by Alec Baldwin
After my unsuccessful run for class president at George Washington, I started to become more jaded. The election opened my eyes to the kinds of people who envision themselves in leadership roles. When I’d arrived for freshman orientation at GW, I unpacked my bags in a six-man suite where four of my five roommates had already declared themselves political science majors, and two of those four stated that they were planning to run for president of the United States one day. (The one guy not studying poli-sci moved out after one semester, as he wanted to live with other premeds, or “anyone who knew what they were talking about.”) At school, I interned for the congressman from my home district, Jerome Ambro. Right away, I was given an assignment working with the organization No Greater Love, a veterans group that wanted each of the country’s 435 members of Congress to help recognize a Vietnam vet from their district who had successfully reacclimated upon returning home. After a couple of days’ worth of research, I recommended Ron Kovic.
Kovic, a Massapequa native who had been taught by my father in high school, was the author of the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, which was later made into a hit film by Oliver Stone starring Tom Cruise. Ambro’s chief of staff and district director went slightly nuts at my suggestion. They brought me in to meet the congressman, who thanked me for my efforts and then explained how Kovic’s antiwar positions made him precisely the wrong vet for the program. I spent the rest of the semester reassigned to “constituent services,” which usually meant helping track down some type of missing government benefit for a voter from the district. The rest of the time, I would join the other interns at receptions all over the Hill, where we drank, ate as many hors d’oeuvres as possible, and lied, expanding the scope of our internship’s responsibilities as much as possible.
When I went to New York to attend NYU and then started my acting career, I put politics on the shelf. Ronald Reagan had been elected president in 1980, and as unhappy as I was about that, I was consumed with getting my bearings in the business. The period between 1979 and 1987 was largely one of political dormancy for me, but when Reagan was reelected in 1984 (and I was near the peak of my drug addiction and alcoholism), I made the exception of a brief and odd little stopover in the office of Tom Hayden. I contacted the California assemblyman’s Santa Monica office and explained that I wanted to volunteer for him. Some of the women in the office watched Knots Landing and asked me what I was doing answering Hayden’s mail. I explained that I had been bound for law school before I picked up acting and that, once in LA, I had a lot of time on my hands. A guy who worked there, unsure of what I was after, gave me a job in, you guessed it, constituent services. This time, my task was usually getting to the bottom of an overcharge on a water or power bill.
In 1985, Hayden invited me to his home for an event he was hosting with his wife, Jane Fonda. All of a sudden, I was sitting in one of the premier salons of political Hollywood. The biggest film and music stars of their day, representing different generations, were gathered in Jane and Tom’s backyard to listen to a speech by Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu. At any given moment, I fully expected someone to ask me to put on a white jacket and start serving canapés. I thought to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” But Hayden, in addition to being an incredibly bright and dedicated political fighter, was completely unpretentious. His attitude was, “If you care, if you’re engaged in the fight, and if you want to learn, you’re welcome here.” We stayed in touch, and in 1988, Hayden put me on the list for a party in honor of his latest book, Reunion, to be held at the home of Courtney Kennedy Ruhe, one of Bobby Kennedy’s daughters. There, I came face-to-face for the first time with Ethel Kennedy. Though her husband had been gone twenty years, to me it might as well have been a month. I spared her my recollection of the ten-year-old me at St. Patrick’s, but to say that I was overwhelmed when I met her is an understatement. After a brief moment of small talk, Mrs. Kennedy did what all Kennedys do: she changed the subject, charging into some issue of the day.
In July 1988, my connection with Hayden got me invited to the Democratic convention in Atlanta as a guest of the California delegation. The group I was with included Ally Sheedy, Sarah Jessica Parker, my brother Billy, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe. Dukakis was the nominee, and although I had my doubts about his electability, I was ardently opposed to Vice President Bush as president, if only because he had been director of the CIA. (I believed then, and I believe now, that having been the head of any secret intelligence agency in this country disqualifies one from being president.) In October of that year, Ethel invited me to her home in Hyannis Port. With my sister Beth in tow, we watched Lloyd Bentsen wither Dan Quayle during their debate with the famous line “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Sitting with Ethel, one wall going up a staircase covered with Kennedy family photos, my sister Beth and I looked at each other, both giddy, in a way that clearly said, “Do you think Dad can see us?”
Not all of the Kennedys are created equal in terms of the ineffable quality that distinguishes them in American political life. The blend of charisma, the ability to articulate the facts, and the high level of passion are rare in politics these days. For me, Bobby Jr., his late brother Michael Kennedy, and his sisters Kathleen and Kerry are examples of how the best of the Kennedy genetics resurfaced in the next generation. But no one can top Ethel for her sheer life force. She is sharp, indefatigable, funny, intense, and well practiced (as all Kennedys must be) at granting strangers a chance to experience the Kennedy zeitgeist. I could not begin to imagine where she found the personal courage she had accessed in order to carry on with her life. A few years later, after Bill Clinton—who carries some of that Kennedy spirit—had moved into the White House, I was invited to a party there featuring a screening of Ron Howard’s film The Paper. To my delight, I was seated next to Ethel. At one point in the movie, a gun went off and Ethel grabbed my arm. To see the look on her face, all those years later, showed me that though she is tough, that moment is still there.
My romantic feelings for nearly all things Kennedy aside, the fall of 1988 was also when another invitation arrived, and with it, one of the greatest political contacts I’d ever make. While shooting Miami Blues in south Florida that year, I was invited to attend a Dukakis fund-raiser at the Los Angeles home of Norman Lear. I wondered if flying across the country while I was shooting, to feel out of place among a pack of powerful Hollywood celebrities again, was the best idea, but a friend told me I’d be crazy to pass up such the chance.
At Norman’s home, a line snaked its way through the property to reach Michael Dukakis, perhaps the last Democratic candidate to win the nomination with such a deficit of charisma. Like Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, and Mondale immediately before him, Dukakis was old school: an earnest and ultimately uninspiring candidate, the kind that one assumed Reagan had knocked off for good. The Massachusetts governor was a decent enough guy, yet he made priggish Vice President Bush seem downright affable. When I turned from Dukakis to shake Norman’s hand, my excitement spiked. “Now, this guy ought to be running for president,” I thought. Norman proved to be more than a powerful political eminence; he became a mentor. The organization he founded, People for the American Way (PFAW), focused my political activities in a way for which I will always be grateful, both to Norman and to the group as a whole. Lear is a hero and a legend in the community of artist-activists I count myself among.
Over the course of the next decade, from 1988 to 1998, I tried to navigate the ups and downs of my career, but speaking on behalf of The Creative Coalition and PFAW and attending countless events, both issue-oriented and on behalf of individual candidates, became like a second job. I crisscrossed the country incessantly. On a few occasions, I landed in LA, forgetting that I had an event in New York within the coming forty-eight hours, and hopped on a plane to turn right around (something I could only do in my thirties!). The one thing I maintain about that period of intense political advocacy, and beyond, is that I never appeared on behalf of any cause in order to line my
own pockets. The work I did never enriched me in any way. I think that has confused or frustrated some people, like some Republicans and conservatives for whom politics must always involve some form of profit taking. It’s as if my political opposites were saying to me, “You’ve made a little money. Why don’t you play eighteen holes, kick back, have a beer? Relax! The spotted owls and the poor people and hybrid cars, they’re all gonna take care of themselves.” My response to that is, “Convince me. Teach me. Show me how to be like you and not worry about all the things you don’t worry about.” I’m still waiting for a persuasive response.
I fought voter suppression in Florida after the 2000 election. I wanted to secure federal support for the arts in every state in the country, particularly for those communities that are not as culturally abundant as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. I argued for saner gun control laws and protested the death penalty not only as cruel and unusual but also as fiscally impractical. I fought for a woman to have control over her own reproductive choices. But my favorite issue was to urge both federal and state governments to take money out of politics. Burt Neuborne and Josh Rosenkranz lectured our TCC gatherings about Buckley v. Valeo, the case that they believe was rushed into the Supreme Court with the hope that its cleansing effects might impact the 1976 election. But the ruling proved to be porous in many ways. Since then, the systematic assault on campaign finance reform by elitist hacks like John Roberts or originalist fanatics like the late Antonin Scalia has only served to keep the White House, and a great many other offices in this country, in the hands of rich, white, corporate-leaning Christian men or those who will do their bidding. Campaign finance reform is the linchpin of nearly every problem we face as a nation, just as our oil-based economy is the linchpin of our issues abroad. If the first issue is not addressed, we will continue to see the US electoral system gamed by insiders who put forth enormous amounts of money on behalf of any candidate who will read from their script in order to get the role of a lifetime. Even if that candidate is a foppish casino operator who had heretofore shown no interest in national politics.
In 1994, the chance to serve the Kennedys came again. Senator Edward Kennedy was running for reelection in Massachusetts in a tough race with Mitt Romney. I met Michael Kennedy, Ted’s nephew, in Hyannis while we were (what else?) playing football on the front lawn. I knew Michael was full-on Kennedy when he climbed up onto the hood of a car to catch a touchdown pass, claiming the front end of the car was in bounds. We spoke about how I might help Ted. In the critical month of October, I traveled to western Massachusetts (as it was assumed Teddy had Boston sewn up) for four consecutive four-day weekends, most of them with Michael. We went to VFW halls, community colleges, and Democratic clubs, where I spoke in front of groups as big as a thousand people and as small as twenty. We made around seventy stops during that month, fueling ourselves with pretzels and Snapple. On October 25, Ted was set to debate Romney. Michael told me that in spite of the polls, Ted needed a good showing, especially in the first and more-watched debate, in order to nullify the issue of his age. Romney was now the fair-haired leading man, but Ted came out prepared, robust, combative. Everyone scored the first, pivotal round for Ted. On October 23, just before that first debate, as I was driving with Michael to Boston to catch my flight home, Ted called his nephew, who then handed me the phone. All of a sudden, I was reminded of driving around western Massachusetts (oddly enough) back in 1992, while shooting Malice, when the news came on the radio that Bill Clinton had defeated Bush. I choked up at that moment, thinking that there really was hope for this country. When I took the phone from Michael, I choked up again as Senator Kennedy thanked me and said, “If I win this thing, I really couldn’t have done it without your help.” And although I knew that was hyperbole, I felt that Ted’s 1994 campaign was one where I really had made a contribution. I thought, “If I can get people to vote for Ted, is there someone else I could get them to vote for? Could it be me?”
In 1997, New York magazine put me on the cover with the title “See Alec Run.” The mostly positive piece teased my aspirations to some state political office, but my allergy to campaign fund-raising told me I wasn’t ready. To run for office meant I would have to give up the work I loved (for the most part) on the stage and screen to play a part I didn’t want to play: a politician raising money. As fast as those rumors came, they went, and stories about me running for the Senate or Congress, for governor or mayor, were treated with a more dismissive tone, as in, “Yeah, we’ve heard all that before.” A year after the New York cover story, Bill Clinton came to East Hampton, the first sitting president to travel to the East End to attend a political event since FDR. My new home had yet to be remodeled, so the DNC stepped in to stage the event. A local builder who was my friend spruced up our house and put together some furniture. Then Kim and I hosted Bill and Hillary at our house with a concert by Hootie and the Blowfish for around a thousand people. That night, the Secret Service wanted a dedicated bathroom in the house for the president, so we had designated a powder room in the hallway and marked it as off-limits. When the president was eventually escorted to it, he found it was locked. The Secret Service men knocked on the door crisply, and a muffled reply came from inside, and after what felt like an eternity, the door opened and revealed my mother standing there. I moaned the most theatrical “Moooooooom” you could imagine. The president of the United States put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Alec. I understand. I’ve got a mother, too.”
After the event at our home, a group repaired to Turtle Crossing, a ribs joint on the highway in East Hampton, where every celebrity who had a home in the area—including Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate, Kathleen Turner, Roy Scheider, Lauren Bacall, Chevy Chase, Sidney Lumet, and Christie Brinkley, among others—was seated at picnic-style tables, eating chicken, ribs, coleslaw, and corn bread with the president and First Lady. At one point, Clinton sat in a corner with Kim and me, where he spoke intently about the brewing Lewinsky scandal. Eventually, he leveled his eyes at us, his long, thin fingers pressed into his breast in a plaintive pose. “Even if I did do it,” he said, “don’t I deserve to be forgiven?” Just then, someone pulled up next to the president and snatched him away. Kim spun toward me and squealed, “I think he just told us he did it!”
Whatever Clinton did or didn’t do, none of it warranted the despicable and offensive nonsense that followed. I watched the impeachment proceedings while in South Africa with Kim, who was making a film there. On satellite television, some British Sky channels came in and I was able to see the news reports of what the Republicans were attempting to do. The whole sordid story about this witch Linda Tripp setting up Lewinsky to get the president made me sick. I agreed with Hillary Clinton’s assertion that many of their troubles were the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy, and I detested Kenneth Starr (whom Pepperdine University disgraced itself by hiring, no matter its right-wing leanings) and Henry Hyde’s hypocrisy, and those feelings would eventually prove impossible to shake.
When I returned home, I appeared on Conan O’Brien’s show in what I thought was obviously a parody of the McCarthyite mentality Hyde had fostered. On Conan, I called for Hyde to be “stoned to death” as I rose out of my chair, shaking my fist and plainly overacting. Plainly, that is, to everyone except the media and the Republicans, who both seemed to think that I was actually serious about the threat. The Democrats have their hacks, too, so Jack Valenti piled on, voicing his disapproval, stating, “It’s not something you parody.” Looking back, I still believe that Hyde disgraced his office with his actions against Clinton. The GOP, with an Ahab-like obsession, would stop at nothing to settle the score over Nixon and nullify Clinton. And now, nearly two decades later, that’s still all that the modern GOP stands for, nullifying election results and settling scores, old and new.
In that vein, the 2000 election dealt me a devastating blow. PFAW had sent volunteers down to Florida as part of its “Election Protection” effort, and
I traveled there to work on the Arrive with 5 program, whereby we helped register tens of thousands of new voters. However, many of those we registered were turned away or their votes were ultimately not counted. It was painful to watch Jeb Bush seem to rig an election on behalf of his less-competent brother, as I believed then and still do that George W. Bush was simply a variant of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan was a front man who brought to the table an indisputable electability, then turned the whole thing over to his handlers while he essentially performed the role of president. He did not, however, steal an election. Both parties are guilty of some rather brass-knuckled electoral tactics, but nothing compares to the 2000 election (until, of course, we learned about Russian hacking). Once Bush won, 9/11 presented his crew with what they were after: a war for oil during which they destroyed an entire civilization, then handed the rebuilding over to their friends in investment banking and multinational construction, often with no-bid contracts. How much money do you think Bush Family and Friends Inc. made in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq in the ensuing seven years and beyond? Along the way, the administration also squandered all of the goodwill we were poised to reap in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy.
During America’s forays into the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we’ve all seen photos of men and women either holding or standing over their dead child, the parent’s face a mask of suffering. Such images lead me to wonder what we can honestly expect from the people of these regions in terms of their feelings toward us? Even if the actions of the United States are well-intentioned, how much blood of innocent civilians is on our hands? I know that Americans live very sheltered lives in terms of the consequences of our foreign policy and that whoever is president must work to end that suffering.