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

trash cans before they ever reached the doors, but most of us dutifully fulfilled our assignments and reported back to the campaign for more tasks. There weren’t many other gigs that paid thirteen-year-olds the then-princely sum of three dollars an hour.
    On Election Night, my friend’s dad, who had recruited us to work for Stein, walked into a satellite campaign office on East Fourteenth Street with a big smile on his face. “Andrew won by five thousand votes,” he reported. My friends jumped up and down, cheering and pumping their fists in celebration. I did not. I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that, for a few bucks, we had just helped install an unworthy nitwit in public office.
    If the Kennedy campaign inspired me to believe what politics could be, my mercenary assignment as a foot soldier for young Andrew Stein opened my eyes to what politics would increasingly become. With unlimited resources and contacts—he received the endorsements of national Democratic luminaries, from Humphrey on down—an ambitious but wholly unqualified twenty-three-year-old won a seat in the New York State Assembly. Bobby was an authentic crusader, fighting for things larger than himself. Andy was ambitious
for
himself, not for a cause—a synthetic candidate saying and doing whatever it took to win.
    It was my first exposure to politics as a business rather than a calling.
     • • • 
    That year, 1968, was noteworthy for another reason. My parents, who had been separated for years, finally made their split official, and were divorced the following year. Soon after, my mother married Abner Bennett, a marketing executive for a liquor importer, with whom I had a frosty relationship. So I spent as little time as I had to at home, and as much as I could with my father, who lived nearby, and with my treasured friends from the cloistered world of Stuyvesant Town.
    Growing up in the hive of protest, drugs, and rock and roll that was New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s made for a lot of fun, but not exceptionally good grades. At Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s elite specialized public schools, I was a student leader and edited the literary magazine, but I graduated in the middle of the pack. Still, when the time came to choose a college, I managed to parlay those credentials, and a gift of gab, into acceptance at a few good schools, including Columbia University and the University of Chicago.
    I wanted to stay in New York to be close to my dad, whose company I cherished and whose guidance I sorely needed. Warm, caring, and funny, he was always there for me. I relished our time together, which often was at Shea or Yankee stadiums, taking in ball games. But he felt that I needed to get far enough away from home to temper the contentious relationship I had with my mother and stepfather. “I’d love you to stay, boy,” he told me, “but it would be good for you to get away from New York.”
    The University of Chicago was a highly regarded institution, and far enough from home, a teacher reminded me, that my parents would never surprise me with a visit. For me, there was another attraction: Chicago had the most interesting politics of any major American city. It was home to the last of the big-city machines, whose boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley, had played a critical role in electing John F. Kennedy president. But his roughhouse tactics in dealing with unrest in Chicago’s black community, and fallout from the calamitous 1968 convention, had thrown a serious wrench in the Daley machine.
    With politics as a big lure, I packed my bags and headed off to Chicago.
    I would never return.

TWO
CITY OF THE BIG SHOULDERS
    M Y FIRST DAY as a student at the U niversity of C hicago was almost my last.
    The incoming college class had gathered in an ornate auditorium on the impressive, imposing Gothic campus. Yet the message from the university’s president, Edward Levi, seemed far from welcoming, much less comforting. In