Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (4 page)

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.