Dynastic politics: Hoosier edition

 In 2018, Representative Joe Kennedy III, scion of that American political dynasty, was the Democratic responder to Donald Trump's first State of the Union address. He was young, attractive, and a likely presidential prospect for 2028 or 2032. But two years later, ignoring the advice of many supporters, he chose to run against sitting Senator Ed Markey in the Massachusetts Democratic primary. He lost, and lost decisively, 44.6% to 55.4%. Since then, he's been largely out of the news. He may still have presidential ambitions, but the pundits haven't been kind to him.

Here in Indiana, we have our own Democratic political dynasty: the Bayh family, with a new heir ready to follow in his father's footsteps: Birch Evans "Beau" Bayh IV is running for Indiana Secretary of State, a position often used as a stepping stone to the governor's mansion. When he announced his candidacy last October, he seemed confident he would glide to victory in the same way his father did in 1986. The current Republican Secretary of State, Diego Morales, has been embroiled in scandal from the start. Even people who routinely mark a straight Republican ballot (and there are a lot of them in the Hoosier State) may make an exception this November. But Beau has one big hurdle to clear before he gets the Democratic nomination: the 2026 Democratic state convention. But first, let's look at the Bayh dynasty. 

Beau's grandfather, Birch Evans Bayh, Jr, son of Indiana State University basketball coach Birch Evans Bayh, Sr, began the dynasty in 1954, when he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives at the age of 26 and later became the youngest Speaker in Indiana history. In 1962, he was elected to the Senate, defeating three-term Republican Homer E. Capehart. Birch went on to serve three terms himself, and during that time he authored two Constitutional amendments: the 25th, clarifying presidential succession, and the 26th, lowering the age limit for voting to 18. (Wikipedia: "Birch Bayh") And he was a liberal in the tradition of the Kennedy brothers. In fact, he may well have saved Edward Kennedy's life after a plane crash in 1964.

Birch made a brief run for the presidency in 1976, but after coming in third (after Uncommitted and Jimmy Carter) in the Iowa caucuses, third in the New Hampshire primary, and seventh in Massachusetts, he withdrew from the race and endorsed Carter. His Senate career ended in 1980, when Dan Quayle rode in on Ronald Reagan's coattails.

Birch Evans "Evan" Bayh III got his start in Indiana politics after being elected Secretary of State in 1986. Two years later, he ran for governor, defeating Republican lieutenant governor John Mutz. Evan's politics were more conservative than his father's, especially after he was elected to the Senate in 1998. Incumbent Republican Senator Dan Coats decided not to run for reelection after Evan announced he was in the race. Evan won against Republican Paul Helmke.

Until 2002, Evan seemed like your typical pragmatic Midwestern Democrat. From 2001 to 2005, he served as Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. In 2002, he enthusiastically backed the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War. Yes, the likes of John Kerry and Tom Harkin voted "Yea" on the resolution, but not with the vigor of Bayh. Still, he was a Democrat and usually voted with his caucus.

In 2006, it was clear that Evan wanted bigger and better things: On December 3, he confirmed he had launched a presidential exploratory committee. By December 15, he announced he would not be a presidential candidate and endorsed Hillary Clinton. When it was clear that Barack Obama would win the 2008 nomination, Evan was in contention for the vice presidential nomination--or at least he thought he was. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said it was a "coin toss" between Evan Bayh and Joe Biden, with then-Virginia governor Tim Kaine also in consideration (The Indianapolis Star, November 1, 2009, p B3). My suspicion is that Bayh was never a serious candidate. Republican Mitch Daniels was governor of Indiana and was likely to win a second term, which he did. Bayh would have to resign his Senate seat if elected vice president, and Daniels would appoint a Republican in his place. Biden also had extensive foreign policy experience, which Bayh (and Obama) did not.

Still, though Evan was disappointed he hadn't risen to greater heights, we Hoosier Democrats expected him to run for a third Senate term in 2010. He had given no indication he wouldn't run until his surprise announcement on February 15, 2010. It was one day before the filing deadline and far too close to Election Day to allow another Democrat to build a campaign. He said he "became convinced that, although on a smaller scale, there were better ways to make a contribution to the welfare of our state and country than to continue service in Congress." (Indianapolis Star, February 16, 2010, p A1) The state Democratic Party named Congressman Brad Ellsworth as the candidate, while Dan Coats won the Republican primary to retake his old seat. The result was predictable: Ellsworth was from southwest Indiana and did not have time to make himself known statewide. He lost to Coats, carrying only the most heavily Democratic counties.

Evan's "better ways to make a contribution to the welfare of our state and country" included becoming a partner in the McGuireWoods law firm, a senior adviser with Marc Rowan's Apollo Global Management, and a messaging adviser to the United States Chamber of Commerce. From March 2011 to July 2016, he was a part-time contributor to Fox News (Wikipedia, "Evan Bayh").

In 2016, at the request of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Evan agreed to run for his old Senate seat in July 2016, replacing Democratic candidate Baron Hill, who graciously withdrew from the race. It didn't pan out. Republican candidate Donald Trump, with the help of his Hoosier running mate, Governor Mike Pence, won Indiana in a landslide, taking Republican Senatorial candidate Todd Young with him. Evan outpolled Clinton, but Young still won with 52% of the vote.

In 2016, Evan also joined the No Labels party as national co-chair. No Labels is a dark money-funded organization. It's supposedly working for bipartisan consensus, but many of us have our doubts. Inequality.org writes: "For years, the group No Labels and its close partner, the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, have quietly promoted policies that are wrapped in the mantle of bipartisanship and pitched as “non-ideological,” while being in the pay of corporate interests. They produce reports, sponsor events, and weigh in on policy on behalf of unnamed corporate donors."

Evan recently made a rather innocuous statement on behalf of No Labels last Veterans Day, in which he mentioned his son, Birch Evans "Beau" Bayh IV and his race for Indiana Secretary of State.

Beau was born November 9, 1995, along with his twin brother Nicholas, while their father was governor, but they grew up in Washington, DC, attending St. Alban's Academy, an elite Episcopal preparatory school. Both went on to Harvard, and both served in the military. Beau, according to his campaign website, joined the "United States Marine Corps. He served as an Infantry Officer, where he rose to the rank of Captain...

"Following his honorable discharge in 2023, Beau earned a law degree. While in law school, he worked for Cummins Engines and Barnes & Thornburg LLP, both in Indianapolis. Following graduation, he served as a Judicial Law Clerk in Bloomington for the Honorable David F. Hamilton on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit."

(Note: His twin brother majored in business and is now a strategic football analyst for the Indianapolis Colts.)

Which brings us to the hurdle Beau has to clear. In Indiana, the Secretary of State is an elective office, but the candidates are nominated not in the primary, but by the state convention. The state convention is going to be packed with committed Democrats, most all of whom loathe Donald Trump and Trumpism. And that could be a problem for Beau. He has an opponent, massage therapist and military veteran Blythe Potter of Bargersville. Potter has run for both town council and Johnson County council and lost both times, but she's in an extremely Republican area--the last time the county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1948. In a normal year, she'd be swept away in a landslide for Beau. But this isn't a normal year, and Beau hasn't done much to reassure Hoosier Democrats he's on their side

As Potter and her allies have pointed out, Beau Bayh has accepted large donations from Trump-affiliated individuals and political action committees, including a $25,000 gift from Apollo Global Management CEO (and Evan's employer) Marc Rowan, who gave a million dollars to Trump's 2020 campaign and over $3 million to Republican causes and candidates in the first half of 2025. Rowan even shows up in the Epstein Files. And while there's nothing to connect him with Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and exploitation of young women and girls, Rowan was in contact with Epstein as late as 2016, when he had breakfast at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. I, along with many other Hoosier Democrats, have urged him to return the $25,000. He doesn't need it. His campaign is loaded. Yet he refuses to respond to pleas to return the money, at least as of this writing.

Perhaps he doesn't have to. Perhaps the convention delegates will be so relieved to have a Bayh on the ticket that they'll nominate him even if he doesn't return the money. But I've seen a lot of angry posts on social media from people who won't vote for Beau even if he should return the tainted money." And quite a few of those people are going to be in Indianapolis for the convention.

I may or may not be at the convention. I've filed as a candidate, but in my county, Elkhart, there are 41 delegate slots and 61 people who filed papers to be delegates. If the official listing for the delegate slots remains alphabetical, I'll be toward the end of the list, which means that I'm at a distinct disadvantage. Too many voters, looking at the list in on the ballot, will be tempted to vote for the first 41. As for being on a list endorsed by Bayh or Potter, I doubt I'll be on one because I'm not yet committed to Bayh or Potter. But if I am a delegate, I'll vote for Beau Bayh if he returns that $25,000 from Rowan. Otherwise, I'll probably vote for Blythe Potter, if only to cast a protest vote. I'll vote for the Democratic candidate in the November.

"A Reagan Book for his 100th"

Thank you, Mark Souder. I'm not in the habit of thanking the former representative from the Third District of Indiana, but because of a column he wrote in the Elkhart Truth (“Pick up a Reagan Book for his 100th,” 5 February 2011), I have reason to thank him.

Souder, some of you may remember, was the Christian Right congressman who resigned after the public learned of his affair with a married woman on his staff. He resurfaced last month to urge Elkhartans to read a book about Ronald Reagan to celebrate the centennial of his birth.

Clearly, Souder idolizes Reagan: nearly all of the books he recommends are either hagiographies or extremely sympathetic to their subject. To give Souder credit, he does mention books by Lou Cannon, with the warning, “He does not share Reagan's worldview.”

Had Souder not published his list, I probably would not have reread Reagan's America: Innocents at Home by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 1987). It isn't on Souder's list; not only does Wills not share Reagan's worldview, he argues that it it is not based in reality: “A visit to his past is always a pleasant experience. Visiting Reaganland is is very much like taking children to Disneyland, where they can deal with a New Orleans cut to their measure. It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better one is any troubling incursions of a real New Orleans, a real racetrack, the real American West.” (p387)
Wills calls the book's first section “Huck Finn's World.” In his autobiography, Reagan calls his childhood “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.” But Wills reminds us that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular, takes place almost entirely at night, as a series of panicky escapes from one horror to another.” (p7)

Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, just a few miles from my father's hometown of Morrison. While Reagan's family moved many times during his childhood, he regards Dixon—one county over from Morrison—as his boyhood home. Reagan's first regular job was at WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa. And while I grew up in Iowa City, I married a Davenport girl. So in a sense, Reagan's background parallels my own, though it's separated by some forty years. And while my father, who grew up in the same region as Reagan, voted for Dewey in 1944, but became a liberal Democrat not long afterward. Reagan supported Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but took a sharp right turn sometime after 1948.

Wills shows how the white settlement of the American Midwest, along with the West, was made possible largely by government: the Hennepin Canal, which benefited Tampico, was a government project. He goes on to remind us that Reagan's father and brother both through the Depression as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

In Davenport, and later in Des Moines, Reagan worked as a sportscaster, transforming telegraphed signals from Chicago Cubs games into play-by-play coverage. And Wills points out that Reagan had spent his entire career as one of the “symbol specialists” Jeane Kirkpatrick attacked in her 1976 book, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics. Reagan went from sportscaster to actor to General Electric spokesman to politician.

“There is nothing wrong with any of these activities,” Wills writes. But it is strange that they should make up the sole background of a hero cheered by critics of mere 'symbol skills.'” (p101)

Wills follows Reagan's Hollywood career from his arrival to his 1942 triumph in Kings Row, to his transition from a movie to a television actor. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan helped engineer an agreement with MCA which allowed the corporation to act both as union representative of television actors an television producer—an obvious conflict of interest.

Reagan, according to Wills, came close to being indicted. Wills believes Reagan just didn't see it as a conflict of interest, but “was always always prepared to think the best of his own bosses.” (p278)

The main premise of Wills's book, though, is that Reagan's America is one of myth—a myth that millions of Americans hold as truth. In his chapter, “Greenfield Village on the Potomac,” Wills writes of Henry Ford's high schools, where students learned from McGuffey's Readers: “Ford kept creating new models of his cars to replace the old, but he would not allow his schools to admit new readers to replace McGuffey's... He could not take his old world with him as he whizzed off in his automobile time machine, which carried him in the wrong direction, forward to the future.” (p374, italics in original)

Reagan's America is one very much defined by Hollywood. Wills points out that the “Wild West” of movies and television is at odds with the real American West of the post-Civil War era:
“...Robert Dykstra, investigating the period of legendary drives through the towns of Kansas, found that places like Dodge City and Abilene averaged only one and a half murders per year, often having nothing to do with cowboys, and usually unconnected with 'shootouts.'” (p89)

In his 1976 primary campaign against Gerald Ford, Reagan repeated a story about a black Navy cook who was stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed: “'He cradled a machine gun in his arms, which is not an easy thing to do, and stood on the end of the pier blazing away at the Japanese airplanes and strafing him and that [segregation] was all changed.'

“Reporters pointed out that segregation [in the military] persisted until Truman abolished it in 1948, three years after the war, but Reagan shook his head and said he did not believe them.” (p165) Wills surmises that he remembered the scene from a movie.

In a movie Wills does not mention, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the old newspaper editor says, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Reagan, the legend has become fact. And because the legends are the same ones that Americans have learned from television and the movies, he was able to key into the American psyche in a way that few politicians have: “He is a durable daylight 'bundle of meanings,' as Roland Barthes called myth. Reagan does not not argue for American values, he embodies them.” (p4)

And perhaps the central American value he embodies is one that it is at odds with traditional Christianity: that of original sinlessness:

At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as “having a past.” The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, “has a past.” And much of American thinking has been intended to exempt this country from that stigma. (p384)

Wills contrasts “the doctrine of the Fall” with “the doctrine of the Market:”

Modern capitalism lives by a counter-myth to the Fall of Man—one where benign nature makes everything go, miraculously, right... Individual greeds add up to general gain... Eden was lost by free choice in the Fall of Man. It rises, unbidden, by the automatic engineerings of the Market.

The earlier myth called for a repenting awareness of sin. The later one called for a dutiful innocence and optimism. (p384)

Jimmy Carter, though a far more devout and orthodox Christian than Reagan, lost the evangelical Christian vote because he believed in the Fall of Man: “religious voters found that Carter lacked the higher confidence in man, man's products, and America. He talked of limits and self-denial, of tendencies toward aggression even in a sacred or 'saved' nation like America. He believed in original sin.”

Reagan's ability to identify himself with that American counter-myth, Wills argues, is the reason Americans twice elected him to the nation's highest office. More recently, Tea Party activists have accused President Obama of not believing in American exceptionalism. It seems to be a myth that, however untrue, all American politicians must subscribe to. And Reagan articulated the myth better than anyone else.

Reagan, who misquoted John Winthrop's 1630 “city upon a hill” sermon, by adding the adjective “shining” to it, distorted Winthrop's message of caution and turned it into an optimistic declaration of a new Eden. Winthrop uses the line from from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14): “...for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world...,” as a warning to his Puritan followers that their colony would be watched and judged by the world. Reagan's “shining city on a hill” had no such cautionary message; only the shallow optimism of “Morning in America.”

Mark Souder, who, I hope, has repented of his sins, ought to read Reagan's America. And I pray that he and his former lover can repair their respective marriages.

Kent State and the Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon

The verdict of history is never final. Warren G. Harding, almost universally considered one of worst American president, has been rehabilitated by at least some historians. Conservative columnist Mona Charen, in an October 13, 2009 article in the National Review, quotes two historians who lionize Harding.

Richard Nixon has never lost his defenders. And sometimes they make a strong case for him. The historian Robert Dallek, in his Modern Scholar lecture series, The American Presidency , gives Nixon high marks for his economic program and his ending of the Vietnam War. And Dallek is very much in the progressive school of historians. Yet the memory of the Kent State killings, which happened forty years ago this week, reminds us of the vicious and divisive nature of the Nixon presidency.

George W. Bush's campaign strategy of polarizing the American electorate and demonizing his opponents was nothing new. While Nixon used the slogan "Bring Us Together" in his 1968 campaign, by 1970 he had become the most divisive president in recent history. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, began the assault on intellectuals, the press, and dissidents. In 1969 he made headlines with the line, "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." The Nixon machine, while never employing the outright racism of George Wallace, the 1968 American Independent Party candidate for president, took advantage of racial prejudice in what was called the "Southern Strategy."

Nixon, in his 1968 campaign, promised "an honorable end to the war." But once he became president he widened the war while launching a domestic offensive against the antiwar movement. The Johnson Administration took no action against Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and others who demonstrated in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It was the Nixon Administration which ordered the Chicago Eight (later Chicago Seven after Seale was tried separately) trials.

In the spring of 1970 Nixon widened the war by approving an invasion of (he called it an "incursion") of Cambodia. As a result, there were antiwar demonstrations on hundreds of American campuses. Nixon's widely-quoted May 1 reaction to the demonstrations was:

You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world and here they are, burning up the books, I mean, storming around about this issue, I mean, you name it. Get rid of the war, there'll be another one. (American Experience, Nixon).

Three days later National Guardsmen fired on students demonstrating at Kent State University, killing four. "My child was not a bum," said the father of one of the girls killed.

Many Americans blamed the students for the deaths, as they had blamed demonstrators for the violence at the 1968, Democratic Convention, which the Walker Commission deemed a "police riot." The Republican National Committee decided to make campus riots, or "law and order" the main theme of its 1970 campaign.

The culmination of the 1970 Nixon effort was an election-eve broadcast:

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. (AP) President Nixon will climax his strenuous role in the 1970 campaign by appearing on major television networks tonight in filmed segments of a speech decrying violent dissent..." -Elkhart Truth, November 2, 1970.

The broadcast turned out to be a disaster. The grainy black-and-white film, with a poorly-recorded soundtrack, showed an angry Nixon who seemed out of control.

The Democrats aired a speech by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine (the 1968 vice presidential candidate). It was in color and professionally recorded. Muskie exuded calmness and rationality in contrast to Nixon's anger. Charlayne Hunter-Gault of the PBS NewsHour put it this way: "In 1970, Muskie's star rose when he responded in a nationwide speech to a divisive Republican campaign that attacked the patriotism of college students and Democrats."

In fact, polls showed Muskie beating Nixon during much of 1971. And so began Nixon's "dirty tricks " campaign, which succeeded in eliminating Muskie as a 1972 presidential candidate.

Nixon may have been progressive in his economic policies. The Environmental Protection Administration and Amtrak began under Nixon's watch. He helped bring about detente with Moscow and opened up relations with China. And after four bloody years, he removed our combat troops from Southeast Asia. But all that pales in comparison to his campaign of division, anger, dirty tricks, and yes, hatred.

Indiana's Third District: A Race for the Extreme Right

It's Primary Election Day in Indiana: the first Tuedsay after the first Monday in May. I'll be taking a Democratic ballot, so I won't have many choices. But I've had fun watching the Republicans trying to one-up each other. The Third District of Indiana, which includes part of my hometown of Elkhart, is represented by Mark Souder, a Christian Right Republican who's best known for his "Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment" to the federal student aid law. While the restrictions have been softened in recent years, the gist of his amendment was that students with drug convictions were ineligible for federal aid. Or, as my daughter Sarah put it, you can be an axe murderer and get student aid, but not if your record is clean save one conviction for marijuana possession. In any other state, Souder would be considered a right-wing extremist.

But apparently not in Indiana. He's got a primary opponent this year, Fort Wayne car dealer Bob Thomas, who virtually calls him a tax-and-spend liberal. Thomas is from the business right. He's against professional politicians and wants to impose term limits. And while Souder has been known to vote for omnibus bills which may contain things he doesn't like, Thomas appears to be a no-compromise conservative.

After enduring Thomas's attacks from the right, Souder began airing a rather clever commercial:



I live in the Second District of Indiana, currently reperesented by Blue Dog Democrat Joe Donnelly. But if I did live over in the Third, I think I'd take Souder over Thomas. At least Souder has a sense of humor.

Forging ballots and Looking for Love: 1972

In the last post I wrote briefly of my work in 1972 on the Dick Clark senatorial campaign. I was an assistant to Pete Smith, the press secretary. I'm working on a novel I started a long time ago, for the Dickens Challenge. The idea was to write a novel in serialized form, as Dickens did--one chapter a week, with no going back. All but perhaps one of us never completed his or her novel. Rachel Green actually did finish Another Bloody Love Story, though I'm sorry to say it hasn't been published.

The novel I never finished when The Dickens Challenge was active (and which I intend to finish now) includes a chapter that talks about the Clark and McGovern campaigns of 1972. It's based on my experience that year. The narrator, Timothy Rymer, is musing about his true love, Helena McKechnie, on a 2005 train journey from Philadelphia to Chicago. She had disappeared at the end of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, only to reappear four years later:


Chapter 8: “Come Home, America”

The sleeping car attendant came with my meal. I tipped her, closed the door, and peeked through the window. We were at Cumberland, Maryland and about to start the climb into the Alleghenies. I said a blessing before eating the roast chicken I had ordered, and said a prayer for Helena, and for the man I knew only as Benét. After I finished, I called the attendant to make up my bed. Once she had gone, I lay down, though thought came before sleep.

I wondered once more why I was going to Chicago, and how I could change what had happened in 1968, or 1970, or 1978. I didn’t know which year was the key. I didn’t think the key year was 1972. But that was the year Helena came back into my life. I had finished my bachelor’s degree in history in the spring of 1972, and was planning to take a break before beginning graduate school. A friend from my McCarthy days had persuaded me to work in another seemingly quixotic campaign. Dick Clark (no, not the American Bandstand guy) was taking on the seemingly invulnerable Senator Jack Miller of Iowa.

Clark’s campaign office was in downtown Marion, Iowa, in a loft above a restaurant. When I joined the campaign, Clark was just beginning his walk across Iowa. It wouldn’t be a simple walk across the state, but a 1300-mile trek covering virtually all of the 99 counties. I spent my time in the press room, drafting news releases and position papers. But my first job for the campaign was to forge ballots. Nothing illegal--it was for a straw poll at the All-Iowa Fair in nearby Cedar Rapids, but I did have some qualms about it. The campaign manager would walk by the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s booth, pick up a few pads of ballots and bring them back to the headquarters. The ballot had the contests for president: Richard Nixon, George McGovern, and George Wallace (who turned out not to be a candidate in November); for governor: Democrat Paul Franzenburg and Republican Robert Ray; and senator: Clark vs. Miller. Of course, all of our forged ballots were for Clark, but I asked about the other two races.

“Yeah, I mark some for Nixon,” said Pete, the press secretary. “And sometimes I use a really hard mark and vote for Wallace, Clark, and Ray.”

“But,” said Connie, his assistant, “I try to mark as many for McGovern as I can.” I might have fallen in love with Connie, a gorgeous woman with long dark brown hair and brown eyes, if she hadn’t been 32, married, and with four children. Like her, I badly wanted McGovern to win, even though he had virtually no chance.

It seemed that some of McGovern’s supporters were his worst enemies. Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) did a lot to sabotage the Democrats, but they were pikers compared with McGovern’s friends. They were the ones who kicked Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley out of the convention. Sure, it was payback for 1968, but it meant that that Illinois and other traditionally Democratic states would go to Nixon. And their endless debating over minor points shoved McGovern’s acceptance speech into the wee hours of the morning. It was a beautiful speech, almost like one of the great litanies of the early Church. Most Americans never heard it. I saw it on a black-and-white TV in the little press room carved out of the big loft:

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.

From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.

From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick -- come home, America.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.

Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for this “is your land, this land is my land -- from California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters -- this land was made for you and me.”

Less than a month after his nomination, McGovern’s running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri admitted he had suffered from depression, and had received electroshock treatments. And after saying he supported Eagleton “1000 percent,” McGovern faced the realities of 1972 and replaced Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. While McGovern’s candidacy was probably doomed from the convention on, I witnessed the final nail driven into his campaign’s coffin on October 26.

It was one of those beautiful fall days that almost makes up for the steaming Midwestern summers and brutal winters. I took the bus down to Iowa City to see McGovern. Clark and the other statewide Democratic candidates wouldn’t be there, as they’d be hurt by association with him.

The McGovern rally was held on the Pentacrest--the center of the University of Iowa campus, named for the domed Old Capitol building and the four great limestone halls that surrounded it. There was a huge crowd, reminiscent of the antiwar rallies of a few years before. People were sitting on the window ledges of Schaeffer and Macbride Halls, their legs dangling into the air. I was in the midst of the crowd, looking around for faces. There was a young couple holding hands--he with red hair like mine and she with luxuriant dark brown hair. I thought of Helena and wondered again what had happened to separate us.

The crowd roared when McGovern came out onto the Old Capitol steps. He said he had some good news. though. Henry Kissinger, who had been negotiating with the North Vietnamese in Paris, had announced that “Peace is at hand.” If this was true, Nixon could claim he had ended the war. Good news for the nation, but it ended even the tiniest hope of a McGovern victory.

McGovern gave his basic stump speech. I had heard it before. Still, I was happy to have experienced it. As the crowd dispersed, I stood there, trying to decide what to do until my bus left, I heard a voice from the past.

“You look dazed and confused.”

“Helena!,” I exclaimed, and we embraced amid the crowd.



P.S. I just worked for Clark through the summer. I went back to the University of Iowa the fall semester, and found love. I met an amazing young woman that fall. She was wearing a McGovern/Shriver button, as was I. We went to that McGovern rally in October--we're the young couple the narrator notices. (Yes, I had red hair once.) We've been married for 36 years now.

Everybody's Polish: Dyngus Day at the West Side Democratic Club

In old Poland, the day after Easter was a sort of secular continuation of the Easter festivities, with more feasting and drinking. At a time when the Lenten fast was a lot more strict than it is now, two consecutive days of feasting wasn't excessive. And what must have been a pre-Christian spring ritual was incorporated into the celebration. On Dyngus Day, young men would get up early and awaken young women by dousing them with water and spanking them on the legs with willow switches.

When Poles came to the United States, they brought the tradition with them, but as Polish-Americans became more American than Polish, Dyngus Day might have gone the way of many ethnic customs. There isn't much water-throwing and leg-switching anymore in the States, but the feasting and drinking have continued in Polish-American communities, such as Buffalo, New York, and South Bend, Indiana.

Since 1930 the West Side Democratic Club of South Bend has held a Dyngus Day celebration. If you want to be elected as a Democrat in Indiana, you've got to be there, or at least have a representative to speak for you. This year there weren't any big names at the club, as there were last year, when former President Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea came to campaign for Hillary. But it was a lot of fun.

Kathleen and I got there at eleven o'clock Monday morning. We paid $8.00 each for admissopn plus a platr of food--kielbasa, Polish cabbage (like sauerkraut but sweeter and less acid), and Kluski--thick noodles in a chicken broth sauce. The food was excellent--the kielbasa was neither overseasoned nor bland, and wasn't overcooked, and the side dishes went well with it. Kathleen bought a Leinenkugel, while I stuck with Diet Dr. Pepper. (I've never cared for beer--I don't know what's wrong with me.)

We talked briefly with Dick Moore, the mayor of Elkhart, who later gave a brief speech. We sang Happy Birthday to him before he had to get back to work. He was planning to be at the evening Dyngus Day celebration at the Elkhart Knights of Columbus.

At noon the official program began with a blessing from a local priest, who transformed the pagan custom into a Christian rite by sprinkling the audience with holy water with an old-fashioned switch broom. We said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then we heard from the speakers. Jonathan Weinzapfel, the mayor of Evansville, had come all the way from the southwestern tip of the state to address the crowd. The rumor is that he's considering a run for governor in 2012, and wants to get his name in circulation.

The highlight of the day was the visit of the South Bend Washington High School girls' basketball team, which has gone to the state tournament for four consecutive years. Congressman Joe Donnelly presented them with an award, and read the remarks he had put in the Congressional Record about them. It's heartening that this all-black team was so warmly received by this mostly-white audience. Skylar Diggins, one of the nation's top players, got a special round of applause, as she'll be at Notre Dame next year.



Everybody's Polish.

Dyngus Day is here.

It's nine o'clock in the morning.

Let's have another beer.



begins the local anthem to Dyngus Day. I couldn't find any videos of this year's celebration, so here's a clip of last year's, starring Bill and Chelsea Clinton, courtesy of the South Bend Tribune:

Two Train Journeys, 40 Years Apart

A little more than forty years ago, thousands of Amercans watched as the train bearing the remains of Robert Francis Kennedy rolled slowly by on its journey from New York to Washington, D.C. Last Friday, another train traveling over the same line carried Barack Obama and Joe Biden from Philadelphia and Wilmington, respectively, to Washington. The cold weather and security concerns prevented huge crowds from gathering to watch the Obama train, but there were people who made the effort to watch it pass by.

The pundits and Obama's own staff have likened the president-elect's rail journey to that of Abraham Lincoln. But the analogy is flawed. Lincon was to take the helm of a nation on the brink of civil war. His journey was interrupted not by rallies, but by riots. The country was divided, and Lincoln's election had brought the crisis to a head. Lincoln wanted to be a uniter, but his principled opposition to the expansion of slavery made union impossible.

For me, Barack Obama has much more in common with Robert Kennedy. While I did my part as a high school volunteer for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and considered RFK a usurper, I came to realize that Kennedy was the only candidate who could bring a divided nation together. The people who said they'd vote for Kennedy or George Wallace seemed totally oxymoronic, but we humans are contradictory. People whose prejudices led them to follow segregationist Wallace were also attracted to Kennedy, a man who had former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader (now Congressman) John Lewis on his staff.

Obama has received the votes of many who might have supported a racist candidate in 1968. His optimism and "Yes We Can" spirit have broken barriers between races and between political viewpoints. He has given us the kind of hope that America hasn't seen since the death of Robert F. Kennedy. His presidency is one legacy of the two dreamers who died forty years ago--Kennedy and Martin Luther King, jr.

I can't watch the first video without tears welling up in my eyes. The second, while not as beautifully photographed, reminds us that Barack gives us the hope of fulfilling the dreams of both Kennedy and King.

The Reagan-Bush Legacy: Breaking Precedents

Let it never be said that I don’t credit the Reagan-Bush era for something. Now that it’s approaching its end (except in the Supreme Court, where its legacy will, unfortunately, live on), it’s time to note some amazing accomplishments of the three Republican presidents of that era. All three broke long-established patterns in the history of the American presidency.

Ronald Wilson Reagan broke the Prophet’s Curse, but just barely. The story begins with the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tenskwatawa, brother of Tecumseh, was a religious leader known as the Shawnee Prophet. He definitely didn’t have the military skills of his brother. In 1811, Tecumseh had assembled a coalition of native peoples at a camp on Burnett’s Creek near present-day Lafayette, Indiana. He had convinced people from tribes all over the region that they should stop fighting amongst themselves and unite against the Americans, who were steadily encroaching on their lands.

William Henry Harrison, whose military brilliance matched Tecumseh’s, had his army outside the Indian camp. Harrison knew that Tecumseh would never be so foolish as to mount an attack on the American army with his fairly small force. But Harrison also knew that Tecumseh was away from the camp, known as Prophetstown, and seems to have goaded Tenskwatawa into attacking. It’s unclear who shot first, but it appears that Tenskwatawa’s forces were moving in on the American camp. Harrison was prepared, and defeated the Indian coalition.

Two years later, at the Battle of the Thames, (at present-day Chatham-Kent, Ontario), Tecumseh, allied with British forces in the War of 1812, faced Harrison again. Harrison, with superior numbers, triumphed, and Tecumseh died in the battle.

The story goes that Tenskwatawa cursed Harrison and every president elected in a year ending in zero. Harrison, after giving a two-hour inaugural address in the rain, and without a topcoat, died a month after taking office. It's a pretty unlikely story, especially since Tenskwatawa died in 1834, six years before Harrison's election. But until Ronald Reagan, every president elected in a year ending in zero died in office:

Abraham Lincoln, elected 1860, assassinated 1865
James A. Garfield, elected 1880, assassinated 1881
William McKinley, elected 1900, assassinated 1901
Warren Gamaliel Harding, elected 1920, died of a heart attack 1923
Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected 1940, died of a cerebral hemorrhage 1945
John F. Kennedy, elected 1960, assassinated 1963

The only president to die in office outside the Prophet’s Curse was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848, and died in 1850, after eating a dish of iced milk and cherries at a Fourth of July celebration. The cause of death was never established. Of course, Taylor was an officer in the War of 1812, and had fought Tecumseh’s ally, Black Hawk, at the Battle of Credit Island, (in present-day Davenport, Iowa). But Black Hawk and his British allies defeated Taylor’s forces in an ambush.

Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981. Modern medicine triumphed over the Prophet’s Curse. It appears that George W. Bush, elected(?) in 2000, will also live through his presidency. But then, does an election by a 5 to 4 vote in the Supreme Court count as an election?

George Herbert Walker Bush broke the Curse of the Sitting Vice President. Before 1988, the last time a sitting vice president had been elected to the presidency was in 1836, when Martin Van Buren, vice president under Andrew Jackson, was elected in his own right. Of course, there haven’t been many sitting vice presidents who have been nominated to run. John Breckinridge (1860), Richard Nixon (1960), and Hubert Humphrey (1968) are the only ones that I could find between Van Buren and Bush I. But still, it was a first.

That leaves George W. Bush, the only president to win office with less than a plurality of the popular vote and win re-election. The other three presidents who lost the popular vote either lost re-election (John Quincy Adams (elected 1824, defeated by Andrew Jackson, 1828) and Benjamin Harrison (defeated sitting president Grover Cleveland 1884, beaten by Cleveland, 1888) or did not seek a second term (Rutherford B. Hayes, elected 1876). Of course, vote suppression in Ohio probably cost John Kerry the 2004 election.

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about any of the three, but they all broke precedents.

Jack Mabley, R.I.P

In doing research for my Dickens Challenge novel, which in part takes place during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, I stumbled upon Jack Mabley, the Chicago American columnist who, in August 1968, publicized the Yippies' so-called plans to put LSD in the Chicago water supply, have Yippie women seduce delegates by posing as prostitutes, and then put LSD in their drinks, etc. I had read Mabley before and believed him to be something of a right-winger. I was wrong. While the American was a right-wing paper (the afternoon paper published by The Tribune Company), Mabley was not a rightist, but someone who was alarmed by the Yippie movement and took their guerilla theater a bit too seriously.

When I did a Google search for Mabley, I learned he had died in January, 2006, at the age of 90. I also found his blog, Jack Mabley's Web Log. And in it I found two predictions: one sadly wrong, the other dead-on:

I’ve never hesitated to make predictions. They don’t jeopardize my reputation because my reputation is being wrong more than right. On that note, I predict that Kerry’s margin of victory will be substantial. And he’ll carry a flock of Democrats into public offices with him. And Barack Obama will be the first person of color to become President.

Rest in peace, Jack. Sorry you didn't live to see your prediction come true.

My thanks to the Millennials

I first noticed the brilliance of Barack Obama’s campaign when I was looking up Hanover College on the Internet. I believe it was on the U.S. News college rankings website. When I pulled up the Hanover College page, there was an ad for Barack Obama, telling prospective Indiana students that there was only one day left to register for the primary.

My son, then a senior at Elkhart Memorial High School, voted for Obama in the primary, as did many of his classmates. Obama nearly won that primary. Hillary Clinton’s Pyrrhic victory in Indiana, coupled with her huge loss in North Carolina the same day, sealed the nomination for Obama. While Obama put together a vast coalition, the Millennial Generation--those between 18 and 30--was crucial to his victory.

Thirty-six years ago, another insurgent Democrat was counting on another huge generation to put him into the White House. He was, of course, George McGovern, and the generation was mine. I voted for him in 1972, but so many of my fellow Baby Boomers failed even to register, let alone vote.

The ‘72 campaign also occurred at a time when we were fighting an unpopular war and when the administration in power was trampling on the Bill of Rights. But the McGovern campaign (though not McGovern himself) spent much political capital righting past wrongs against fellow Democrats. Perhaps Richard J. Daley deserved to be thrown out of the Democratic Convention, but that one act cost McGovern Illinois.

McGovern gave his beautiful “Come Home, America” acceptance speech at around three in the morning, thanks to his supporters’ petty squabbles on the convention floor. Of course, he has to take responsibility for failing to control his enthusiastic, but vindictive, adherents. His failure to vet his first vice presidential choice, Thomas Eagleton, cost him dearly, in those days when clinical depression was far less understood. And his campaign was so tightly focused on opposition to the war that when Henry Kissinger announced that peace was at hand, McGovern had lost his main issue. The threat of being drafted to fight in Southeast Asia had been lifted; Richard Nixon coasted to a landslide victory.

Barack Obama was against the Iraq war, but General David Petraeus’s brilliant strategy of co-opting the Sunni militias and drastically reducing the violence in that war did not put an end to the Obama message. He did not depend on the antiwar issue, but talked as much about the economy, the environment, and America's role in the world as a whole, that his candidacy did not implode. His campaign had the benefit of Hillary Clinton’s endorsement. The prediction that her supporters would defect to the Republicans, widely touted, did not come true. (John McCain’s patronizing selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate surely hurt him with former Clinton backers.) In contrast, the 1972 credentials fight between McGovern and Hubert Humphrey was still smoldering in November.

But Obama’s greatest strength, through the whole campaign, was his unrelenting optimism and message of hope. It is was the strength of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John and Robert Kennedy. It connected with so many of us from every generation. And it brought a great new generation to the polls in large numbers. The Millennials did what we Boomers could not do: elect an insurgent Democrat to the White House.

The Iowa Caucuses--A personal retrospective

It's finally caucus time, and the state that I once called home can recede from the center of national attention. I thought I'd recycle a post from last year which explains the origins of the first-in-the-nation caucuses, and reflects on the 1976 Democratic caucuses, in which I played a small part. My precinct caucus voted me to be a delegate to the county convention, and from there I won a seat at the district and state conventions. It's there--at the congressional district and state conventions--that the actual delegates to the national convention are selected. So the caucuses are really something of a straw poll. Iowa's actual delegation to the national convention may not reflect the results of the caucuses, as every delegate has the right to change his or her mind, and candidates who receive fewer than fifteen per cent of the vote at cannot go on to the next level. But the news media have made the caucuses the first test of a presidential race. What goes on later, in a state which has a very small delegation at the convention, doesn't much matter to the media.

Until 1972, caucuses were held in March or April, and Iowa had virtually no influence on presidential nominations. But that year two things happened: Harold Hughes, the popular ex-governor and senator, was considering a run for the presidency, and the complicated McGovern Commission rules for selecting delegates went into effect. Iowa Democrats decided to hold their caucuses early that year to allow more time to work through the McGovern Commission rules, and to give Hughes a boost in his run for the White House.

Alas, Hughes bowed out of the race, saying he knew he could never push the button to fire our nuclear missles, even if the Soviets launched first. He endorsed Edmund Muskie, who won the caususes. George McGovern managed a strong showing. It was not until four years later that the Iowa caucuses became the media spectacle they are today. I was living in Iowa City that year, and was working the precincts for Representative Morris K. (Mo) Udall of Arizona. He was one of about a dozen Democratic candidates in the Bicentennial Year. A bumper sticker that year, taking off on a McDonald's Big Mac commercial, read something like:
"bayhbentsenbrowncarterchurchharrisjacksonsanford
shappshriverudallwallace...on a sesame seed bun!"

Udall had the problem of telling too many jokes. He was a serious candidate, and his message of conservation was right for the time, but people didn't take him seriously because he couln't stop telling jokes. Instead, Iowans--even very liberal Iowans who had campaigned for Gene McCarthy in '68 and George McGovern in '72--seemed to be backing a conservative former one-term Georgia governor who had been a supporter of the Vietnam War.

I saw Jimmy Carter at a forum at the Iowa Memorial Union. I had a work-study job driving the campus bus (Cambus), and we drivers were in an adjacent room, signing up for shifts. While waiting for our names to be called, some of us looked in on the candidate. I thought he was boring. Of course, after seeing the trailer for the movie "Rocky," I said that the last thing this country needed or wanted was another fight film. My finger was not exactly on the national pulse of that decade.

But I also remember walking around campus that winter, and seeing the chartered Greyhound buses parked by the Fieldhouse. The "H" in CHARTER had been taped over. Scores, perhaps hundreds of Georgians had left their subtropical world for the snows of Iowa. They did what the students for McCarthy had done in 1968: knock on doors and make personal contact with the voters. Even then, Carter was unable to win the caucuses. He came in second, to "Uncommitted." In the Iowa caucuses, you can beat somebody with nobody. And Carter's spin doctors (I'm not sure they used that term then, but there were people who did the same thing) convinced the news media that coming in second to Uncommitted was indeed a great victory. He went on to win the New Hampshire primary. In spite of the "Anybody but Carter" movement in the West, where Frank Church and Jerry Brown beat the Georgian in several primaries, Carter's people held onto their lead and swept the 1976 convention.

Carter beat Gerald Ford in a very close election that year. Ford might very well have won, had it not been for Ronald Reagan, whose attacks on Ford during the Republican primaries weakened the president.

It was a bizarre campaign, with dozens of candidates, from Ronald Reagan and George Wallace on the right to Mo Udall and Fred Harris on the left. I had friends who wouldn't vote for Udall because he was a Mormon, and supported Harris, a populist from Oklahoma. (Harris was a born-again radical; in 1968 he was a Johnson/Humphrey man.) Since then, the Iowa caucuses have been more important in winnowing out the weaker candidates or persuading the eventual winners to shake up their campaigns. But in 1976 the Iowa caucuses really did make a president.

Al Lowenstein, Larry Craig, and Confused Sexuality

I met Allard Lowenstein only once, after he gave a talk at the University of Iowa in the fall of 1971. In the few minutes I had with him that afternoon, I came away with the feeling of being very special. Al made people feel that way. If I was ever in Brooklyn, he said, be sure to look him up. I never got the chance. I thought about him when I rolled through Brooklyn on the Long Island Rail Road in the summer of 1972, after I had driven Polish poet Artur Miedzyrzecki and his family from Iowa City to Stony Brook, and was taking the train back to Iowa. I didn’t have time to stop off in Brooklyn, but I told myself that Al would approve of what I’d be doing back in Iowa: working for liberal Democratic senatorial candidate Dick Clark.


Al Lowenstein was sometimes known as the Pied Piper for his ability to charm young people into following him. In the summer of 1964 he recruited idealistic Northern white students to go down to Mississippi to register black voters. In 1967 he organized the Dump Johnson movement, persuading Eugene McCarthy to challenge Lyndon Johnson, after failing to convince Robert Kennedy that he should run. The students who got “Clean for Gene” and went door-to-door in New Hampshire and Wisconsin were often Al’s recruits. The New Left people, including Tom Hayden, despised Lowenstein because he was telling people to work within the system. When I met him he was setting up the Dump Nixon movement.


If I was charmed by Al Lowenstein, I was in good company. Journalist Steve Roberts, Senator John Kerry, actor Warren Beatty, and singer-songwriter Harry Chapin are among the many people he inspired. Edward M. Kennedy said of him: "He was a person of impassioned political conviction, but personally he loved so many who so often disagreed with his politics. Who but Al Lowenstein could claim among his best friends both Bill Buckley and Robert Kennedy?"

And conservative writer William F. Buckley, who disagreed with Lowenstein on most matters, said: "Of all the partisans I have known, from the furthest steppes of the spectrum, his was the most undistracted concern, not for humanity-- though he was conversant with big-think idiom--but for human beings."


On March 14, 1980, I tuned in to National Public Radio and was shocked and saddened to hear that Al Lowenstein had been murdered in his Manhattan office. The killer was Dennis Sweeney, a onetime protégé of Lowenstein who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Sweeney believed Lowenstein was plotting against him. After killing Lowenstein, he waited in the office for the police.

Some years later I discovered the book, Dreams Die Hard: Three Men‘s Journey Through the Sixties, by David Harris (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1982). Harris is best known for going to prison for draft resistance and for his brief marriage to folksinger Joan Baez. But he, too, was one of Lowenstein’s protégés. Harris and Sweeney were both students at Stanford University in 1963-64 when Lowenstein was assistant dean. Lowenstein persuaded both idealistic young men to join the Mississippi Summer Project, where they worked to register black voters in McComb, Mississippi. McComb was one of the most Klan-dominated towns in the state, and the two men literally risked their lives for the cause of civil rights.


But while Lowenstein was a great inspiration to so many of us, he was also deeply flawed. Harris writes of driving for Lowenstein on a long campaign trip. They stopped at a motel and Lowenstein went in to register. He came back out to the car and said that the motel was booked except for a room with only one bed. Under the circumstances, Harris agreed to share a bed. Later that night Harris awoke to find Lowenstein hugging him. Harris said he was uncomfortable and Lowenstein ceased. Harris spent the rest of the night on the floor. It was something Lowenstein did regularly. Sweeney had the same experience. While the episode did not trigger Sweeney’s schizophrenia, it may have been the cause of his delusions that Lowenstein was trying to control him.


I have wondered what I would have done in such circumstances. I suspect I would have done just what Harris did--spend the night on the floor, but otherwise keep quiet about the incident, except within the circle of Lowenstein protégés.


Idaho senator Larry Craig’s arrest for soliciting sex in the men’s room of the Minneapolis airport and his subsequent denial that he was gay made me think about the confused sexuality of both Craig and Lowenstein and the cultures that led them to such risky behaviors.


I’m no psychologist, but it seems clear to me that Craig is and Lowenstein was bisexual--attracted to both men and women. Lowenstein was married for several years and fathered three children. But he channeled his homosexual impulses into these hugging episodes with his protégés. From what Harris says, they didn’t go beyond hugging. When Lowenstein encountered a protégé who was gay, he said he was not homosexual--he just wanted the intimacy of hugging. (Later in his life he most likely did have gay sex.) To be bisexual in the 1960s, even for an East Coast liberal, would be devastating to a political career. Today the openly gay Barney Frank (himself a Lowenstein protégé) is able to be reelected regularly from a liberal Massachusetts district.

Craig, a conservative Republican from a Mormon-dominated state, is in the same position now as Lowenstein was in the 1960s. Yes, his anti-gay rhetoric makes him a hypocrite. But to remain in Idaho politics, he had to hide the gay side of his sexuality. He appears to have done so through anonymous encounters in men’s rooms.


It’s difficult for me, a heterosexual, to understand the homoerotic impulse. But I know impulses and attractions, and it’s hard for me not to sympathize with Craig’s predicament, hypocrite though he is. Perhaps it’s because I still admire Al Lowenstein, in spite of his shortcomings.