Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Read Online Free PDF

right. But it was more than that. Once viewed as his brother’s coldhearted political enforcer, Bobby Kennedy had emerged from a period of mourning and reflection as a fierce and fearless advocate for change and reform. He toured the darkest corners of America to shine a light on suffering and injustice. He turned against the war that had begun in earnest under JFK but was now raging and tearing at the fabric of the country. He challenged the worn ideas and shibboleths of both parties. Steeled by his personal loss and the recognition of his own mortality, Kennedy communicated a sense of urgency as he called to action a new generation. With his longish, tousled hair, perpetually disheveled look, and penchant for speaking blunt truths, he was also an authentic tribune for the young.
    So when Bobby announced his candidacy for president in 1968, quickly driving Lyndon Johnson from the race for reelection, I eagerly volunteered and monitored every aspect of his campaign.
    On April 4, Dr. King was killed in Memphis. Grieving with an almost entirely black audience in an Indianapolis ghetto later that night, Bobby gave a moving plea for constructive action rather than mindless violence, and thus helped avert the riots that erupted in many other cities. I cheered as he won a series of hard-fought primaries, turning back another antiwar candidate, Eugene McCarthy, and providing a growing challenge to the candidacy of Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey.
    On June 4, Bobby won the California primary, and I went to bed thrilled, and confident in my belief that he would almost certainly be the Democratic nominee and, very likely, the next president. When I woke up the next morning, however, I learned that after delivering the victory speech at a Los Angeles hotel, Bobby had been mortally wounded as he exited the room through the hotel’s kitchen. It was an absolutely crushing blow in a convulsive and violent year punctuated by the riots at the convention in Chicago and the dark presidency of Richard Nixon.
    Bobby Kennedy had challenged a failed status quo, mobilizing millions behind an inspiring campaign for American renewal to which he had given his all. Had he lived, I am convinced he would have defeated Nixon, and changed the course of history for the better.
    Nearly forty years later, when Barack Obama was considering his candidacy for president, I talked with him about Bobby and the campaign of ’68. “Bobby inspired, and spoke for, a whole generation that believed we could do better,” I told Obama, another young senator poised to challenge an unpopular war and the established political order. “If you run, we need to be as bold, and rekindle that kind of hope.”
    But if the lessons of the Kennedy campaign and 1968 have stuck with me for a lifetime, so has the memory of the much less celebrated (or elevated) campaign I had participated in that year.
    The father of a school friend had signed on to help a wealthy and powerful newspaper publisher and entrepreneur named Jerry Finkelstein elect his son, Andrew Stein—his name presumably shortened for ballot appeal—to the New York State Assembly. I’m sure I have seen less qualified candidates for public office over the years, though none immediately springs to mind.
    Stein challenged a Republican incumbent, William Larkin, who was a thoroughly acceptable and competent, moderate Republican assemblyman. Under normal circumstances, Larkin would easily have turned back the challenge, but Stein’s dad was willing to spend whatever it took to buy his son the seat. By all accounts (on the books and off), they ran what was then the most expensive assembly campaign in New York State history. Among the advantages all this money afforded young Andrew was an army of teenage mercenaries whom the campaign enlisted to penetrate the secure high-rises of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village and place his campaign literature under every door.
    I’m sure some pamphlets wound up in