration's pressure was a bright, conscientious young senator who was highly regarded by his elders. The senator was inclined to vote against the nominee. Then a man came forward who told the president's people that he and the senator-by now happily married with a young daughter-had had a homosexual encounter during World War II. The man produced a photograph supporting his story. Confronted with a choice between voting for a nominee he strongly distrusted and being exposed, the senator killed himself.
Advise and Consent was a major bestseller. In 1962 it was made into a movie with Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon playing paragons of public virtue. John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, also appeared as a very appealing senator. The contrast between the movie's manly ethos of public service and the shame of homosexuality was clear.
Fiction and reality were in complete accord. Following Eisenhower's example, the Kennedy administration took its own explicit anti-gay steps. The civil service director John Macy stated that homosexuals were not welcome in federal jobs. And the administration took rapid action to avert the possibility that foreign homosexuals might be allowed into the country.
The prevailing immigration laws excluded several categories of people from even visiting as tourists because of their undesirability. Since the word "homosexual" was too shocking to use when the laws were adopted, the phrase used for our exclusion was "afflicted with a psychopathic personality." Everyone knew that meant us. Even so, this linguistic delicacy suggested an opportunity to a Canadian citizen, Clive Michael Boutilier. After having lived legally in the United States, he was denied citizenship. He challenged the ruling, claiming that the exclusionary language simply did not apply to him. He acknowledged that he was homosexual but denied that this made him a psychopath.
Federal immigration officials feared that the Supreme Court would agree with Boutilier and invalidate the antihomosexual clause. This was the famously liberal Warren Court that included Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and William Brennan, and would include Abe Fortas by the time the case reached it in 1967. To forestall the terrible possibility of LGBT people coming freely to the United States, Congress, with the support of the Kennedy and later Johnson administrations, moved successfully to replace the sixty-year-old language with a more explicit ban on "aliens afflicted ... with sexual deviation." Their fears turned out to have been unjustified: The most liberal Supreme Court in U.S. history ended up ruling that excluding people like me under a denigrating, nonspecific rubric was perfectly acceptable.
In the familiar legal expression, those determined to exclude us wound up with both a belt and suspenders-the new "sexual deviation" language was also included in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This vaunted legislation was strongly supported by every liberal group in the country. When, more than twenty years later, I succeeded in repealing the exclusion outright, I checked to see if anyone in Congress had opposed it at the time. Nobody had said a word.
It is important to stress that this renewed assault on gay people began in one activist, liberal administration and was carried out by its successor. My sexual orientation remained highly unpopular even while government as a force for societal improvement was at a high point in its approval ratings. It was in this frame of mind that I enrolled in graduate school in Harvard's Government Department. In the prevailing circumstances, I believed an advanced degree would give me the best chance to pursue the kind of career I wanted.
I would later discover a flaw in this plan: I was good at every aspect of scholarship except writing it down. But in the early years that was not a problem. I started teaching undergraduates and was gratified to find that I enjoyed it. Besides teaching, I stepped up my political activity. I participated in Harvard's understated student government and became an active member of the Young Democrats.
It was through my student government work that I met Allard Lowenstein, who would become an essential figure in my political development. Lowenstein was eleven years older; by his late twenties he had already become an activist for all seasons. With the powerful support of Eleanor Roosevelt, the moral leader of post-World War II liberalism, he was engaged in practical agitation on behalf of a number of causes, including racial justice in the United States and South Africa. We met in 1959 when he came to Cambridge calling for an end to South Africa's brutality toward what was then Southwest Africa (now Namibia). I spent time with him as his appointed driver-the Harvard Student Council was his sponsor-and I found his blend of passionate advocacy and strategic savvy immensely appealing.
I apparently succeeded in convincing him that I was a kindred spirit, and we stayed in touch. In the summer of 1960, I saw him at a National Student Association congress. As a past president of that organization, he remained an inspiration for reform-minded students. In late 1963, during my second year in graduate school, he asked me to take a leadership role in what was to be the Mississippi Summer project of 1964. The prototype for that effort was a campaign to help Aaron Henry, the NAACP's state president, run for governor. At that time-nearly one hundred years after the adoption of the post-Civil War amendments-the great majority of African Americans in Mississippi were disenfranchised. They were kept from the polls by the law and, when necessary, by force.
Violence against black people seeking to register or vote was not news, but assaults on white Yale and Stanford students were. The publicity generated by the Henry campaign inspired Lowenstein and black leaders to try again in 1964 on a larger scale. Since there was no gubernatorial election that year, the effort would have a broader focus: It would contest the near-total disenfranchisement of black Mississippians by challenging the state's delegation to the upcoming Democratic presidential convention, which would be chosen by an all-white electorate.
When Lowenstein withdrew from the campaign after a dispute with more radical activists, my leadership role disappeared, but I was happy to go anyway as a volunteer. My group left our training center in Ohio for Mississippi on the same Sunday that three fellow Freedom Summer participants-local CORE field-workers James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, and volunteer Andrew Goodman-were murdered by a mob that included the local sheriff. When we arrived in Mississippi, we heard that the three had disappeared, and we assumed, correctly, that they were dead.
In order to replace Mississippi's all-white convention delegation with an integrated slate, we planned to create a new organization-the Freedom Democratic Party. I went to obtain the official forms for starting a new party and was pleasantly surprised when the white official I encountered smiled when I said I was working on a third party, and said Governor George Wallace would do well. I felt no need to correct his assumption that I was there to help the Alabama racist who had challenged Lyndon Johnson in some primaries, with distressingly good results.
My work that summer consisted mostly of organizing the presentation of our case. When we feared a local office might be attacked, I spent the night there, although our pledge of nonviolent resistance made me wonder what good we could do. I also made a run to northern Mississippi with another volunteer-Richard Beymer, who played Tony in the movie West Side Story-to deliver leaflets. But my direct organizing of Mississippi voters was limited by the fact that my accent (to this day more New Jersey than New England), my poor diction, and my rapid speech, especially when I got excited, rendered me largely incomprehensible to rural Mississippians of both races.
Harking back to my Pete Seeger reaction, I sharply disagreed with much of the Freedom Summer leadership on the larger purpose of our enterprise. They were critics of what they saw as a materialistic, mind-numbing middle-class America. Their goal was not for African Americans to live in ticky-tacky little boxes but to guide them into new forms of economic and social organization, where cooperation replaced competitiveness, and creativity was freed from the deadening bourgeois mind-set. In friendly debates-the threat of violence bound us together-I argued that most black Mississippians wanted to be like most white Americans, though without the vicious racial prejudice. William McCord, who wrote Mississippi: The Long, Hot Summer about our experiences, accurately summarized-and quoted-my view:
While he worked hard for the Negro cause in Mississippi, Frank did not fall prey to utopian illusions: "This ideology of nonviolence is fine, but when it comes to defending my home, I side with those who keep a rifle by the door." As for the future, he did not believe that Negro progress would usher in a millennium. "As conditions improve-and they will-the Negro will seek his spot in suburbia, drink his beer, and watch TV. That's fine! Some of these people think that they are going to reform our entire civilization and that the Negro will be the spearhead of this new age. Not me. I'm not here to build a perfect society, just to insure that the Negro gets a chance to live his life in his own way. If these liberals have the same illusions about the Negro that they used to hold about unions, they are bound for the same disappointment they had in the thirties."
Meanwhile, I was learning the tactical importance of remaining realistic. We hoped to present a vivid contrast between the segregated Mississippi convention delegation and our own integrated one. But that required asking courageous delegates to risk certain ostracism, probable economic retaliation, and possible violence from the Mississippi establishment and its less savory allies-the bodies of our three missing comrades had been found. This was difficult work.
Seeking to gain support from wary politicians, our Washington office boasted prematurely that we would have a dozen or so whites on our integrated slate. Since part of my job was to help secure these people, I knew we would not come close to that number. I urged the Washington contingent not to make promises we could not keep that could then be used to discredit us. "Hold your fire until we hear the ayes of our whites" was my exact message. I was pleased that the boasts stopped.
For all my disagreements, I was impressed by the movement's discipline. That summer, most of the country was focused on the passage of the great national civil rights bill outlawing segregation in employment and public accommodations. Even so, the Council of Federated Organizations-which included the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and CORE-decided to put the even more fundamental right to vote first. This meant asking black Mississippians to temporarily accept the segregation of restaurants and theaters they had earlier braved violence to enter. Setting aside important goals to pursue others more effectively is hard for emotionally committed advocates to accept. Years later, I would strenuously argue the point with LGBT activists.
With my Ph.D. orals scheduled for that September, I had to return to Cambridge to study. I did not try hard to find a way around this scheduling conflict. I had the strong suspicion-which turned out to be valid-that I would disagree with the Freedom Democrats' next steps, and I was not emotionally prepared to argue face-to-face with colleagues I admired so greatly.
On my way north, I stopped in Washington, D.C., to meet with Joseph Rauh. One of the heroic figures of postwar liberalism, Rauh combined excellent legal skills with equally good political judgment. As a lawyer for the United Auto Workers and a longtime ally of Senator-and soon to be vice presidential nominee-Hubert Humphrey, he would find himself in a stressful position at the Democratic convention. When I arrived at his office, he asked me if I was a lawyer. I said "no." He said "good."
My job was to help Rauh compose a brief on behalf of the Freedom Democrats, drawing on information I'd compiled during the summer. By documenting the Mississippi Democratic Party's suppression of black voters, we hoped to bolster the Freedom Democrats' case to be seated at the convention.
Although we had tried to be scrupulously accurate, the ad hoc, underfunded nature of our work, which relied on volunteer fact gatherers who were as unsophisticated as they were brave, made it highly likely that there were some errors. Rauh feared that conservatives, who were strongly entrenched in the organized bar, would go over his brief in great detail, and if they found any inaccuracy, exaggeration, or distortion of the facts, would pursue disciplinary proceedings against him. Since the brief was being submitted to the Democratic Party and not to a legal tribunal, no criminal penalties could attach, which meant that a nonlawyer-me-was safe from retribution. Rauh's submission identified me in a footnote as a major source for the information it contained. There are few documents I've ever been prouder to appear in.
The logistical arrangements for my one-day stopover in Washington also brought me into contact with a national political leader whom I had read about and admired but never met. Through my work with the National Student Association, I had become very friendly with two sisters, Barbara and Cokie Boggs (later Barbara Sigmund, mayor of Princeton, and Cokie Roberts of journalistic repute). I knew their family home was a large one in the D.C. suburbs, and I asked if I could spend the night there.
Cokie showed me to a very comfortable room in the basement. The next morning, I went upstairs to the dining room, where her father, Congressman Hale Boggs, was having breakfast. Boggs was an important leader in the House and a close ally of Lyndon Johnson. He was in a potentially dangerous situation because Johnson's embrace of civil rights was not popular in his New Orleans district. His district was also adjacent to Mississippi, and our delegation was seeking to unseat his colleagues there. That fall, his wife, Lindy, would be Lady Bird Johnson's traveling companion on a whistle-stop tour through the South that was intended to counteract the appeal of Barry Goldwater and his vote against the civil rights bill.
I soon realized that Cokie and Barbara had not warned their father I would be visiting. As he later told them, when I came up from the basement, blinking in the light, he assumed at first that I was the exterminator or some other such workman, and he was taken aback when I sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee. After I explained to him who I was and what I was doing there, he asked me, with the graciousness of a Southern gentleman and the concern of a liberal Southern politician, if the accommodations had been comfortable, if the coffee was good, if I needed anything else, and in general if his family's hospitality had been satisfactory. When I enthusiastically answered yes to each question, he said, "Son, in that case I'm going to ask you a favor. Please don't ever tell anybody that you were here."
After I left, Cokie later told me, her father remonstrated with her. Didn't she think he was in enough trouble for seeming too liberal for Louisiana without his daughters turning his house into a stop on the Underground Railroad? To his enormous credit, in 1965 he became one of the first white Southerners to support a civil rights bill. And with my discretion a minor contributing factor, he became House majority leader a few years later. He would have been the Speaker of the House had he not been lost in a 1972 plane crash in Alaska, where he was campaigning for another member.
At the Atlantic City convention, the Freedom Democrats' demand to supplant the all-white Mississippi delegation was rejected. Given the magnitude of the challenge we were presenting to the status quo, and the fear of Goldwater's already potent appeal to the South, I was not surprised. As a consolation, the party-acting on Johnson's orders, with some influence exerted by Humphrey-offered to seat two Freedom Democrats alongside the official racist group. This was much less than we had pushed for but far more than would have been conceivable only two years before-when John F. Kennedy was accommodating political reality by appointing as a federal judge William Harold Cox, who used the word "nigger" from the bench.
At the time, I expressed the view that the Freedom Democrats should accept the seating offer but state that it left a great deal more to be achieved. If they had done that, it is likely the official delegation would have bolted the convention-and the party-rather than accept the indignity of sharing the spotlight. But the civil rights coalition never tested that possibility: Its response was total rejection and a denunciation of the party's immorality. My mentor Al Lowenstein, more than incidentally, was prepared to support the two-seat offer with one change-allowing the Freedom Democrats to decide who would occupy those seats, rather than acquiesce in the national party's choices. But there was no opportunity to negotiate such a deal in the face of the Freedom Democrats' anger at the very idea of compromise.
As I would argue again and again throughout my career, there is a price to pay for rejecting the partial victories that are typically achieved through political activity. When you do so, you discourage your own foot soldiers, whose continued activity is needed for future victories. You also alienate the legislative partners you need. A very imperfect understanding of game theory is at work here. Advocates often tell me that if they give elected officials credit for incremental successes, they will encounter complacency and lose the ability to push for more. But if you constantly raise your demands without acknowledging that some of them have been satisfied, you will price yourself out of the political marketplace. When members of Congress defy political pressure at home and vote for a part of what you want, they are still taking a risk. Telling them you will accept only 100 percent support is likely to leave you with nothing.
The Mississippi campaign focused on winning the right to vote. In later years, many of its leaders would become disillusioned with the democratic process and turn toward various forms of direct action. When the Vietnam War and civil rights militancy tore the left apart, I remained a staunch advocate of conventional political activity.
* * *
Well before the summer of 1964, I'd begun working on electoral campaigns. My 1956 Stevenson debacle did not dissuade me from participating in a string of Massachusetts Democrats' bids for office. In those efforts, I met a great number of people who would shape my career. The first of these was a law student named Michael Dukakis. In 1958, he persuaded the Harvard Young Democrats to support a liberal Democratic challenger to an incumbent Republican congressman. I spent Election Day 1958 outside a temple in Brookline handing out literature for our candidate, John Saltonstall, who lost. (Twenty-two years later, that same polling place gave me one of my best margins in my first election to Congress. Nothing could have seemed less likely to me at the time.)
In the 1960 presidential race, I once again supported the intellectuals' hero, Adlai Stevenson, and helped organize Harvard for his campaign. Like many liberals, I was skeptical of his rival, John F. Kennedy. But as the presidential convention neared, I began to have doubts about my choice. Kennedy's main opponent for the nomination that spring was Senator Hubert Humphrey. He was unquestionably the most effective liberal leader in the Congress, but he had lost to Kennedy in several primaries. I remember being impressed by Arthur Schlesinger's summary of the situation: "I am nostalgically for Stevenson, ideologically for Humphrey, and realistically for Kennedy." By that summer, I was a convert to Schlesinger's view. At the time, many disenchanted leftists claimed that Kennedy and Nixon were virtually indistinguishable. Once again Schlesinger emerged as the spokesman for those of us on the realistic side, quickly writing Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?, which made the case for Kennedy from the left. I have often reminded friends who lament the passing of the good old days when we had inspiring leaders like President Kennedy that people with attitudes similar to theirs were usually critics of Kennedy at the time.
I ended up campaigning for Kennedy in New Jersey, since the election coincided with the time I spent at home following my father's death. When I returned to Harvard in 1961, I joined the primary campaign of Attorney General Edward McCormack, who was running for the president's former Senate seat against Ted Kennedy. McCormack was a courageous liberal, and I believed the president needed to be pressured by the left. I have never, retrospectively, been so happy that someone I admired so much was defeated, but I still believe that supporting McCormack was the right decision at the time. In his forty-seven years in office, Ted Kennedy would become the most effective advocate of racial justice, economic fairness, and the protection of various groups against discrimination ever to serve in Congress. How could I have voted against him in his first race? On this point, my only defense is the one I have heard attributed to Samuel Bernstein, who was chided for not letting his son put more time into music: "Who knew he would turn into Leonard Bernstein?"
Over the next several years, the choice between conventional political activity and direct action became sharper. Riots in African American neighborhoods and antiwar demonstrations inside and outside universities increased the tensions within the old Democratic coalition. In 1964, I'd amiably debated strategy with my comrades in Mississippi. Only one year later, the amiability was replaced by anger. The militant left was contemptuous of liberals, whom they saw as morally corrupt, spineless, or both. In fact, progress was speeding up on the racial front: The stated goal of the Mississippi Summer was significantly advanced by passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Of course, vigorous demonstrations, which were met with brutal violence, played a role in winning national political support for the act. But once national legislation was passed, and African Americans got the vote, they most often recognized that the ballot was a superior means of fighting for what they needed.
In 1966, I was appointed director of student affairs at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School, which Harvard had recently established in the wake of the president's death. (Despite my work for his political adversary McCormack, Ted Kennedy made no objection.) The new position elevated the role of politics in my life-to the further detriment of my putative scholarly work. It also raised my profile in the political world, not always for the better.
One of my major institute responsibilities was to run the Visiting Fellows program, which brought important people-usually high government officials-to Harvard for meetings with students. To facilitate genuine conversation, and to give students a chance to see major public figures in an intimate setting, we organized private sessions that were closed to the media. Even two years earlier this would have been a popular approach. But by the fall of 1966, the government's conduct of the Vietnam War had become emblematic of antidemocratic secrecy and a lack of public accountability. In a decision that I count, in hindsight, among the stupidest in which I ever participated, we invited Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to Cambridge. In another, which comes close on the stupidity scale, I decided I could handle the logistics myself, giving little thought to the depth of antiwar anger. During his visit, McNamara's car was mobbed by irate students as we tried to get him to his next appointment-note of historical interest: It was to a seminar run by Henry Kissinger. He was rescued by a flying squad of Harvard and Cambridge policemen, and with a composure that I greatly admired, he proceeded to carry out the rest of his program. But the spectacle of the U.S. secretary of defense being temporarily captured by a mob of Harvard students reverberated around the world. That it happened just before the midterm congressional elections magnified the embarrassment-to the Johnson administration, Harvard, the institute, and me.
In response to this episode, some undergraduates circulated a petition among their fellow students that apologized to McNamara, while making clear that this apology in no way indicated support for the war. Two of the leading organizers, James Segel and Richard Morningstar, were students of mine. They became friends and would be close political confederates throughout my career.
The most enduring impact of the McNamara incident was on me. Here was the most important responsibility I had ever been given, and I had conspicuously failed to carry it out. I was furious at the personal criticism leveled at me-especially from the leaders of a new organization, Students for a Democratic Society. And I deeply regretted any political damage inflicted on the Democrats, whose losses in the 1966 election did nothing to retard the war effort but did put an end to hopes for further progress on the social and economic fronts. Most profoundly, I feared that the growing prevalence of angry, uncivil disobedience would deepen the socioeconomic split in the coalition for stronger government action. Of course, the temporary capture of McNamara did not do this by itself, but as a visible symbol of successful disruption, it enhanced the tactic's appeal to many on the left, particularly younger people. In a political application of Newtonian physics, the growing popularity of such rhetoric and behavior provoked an equal and opposite reaction from older whites, for whom patriotism was an important value. (Remember that in the late 1960s, World War II veterans were a significant part of the population.)
* * *
In November 1966, not long after the McNamara fracas, I received a phone call from Michael Dukakis. The young law student I'd met as an undergraduate was now serving in the Massachusetts legislature. He asked me to become the unpaid staff member for a group of mostly young liberal state legislators who had just formed what they called the Democratic Study Group, inspired by a similar congressional organization. Reasoning that this work would benefit both the world at large and my Ph.D. thesis on the legislative process, I eagerly said yes.
The group met every Monday when the House was in session at the home of Representative Katherine Kane, which was around the corner from the Statehouse. I sat in on their discussions of strategy, kept records of the decisions, researched the issues, and helped the members coordinate with each other.
I began 1967 following the career path I had anticipated when I opted for academia. I was a scholar-albeit an embryonic one-and I also served as an assistant to elected officials I admired. That June, when my stint as an undergraduate instructor at the Institute of Politics ended, I moved out of Harvard housing and into an apartment in Cambridge, ready to pursue my dual line of work.
Then, in September, I received another life-altering phone call with a job offer, another unpaid one. The caller was Christopher Lydon, then a political reporter for The Boston Globe, later the creator of The Connection, one of our best political talk radio shows. He asked if I was interested in joining the campaign team of Kevin White, who was running for mayor of Boston. White had been elected Massachusetts secretary of state in 1960 but had not made a strong impression in that position. He'd also led a group of liberals who had taken control of the Democratic Party organization in Boston's Ward Five, where I would later run for office.
White had unexpectedly survived a tough multicandidate primary election and now faced a single opponent in the final election. That opponent, Louise Day Hicks, was the potent symbol of white Bostonians' resistance to demands for school desegregation. The political, economic, and educational establishments in the city were horrified at the prospect of her victory, but the divisive primary campaign had dissipated their power and alienated many of White's potential supporters.
When a runoff election takes place soon after a first-round vote, the hard feelings inevitably kindled by any campaign do not have time to soften. Few political statements are as often uttered and infrequently meant as "We ran against each other, but we're still good friends." Supporters of a failed candidate have little love for the person who defeated their champion. And the feeling is usually mutual. Good winners exist in politics as in other areas, but it sometimes takes a while for magnanimity to replace anger-especially when the anger is directed at those who've spent the past few months demeaning you.
That is where I came in. Like most people at Harvard at the time, I had been engaged in national and state politics but had paid little attention to Boston's intra-Democratic battles. Since I hadn't supported White or his rivals, I was acceptable to all of Hicks's foes, if only by process of elimination. I agreed to work for White, not out of any great support for him (I knew little about him then) but because I shared the dread of seeing Boston elect a mayor whose sole qualification was her willingness to demagogically defend a racially unfair status quo.
So I went to see White at his home on Beacon Hill. He was detained and kept me waiting for two hours. But I later learned he was favorably impressed that I spent those hours in his study reading a great novel about Boston politics, Joseph Dinneen's Ward Eight, which I had found on his bookshelf. He was even more impressed when I asked if I could borrow the book so I could finish it. What might have seemed a bit forward in a more polite setting apparently struck him as just the kind of pushiness he wanted in a campaign aide.
I spent the next month working as his scheduler. My friend the process of elimination enabled me to play several other roles as well. Many of White's top advisers had full-time jobs, which left them free to campaign only after five. I had finished my teaching and administrative duties for the semester, the better to write that elusive thesis, so I was one of the few people he trusted who was available all day.
This was my first experience of full-time campaigning. My short attention span and disinclination to plan ahead turned out to be great assets in this atmosphere. In fact, my impatience in face-to-face dealings, which can be a handicap, suited White perfectly. We could communicate rapidly with little small talk. The campaign succeeded. White beat Hicks, decisively but not overwhelmingly. I prepared at long last to write what I was beginning to fear was a phantom thesis.
Then came another phone call. This time it was the mayor-elect, who asked me to meet him. The Saturday after the election I was attending a National Young Democrats convention at a hotel in Boston. We were discussing a project initiated by Al Lowenstein to "Dump Johnson" and nominate someone else for president in 1968. White picked me up at the hotel and drove me out to suburban Wellesley, where we talked while his son played hockey. He surprised me by insisting that I come to work in the new administration in January.
I remember my precise reaction: "Wow!" That is "wow" as opposed to "hooray" or "damn." The mayor-elect wanted me to be his chief of staff. The good news was that this was not the kind of political job I had hoped to have-it was a much bigger one. The bad news was that I still had a Ph.D. to complete, and I was scared.
I had never considered what it would be like to hold a job that was the focus of so much day-to-day media attention. There were no instances anywhere in America-or in the world, for that matter-of known homosexuals occupying prominent positions in public life. The closest I could think of was Walter Jenkins, one of President Johnson's most important aides, who had been caught by the police in a homosexual act in a Washington, D.C., YMCA during the 1964 campaign. He was not only fired but also immediately became a nonperson. President Johnson's first public response featured his volunteered assurance that he had spent the previous night in bed with Lady Bird.
The risk of exposure was not the only intimidating factor. More important was my worry that the job White sketched out was beyond my capabilities. I had never administered anything more complicated than the Institute of Politics programs, and, as noted, the McNamara debacle had not built up my self-confidence.
So I told White that I would not accept the offer, citing my dissertation as the primary reason. Serendipitously for the mayor-elect, the chair of the Harvard Government Department, Samuel Huntington, was his friend, neighbor, and political ally. "We'll get Sam to give you a deadline extension of a few years," he confidently and accurately predicted. He added, "You can then write a great thesis on your experiences at the highest level of city government."
White had taken advantage of my negotiating mistake-a type of mistake I would learn to avoid committing in the future. Whenever you give someone a reason for a decision that is not your real reason, you leave yourself vulnerable. If your ostensible objection is resolved, you have no recourse to your true but hidden objections.
Thus deprived of my dissertation argument, I had to confess that I was afraid of failure-perhaps I was not the skillful, high-level political operative I seemed. White's response was irrefutable.
"You want me to be an effective liberal mayor," he said, "making a lot of changes in a conservative city and a conservative government. The people I've had with me in the secretary of state's office are good guys, but not many of them share your agenda, and without some new blood, I won't be able to be the kind of mayor you want me to be. If you walk away to be a professor, and because you're too nervous about how you'll do, don't come complaining to me in six months when I haven't been able to move the way you want me to."
Case closed. If I was truly committed to racial, economic, and social progress, how could I justify-to myself-ducking this challenge for personal reasons? So I said yes, on the condition that Sam Huntington deliver my extension. He did-an unlimited one. I understand this to mean that I am still entitled to submit a thesis and receive a doctorate. Whether that's truly the case is a question that is in no danger of ever being answered.
Copyright © 2015 by Barney Frank