My Life on the Road (16 page)

M
y mother’s stories of suffering during the Depression—and how Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped us out of it—taught me that politics are a part of daily life. She described making soup from leftover potato skins, then listening to Roosevelt’s speeches on the radio to nourish her spirit. Or cutting up a blanket to make a warm coat for my older sister and protecting her from ridicule by saying that if people loved a new kind of First Lady, they could love a new kind of coat. She even told me that my grandfather had died not of pneumonia, as everybody said, but of a broken heart after losing everything he worked for. Had he lived to see President Roosevelt create jobs and dignity where they were needed most—by building bridges, planting forests, even painting murals in post offices—she was sure he would be with us still.

It made perfect sense to me that my mother’s stories began in a personal place, and came to a political point. So did her belief that Franklin and Eleanor understood our lives at the bottom, even though they were born at the top. “Always look at what people do,” as my mother said, “not at who they are.” She also was sure the Roosevelts wanted us to become independent, not dependent. Since, like most children, I said things like “It’s not fair” and “You are not the boss of me,” this idea made me love them even more.

Not all my mother’s stories had a happy ending. When I saw a mysterious newspaper photo of police dragging dark-skinned people through city streets, she explained there were race riots in nearby Detroit—because the Depression had never ended for people called Negroes. I imagined people making soup from potato peelings and coats from blankets, yet somehow I couldn’t imagine my family being attacked by police. She also sat with me as we listened to a radio drama about a mother and child trying to survive in a place called a concentration camp. I knew my mother didn’t want to frighten me, only to teach me something serious, and this made me feel important and grown-up. In later years, I wondered if she meant such small doses of hard realities to immunize me against the depression that, in her, could be triggered by as little as a sad movie or a hurt animal.

Yet I never asked why my happy-go-lucky father had zero interest in politics. Both were kind and loving, just very different.

I was eleven when President Roosevelt died. By then, my mother and I were living in the small town in Massachusetts where we had moved after she and my father separated. I can still see the exact look of the cracks in the sidewalk where I was riding my bike when my mother came out to tell me. It was hard to believe that Franklin and Eleanor would no longer be part of our lives. It was harder still when I realized that not everyone was sorry. Some in that town blamed the president for getting us into World War II, and others thought his idea of a United Nations would just let foreigners tell us what to do. A newspaper cartoon said, “Goodbye to President Rosenfeld.” My mother explained that no, Roosevelt wasn’t Jewish; it was just that prejudiced people linked together things they didn’t like.

Our only companion in mourning was an elderly man across the street who wore a tie with
FDR
woven into it, something he showed to us as if to coconspirators. My mother was brave enough to put a black-draped photo of the president in our front window, but not brave enough to explain it to the neighbors. I was beginning to suspect that conflict follows politics as night follows day, yet the mere thought of conflict was enough to depress my already depressed mother. I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine,” so we suppress it—until it overflows.

I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward an activist place where she herself could never go.

M
Y OWN POLITICAL LIFE
didn’t begin until my last year in high school. I was living with my sister in Washington, D.C., where she was a buyer in a department store and shared a house with three other young working women. They assumed I must be homesick, and it seemed disloyal to tell the truth. Because I was responsible only for myself, I was in heaven.

In my new high school, everyone seemed headed for college. Some had even taken the college boards before
just for practice,
something I’d never heard of. They came from families with bank accounts instead of pay envelopes, dinner parties instead of TV dinners, and vacations in countries my Toledo friends’ families had fled in poverty.

Many of my new classmates came from high-level military families, and regarded presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower as war hero and father-figure combined. To me Adlai Stevenson, a reluctant candidate drafted by Democrats, sounded more like Roosevelt, but I wasn’t about to argue. I had a handsome new boyfriend who was headed for West Point, the son and grandson of generals. Only by accident did I discover that a makeshift Stevenson for President office was just a streetcar ride away.

The minute I walked into that big room full of ringing phones and rushing people, I felt it was the most exciting place I’d ever been. Staff members were presiding over cluttered desks, volunteers were talking intensely while stuffing envelopes, and teenagers were stacking lawn signs for nearby Maryland and Virginia, where people could actually vote for president, unlike residents of D.C. who were supposed to be neutral. Most amazing, all this was open to anyone off the street.

Soon I had a place working alongside other young women volunteers, getting purple ink on our hands while tending a big drumlike mimeograph machine churning out
Students for Stevenson.
It was a newsletter designed to attract volunteers, since no one under twenty-one could vote.

I could see there was a clear hierarchy. Male staffers made decisions, and women carried them out, even women old enough to be their mothers. Paid staff were white men, and the few black women and men were volunteers or messengers. Still, this was much more like the real world than my new high school. I spent my first days there trying to figure out why the halls full of students looked so odd. Suddenly I realized that everyone was white. I asked a teacher if this reflected the neighborhood, and he said of course not, it reflected segregation. Washington was two separate cities, he said, and the black majority wanted separate schools, too. Besides, the city had come a long way since slaves built the White House.

This was news to me. My Toledo high school was segregated socially, too—not only by race but by whose family had a television set, spoke Polish or Hungarian at home, or had a father who was a foreman instead of working the line—but at least we all went to the same classes, ate in the same cafeteria, and cheered the same football team.

Altogether, this Stevenson for President office was the most open and welcoming place I’d ever been. But one Saturday when I and the other young women arrived, we found ourselves stashed away on an upper floor. We were devastated. A staffer explained that Stevenson himself might drop in and must not be seen with any female unless she was old enough to be his mother. After all, he was that terrible thing—divorced—something no president had ever been. Though everyone seemed to know that Eisenhower had imported the beautiful young English woman who was his driver during the war—and even arranged for her U.S. citizenship—he would have his wife, Mamie, as a proper First Lady. Appearances were all that mattered.

We didn’t object to being hidden away; we felt like Typhoid Marys who might endanger the cause we cared about. When we went out for ten-cent hamburgers at the local White Castle, we talked about staying out of sight. What we didn’t talk about were the male staffers who rated our looks, brushed against us in close quarters, and became hazards to be navigated. Our presence was the problem; their behavior was inevitable. Avoiding them while keeping their egos intact was just part of our job.

The truth is that we would have put up with almost anything to stay in this exciting place with its air of fighting for outsiders—even though we didn’t yet know we were outsiders, too. Or to put it another way, we didn’t believe we could ever be insiders. I didn’t know that political change could make me feel safer in the street, or allow me an identity of my own instead of marrying it, or send my Toledo classmates to college instead of to factories, or get my current classmates out of their white ghetto. I didn’t realize that changes made through politics might have helped my mother remain the pioneer journalist she had been years before I was born.

My only thought was
Where else could I find such openness, excitement, and hope?
I was hooked.

And I’ve stayed hooked on campaigns to this day. Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself. Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.

L
IVING IN
I
NDIA,
where people lined up for hours and even days to cast their ballots, confirmed my oddball love of campaigns. So did returning home to find a growing and brave civil rights movement of people willing to risk their lives to register and vote.

But as a freelance writer, it was hard to combine what I loved with what I did. If I tried for an assignment covering a major political leader, I would be asked to write about his wife instead. If I worked hard, I could get assignments I was proud of—for instance, a profile of Truman Capote, or a long article about the contraceptive pill—but the world of politics allowed few women into it, even as journalists.

Then, in 1968, I joined a group of writers—led by Clay Felker, my editor at
Esquire
—who were starting
New York
magazine. I was the only “girl reporter,” but finally I would be able to write about politics. This was the home of the New Journalism as practiced by Tom Wolfe, and also of Jimmy Breslin, an in-the-streets chronicler of New York life. Since Wolfe wrote satirically from outside about subjects he probably disliked, and Breslin wrote from inside about the lives of people he probably loved, they helped establish the right of nonfiction writers to be both personal and political—as long as we got our facts straight.
1

When I joined the press corps on campaign planes, I noticed that each one seemed to reflect the candidate’s character. Eugene McCarthy isolated himself, talked philosophy, and told reporters that only the well educated supported him—as if that were a good thing. This set the tone for his staff, who also seemed cool and disengaged. On the other hand, Richard Nixon gave the same speech at every stop, disappeared behind closed doors with local political leaders, and once on every campaign trip walked back in the plane to greet each reporter with a carefully memorized personal fact, almost always out of date. Reporters on his plane seemed to overcompensate for not really liking him by being less critical, and there was none of the usual air of excitement about talking to the candidate.

When Bobby Kennedy’s campaign plane was scheduled for a stop at an Indian reservation, his staff objected because there were too few votes to be worth his time. He accused them of not caring and stopped anyway. His was probably the only plane with a folksinger playing guitar in the aisle. Because so many reporters loved Bobby, they overcompensated—but by being critical. Later I would wonder if journalists’ guilt about their personal feelings meant that readers couldn’t know who Bobby Kennedy was until after he was dead, or who Richard Nixon was until after he was in the White House.

A
S A VOLUNTEER,
campaigning has meant many different things for me. I’ve stuffed envelopes and leafleted and picketed and phone-banked and fund-raised. I’ve lobbied and researched and written speeches and, once, served on a platform committee, though only because Bella Abzug couldn’t. I’ve shortened my life by trying to accomplish anything at political conventions, then shortened it even more by staying up all night to draft group statements and press releases for movement protests against exclusions at those conventions. I’ve campaigned for more candidates than I can remember. In 1996 alone, I look back at a schedule that lists twenty-nine candidates, not counting a president. I’ve spoken in backyards to a dozen neighbors, at huge concerts of rock and grunge bands, at teas in quiet living rooms, on flatbed trucks with bullhorns, and on foot while door-to-door canvassing. Once the women’s movement was really under way, we sometimes found ourselves speaking at marches in Washington of more than a million people. I recommend all these tasks, high and low. It’s one of the great things about campaigns that experience trumps everything, and people just try to do what needs to be done. A domestic worker lobbying to be included in the minimum wage may be a major speaker, and a Ph.D. may be making get-out-the-vote phone calls.

When I look back, I see three stages, though I didn’t know they were stages at the time.

First, I was volunteering inside campaigns and doing whatever I was asked to do—for instance, phone-banking until I thought the receiver would have to be surgically removed from my ear. I called big-city contributors from on-the-road places so I could say, “You don’t know what it’s like out here.” Sometimes I also did such unusual tasks as urging George McGovern to wear longer, TV-appropriate socks when he was a presidential candidate, going out to get Chinese food for Kennedy volunteers, or helping to run a discothèque as a fund-raiser for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Goldwater. My proudest moment was writing a televised speech for Shirley Chisholm in her 1972 run for the U.S. presidency. She was on the ballot in only fourteen states, but she was the first major-party black presidential candidate and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Single-handedly, she took the “white males only” sign off the White House door. Because she was “whited out”—as Flo Kennedy put it—of a televised debate before the New York primary, Chisholm and her campaign manager, Ludwig Gelobter, brought a legal action for equal time. She was given a half-hour at the last minute. Ludwig asked me to write overnight a speech that knit together Shirley’s farsighted positions. Staying up to do it, then watching her deliver it on television, was a high I won’t forget.