Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Read Online Free PDF Page A

then common in New York. In the context of New York City politics in 1965, Lindsay represented bold, progressive change. Even at the age of ten, I knew that his was the side on which I wanted to be. So, after school and on weekends, I stood on street corners in Stuyvesant Town distributing his campaign literature.
    One afternoon, when I was manning my post, a woman stopped to chat, intrigued as to why a ten-year-old boy would be electioneering on a perfect day for stickball. I gave my pitch for Lindsay and, perhaps getting a head start on my career as a campaign consultant, landed a few shots on his opponent. The woman laughed at my thorough and earnest presentation, and handed me a white pastry box she had been carrying. “Here,” she said. “You’ve earned this!” After handing out my last brochure, I went back to the local Liberal Party office, where the district leader opened the box. Inside were the promised goodies—and an unanticipated stack of ten-dollar bills. “Here, kid, you take the donuts and I’ll take the cash,” the district leader said, patting me on the back as he walked me out the door.
    The age of thirteen is an important rite of passage in the Jewish faith, and that year, under my mother’s incessant prodding, I fulfilled my bar mitzvah mandate. Yet I will always remember 1968 for a different rite of passage, in which my still relatively idealistic view of politics was tempered by ugly and tragic events as well as experience.
    The year was one of the most momentous in U.S. history: a president driven from office over a disastrous, costly war; two stunning political assassinations; America’s inner cities aflame; and a calamitous Democratic National Convention, marked by chaos in the hall and rioting, by protesters and police, on the streets of Chicago. It was a year that both ignited, and tested, my youthful idealism. And there were two central characters in my process of self-discovery—a tragic hero, Robert F. Kennedy; and a feckless newcomer named Andrew Stein.
    I worked for both in 1968. Bobby was running what would be his last campaign, driven by a relentless sense of urgency and mission. Andrew, a twenty-three-year-old heir to a local publishing fortune, was running his first campaign, simply hoping to buy himself a starter office. Together, these campaigns taught me lasting lessons about politics at its best and worst.
    From that day on the mailbox, I was obsessed with all things Kennedy. Even as a small child, I heard JFK’s call. I believed him when he said that, together, we Americans could chart our future and change the world, and that we each had a role to play. I was intrigued from the start by the game of politics and the larger-than-life players it attracted. I also sensed that it was about big, noble ideals. It was about history and historic change.
    JFK embodied that spirit, and when he was killed, there was a sense of things coming apart. His assassination was the first in a series of societal shock waves—unfortunately with many more to follow—that came to define the decade. There were deadly clashes in the South and elsewhere over civil rights, even as Lyndon Johnson advanced Kennedy’s civil rights agenda in Washington. And just two decades after the Greatest Generation had united to save the world from fascism, deep discord over the escalating war in Vietnam divided Americans by age and class.
    The generation that had triumphed over war and the Depression had a firm belief in itself, the country, and our institutions. Still, our generation, at least the one I knew in New York City in the ’60s, was filled with growing skepticism and moral outrage over the war and social injustice amid historic postwar affluence. For many, Bobby Kennedy had become the voice of that outrage, and the best hope for change within the existing system.
    Part of the hope, to be sure, was rooted in memories of Camelot, as if restoring another Kennedy to the White House would make things