Eugene McCarthy – Don't Gel Too Soon

Big Birthday Memory #22 : Flowers in Their Hair

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from June 11, 2007.

This morning the New York Times told me that the San Francisco Summer of Love was 40 (forty!!!) years ago. No, I wasn’t there. I was still in college, and that summer I was working a the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh, Pa, taking pictures in various buildings and helping with community organizing.

It was the days of VISTA and there were volunteers all over town, working with residents to learn how to budget, how to prepare nutritious food, child development and work skills. It was moving, exciting work – a job I’d gotten for myself after the director initially told me that “no nice girl from Smith belongs in the projects.” He was from the original public housing establishment and a great teacher, once I convinced him I wasn’t some Muffie prepazoid.

But the Summer of Love… my boyfriend was out there – his family lived in Berkeley – and it all looked so romantic. I was far too committed to what I was doing – and too much of a coward to ever tell my parents I was going. I also knew that hanging around stoned was not the way to help people who couldn’t help themselves – and that was what I most wanted to do. Even so, it was tough thinking that all the action was “out there” and I was on the shores of the Monongahela River in Head Starts and food banks.

Between my house and “downtown” there was a bridge that went through the famous Homestead neighborhood where the Pinkertons beat up the steel strikers so brutally. Crossing between a smoking mill with a red aura generated by molten steel and the Mesta Machinery plant, it rattled and clanked with age and instability. Ever since we were little we had called it the “rickety bridge.” I loved it.

One day that summer, somehow emblematic to me of the whole three months, I was driving along and, just as I began to cross the bridge, Scott McKenzie’s “If You’re Goin’ to San Francisco” came on the radio. At first I smiled, then – suddenly – without warning, I began to cry. I ended up sobbing, almost unable to drive. I still don’t know why. The song was moving, of course, and very seductive, but now as I recall that day I think I was also crying for the side of me I couldn’t allow to rule. I loved the ideals of the counterculture, adored the music and light shows and communes and home-made bread — but either my fear of the risk or my commitment to politics or both kept me home.

It was probably better. I later left college to work in the anti-war campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy – a risk more suited to my nature and dreams. Even so – remembering that day, which I do, with particular intensity – I’m still sad – for what I may have missed, for what the movement disintegrated into, for those shiny dreams that even then seemed a bit naive. You know that old Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that ends: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. True then – and sometimes, just as true now.

Big Birthday Memory #16: (More 1968) Obama, Clinton, New Hampshire And Primaries – 1968 And 2008

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from January 8, 2008.

In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, 40 years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote running against Lyndon Johnson .

That was enough to be viewed as a win, since no one thought he’d get anywhere close to those numbers. That victory by the only national politician with the guts to run against the Vietnam War sent a shock through the Democratic Party.

McCarthy’s effort, often called “The Children’s Crusade,” was comprised largely of college students (including me) who abandoned their studies to come to New Hampshire and work to help to stop the war. Now, as I watch Barack Obama, and see the the numbers of young people propelling his success, I know just how they feel — and what awaits them if they fail.

Then too, win or lose, things will be tough for Senator Clinton. Obama, seen not only as a change agent but also as someone who offe

That’s exactly what happened in 1968. The New Hampshire victory brought Robert Kennedy into the race – establishing, until his tragic death, a three-way battle – two dissidents against the juggernaut of the Democratic establishment. Then later, Hubert Humphrey , candidate of that establishment and for years, as Vice President, public and energetic supporter of Johnson’s war, won the nomination.

To all of us, he had stolen the nomination. Many (not me) were so bitter that they refused to vote for him. (2016 NOTE: Let’s not let this happen again! That reluctance led to the election of Richard Nixon and all that followed. Think how different things would be…) Remember, for most of us, as for many of Obama’s young supporters, this was our first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she prevail further down the line, will face the same broken-hearted campaigners. Once the anti-establishment, anti-war student and Watergate hearing staffer, in the eyes of these young people she’ll be cast as the villain.

For evidence of how long that bitterness lasts, take a look at this quote from the American Journalism Review, from the 1968 Chicago Convention recollections of veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder. It’s about me – but it’s also about any young American who takes a stand and loses .

He recalls coming into the hotel lobby from the park where demonstrations were underway and spotting a woman he had first met during the Eugene McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire. “Her name was Cindy Samuels,” Broder still remembers. “She was seated on a bench crying. She had been gassed. I went over and I put my arm around her and I said: ‘Cindy. What can I do for you?’ She looked up at me with tears on her face and said: ‘Change things.’

NOTE: As I searched for links for this post I found a David Corn piece saying much the same thing. I want to take note of it since the ideas came to me independently but I didn’t want it to seem that I drew from his.

1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE

I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call “a true believer” and to see policemen behave like that. To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a “kike” (you had to read his lips – there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps. To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you’d worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.

That’s how it was. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, of course, on this momentous anniversary – when hopefully another, happier landmark will emerge in the extraordinary nomination of Senator Obama. I’ve been to every Convention from 1968 until this year. It’s kind of sad to break the chain after 40 years but I think I’m ready. I did a workshop on convention coverage at the BlogHer conference to pass the torch; I’m so excited for all the women who are going. Just as Senator Obama is a generation behind me – in his 40s to my 60s – a little kid when we faced billy clubs and tear gas in his home town, so are many of the bloggers credentialed to cover the week. I know it will be great for them and that they’ll make certain we know – in twitteriffic detail, what’s going on.

I know too that, 40 years from now, it will still be a milestone
memory in their lives. I started to write “hopefully, a happier one”
but despite all the agony of those terrible days in 1968, I’m embarrassed to tell you that I wouldn’t trade the memory. It’s so deep in my soul and so much a part of my understanding of myself and who I’ve become that despite the horrors within it, I cherish its presence. So, what I wish my sisters in Denver (and Minnesota) is to have conventions — happy or not — as important to their lives, sense of history and purpose and political values as Chicago was to mine. Along with, of course, the fervent hope that this time, there will be something closer to a happy ending.

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign. I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson. When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody." So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused.

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war. After NSA I organized the Smith campus. We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war. So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry.

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign. There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice. This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war. Kennedy won Indiana. McCarthy won Oregon. We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA. Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn. We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage. Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV! They’ve done it again!"

Continue reading FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

WHO WANTS HILLARY? WHO WANTS BARACK? WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE? WHAT’S AT STAKE?

You really need to read this guest post at Political Voices of Women, Catherine Morgan‘s remarkable combination of editorial and aggregator. There are links there to more than 400 women who blog about politics – and guest posts. And (full disclosure) yes, sometimes that includes to my work. But I digress.

On Wednesday, April 23, just after the Pennsylvania primary, Slim, whose blog is called No Fish, No Nuts, was Catherine’s guest blogger. Slim’s post, which first appeared on her blog, wrote a loving but sad analysis of the Clinton supporters at her county convention where local Democrats elected their delegates. Listen to this:

Obama’s voters are looking toward Obama as a standard
bearer, as a point man for the change they want to see in the country.
Hillary’s supporters, at least the older women among them, are voting for their
surrogate: because they want to see a woman in the Oval Office before they die,
and because they themselves were denied so many opportunities for advancement
in their own lives.

I do not doubt that they also desperately believe in
Hillary Clinton, but their investment in her goes much deeper than politics.
Hillary Clinton is proof that they had it in them all along, the fire, talent
and creativity, and they could have been leaders but for the glass ceiling that
seemed to rise only inches a decade.

Slim also wrote that she was reluctant to offer these observations but that given polls showing many Clinton supporters saying they will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination, and some the other way around, she felt that times were so desperate that she had to weigh in. In her view, "We cannot afford another 4 years of war, debt and economic stagnation,
the prescription of a McCain presidency. So we Dems cannot allow
Clinton voters (or for that matter, I add, Obama supporters if it goes the other way – though they report this feeling somewhat less frequently) to take their ball and go home come November."

To that I say "amen!" I was a member of the "Children’s Crusade" that was the 1968 anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. We worked like demons through New Hampshire, did so well there that it was considered a win even though, technically, we lost, then saw Bobby Kennedy enter the race against us. We persisted, as did his supporters, until his assassination in June of 1968. After that, many of his supporters joined us, working still to try to elect a president who would stop the war. And then.

The riots in Chicago. The nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and for way too long a staunch supporter of the war. And then. Many, many of my colleagues and friends indeed picked up their footballs and went home. To stay. Not only did they not work for Humphrey – that would have been very hard after what had happened in Chicago. They didn’t even vote for him. Or vote at all. And that, my friends, is how we got Richard Nixon. Which is how we got Watergate. Which is how we got Jimmy Carter– who made such a mess that we got Ronald Reagan. Who took apart so much social safety net, environmental and regulatory and other federal function that we thought more was impossible. Until we got George Bush. Who decimated much of what was left, including much of our hope. Until now, when we have two candidates who stand for so much.

Of course that’s simplistic, but what really really upsets me is that every time we educated activists, in our righteousness, take a walk because things aren’t perfect, we aren’t the ones who get hurt the most. People who are poor, whose kids go to bad schools, whose unemployment insurance runs out too soon, who no longer can afford even in-state tuition or, for many, community college tuition, to say nothing of HEALTH INSURANCE (an issue which reaches up into the middle class) — and of course the war, where low-income people do most of the enlisting…these people are the ones who are hurt the most.

We let our singular perception of what’s perfect become the enemy of the good – or at least better than bad – that we could help to bring into being. It’s infantile. It’s sad. It’s shameful. And unless all of us in the blog universe who feel this way make a lot of noise and take lots of friends to lunch no matter WHO gets the nomination, it’s going to happen again.

Thanks to Slim for her great post that inspired this rant.

OBAMA, CLINTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE AND PRIMARIES – 1968 AND 2008

In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, 40 years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote running against Lyndon Johnson .

Then too, win or lose, things will be tough for Senator Clinton. Obama, seen not only as a change agent but also as someone who offers the hope and optimism of a JFK, has captured the imaginations not only of young people but also of many journalists, most notorious of whom is the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks. That means that anyone who wrests the nomination away from him will be perceived as the breaker of young hearts, standing in the way of idealism and the candidate who brought young people fully in to the system.*

To all of us, he had stolen the nomination. Many (not me) were so bitter that they refused to vote for him. Remember, for most of us, as for many of Obama’s young supporters, this was our first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, should she prevail further down the line, will face the same broken-hearted campaigners. Once the anti-establishment, anti-war student and Watergate hearing staffer, in the eyes of these young people she’ll be cast as the villain.

For evidence of how long that bitterness lasts, take a look at this quote from the American Journalism Review, from the 1968 Chicago Convention, riot and Hum prey coronation recollections of veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder. It’s about me – but it’s also about any young American who takes a stand and loses .

WONDERFUL WILLIAM STYRON

In 1968 I was a volunteer in the Eugene McCarthy anti-war presidential campaign. Most of the time I took care of the press, riding on the press bus and handling logistics for filing stories and getting to the plane on time. Frequently, when celebrities were campaigning with the Senator they’d ride for a while on the press bus, so I got to meet some pretty amazing people, from Robert Lowell to Tony Randall to William Styron, who died this week.

I had just read The Confessions of Nat Turner, his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, which I had loved. I knew of his close friendship with James Baldwin, whom I really admired, and imagined that the book was written partly as a cry for justice for his friend and other black Americans. (OK I was 20, what do you want?) I sat down beside him on the bus and was able to let him know how much I admired him and his work.

The next day, literally, there was a horrible piece about the book and Styron’s “racism” in some lefty publication (can’t remember which one) He walked down the aisle of the bus and dropped it in my lap – “see — see what they’re doing to me?” he said sadly. I have never forgotten that day – the punishment he took for imagining the rage and longing for justice on the part of a charismatic slave — and the sweetness of the man himself. Only later did I learn of his battles with depression. I don’t know if it’s true that one must suffer for one’s art, but he certainly did.

Of course, people know him better for Sophie’s Choice and the Meryl Streep film — again about the unimaginable persecution of a minority. I guess it’s no accident that his wife Rose was so closely tied to Amnesty International for so long.

Anyway I am thinking of him today — of his deep moral sense so well communicated in his work – and of the amazing privilege of knowing him, if only for a little while.