My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  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campaign trip walked back in the plane to greet each reporter with a carefully memorized personal fact, almost always out of date.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.

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  AS 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.

  Second, I helped to found—and then campaigned with—women’s movement groups, for instance, the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), which supported pro-equality women for elected and appointed office, and then Voters for Choice, a political action committee that helped male and female candidates from either party who supported reproductive freedom. Ms. magazine rated presidential candidates on everything from pay equity and child care to the Machismo Factor—by which we meant support for the military and the death penalty. This did nothing to keep Richard Nixon out of the White House, but some Australian women who visited the Ms. office told us they used our rating system to help bring in the Labor Party. Also, the NWPC compiled the names of diverse women qualified for appointment to high office. More than forty years later, Mitt Romney would claim personal credit for having “binders full of women” as governor of Massachusetts, advancing it as one of his credentials for the presidency. In fact, those binders had been prepared and pressed on him by the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, as the group had done for decades.

  Only in my sixties did I arrive at my third and favorite form of campaigning, independent of any organization. With a few friends who were also activists and organizers, I rode cross-country in a van, found places to stay in swing states where local activists told us we were needed, and held meetings at school gyms, libraries, shopping centers, bowling alleys, rock concerts, backyard barbecues, campus rallies, subway stops, union halls, immigration lines, movie theaters, and bagel shops—all the places where voters are but candidates rarely go. Because I wasn’t a surrogate for any candidate, I didn’t have to say only what the candidate would say, or risk getting him or her into trouble by saying more. Because we all were free agents who paid our own way by raising small sums from friends, we could be trusted messengers, people who benefited in no way except as citizens and could say why we were supporting a candidate.

  By the time of Obama’s election campaign for the White House in 2008, we had extended these independent road trips to distant places. In the swing state of Colorado, which was crucial to Obama’s victory and also had some threatening ballot initiatives, we rented a house in Denver and, using it as a hub, traveled each day to different living rooms and community centers full of Independent or Republican women, the groups most likely to be neglected by the Democratic Party. They felt abandoned by the Republican War Against Women, yet were turned off by accusatory Democratic women saying, “How can you be a Republican?” Instead, we talked about the reasons to support political leaders who support us, never mind party labels. It was the kind of campaigning only a movement could do.

  In the end, Colorado defeated the biased ballot initiatives, including one that would have conferred legal personhood on a fertilized egg, and also gave its support to Obama. On the night of the election, he won this 80 percent white state with about 60 percent of the votes from women of all races, and more than 70 percent of the votes from all single women. Even more so than in the rest of the country, John McCain would have won if only men had voted. We danced with crowds in the streets of downtown Denver to celebrate a victory for Barack Obama, a man with a great mind and a good heart, as the first African American president of the United States.

  On very good days, I knew our little group was part of the great tradition of abolitionists and suffragists who traveled by horse-drawn carriage and train to meetings in parlors, town halls, churches, schoolhouses, granges, and barns. They couldn’t rely only on letters, newspapers, and books to spread the word, just as we must not rely only on television, email, Skype, and Twitter. Then and now, we take to the road to hold communal meetings where listeners can speak, speakers can listen, facts can be debated, and empathy can create trust and understanding.

  In each of these stages of campaigning, I’ve been inspired, angry, hopeless, hopeful, sleepless, surprised, betrayed, exhausted, educated, energized, despairing, and impatient—but never sorry. I wasn’t tempted to join a campaign staff. That is important but a one-way street. Volunteering as a citizen—or with an issue group or a movement—allows ideas to flow both ways. Nor wa
s I tempted to become a candidate myself. That would have meant taking on conflict as a daily diet. I’ve noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I’m energized by listening to people’s stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That’s the work of an organizer.

  Sometimes when I’m in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, “Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.”

  I.

  As a freelancer, I finally did get one assignment in our nation’s capital—to write about the style of the Kennedy White House. It paid less than I would spend traveling back and forth from New York, but I was as fascinated as anybody with the Kennedys. Also I would be reading otherwise tedious research in the West Wing office of Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter, someone I knew from campaigning. Just being in that political energy field was reward enough. Since Sorensen felt humor was his weak point, there was a small chance I could contribute a word or two to a speech he was finishing on a deadline.

  A man of sober Nebraska stock, Ted purchased his own stamps, just in case a letter might not be deemed job-related. He was definitely not part of the glamorous Kennedy social life. Indeed, he disapproved of Kennedy’s affairs, especially since he sometimes had to serve as a cover. He also thought smoking made a woman look immoral, and since I thought a cigarette made me look like a writer—though I couldn’t inhale without getting sick—I smoked and felt judged by him. Far more important was his mastery of parallel construction, with sentences as elegant and inspiring as “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” If I hung out in his office for a day or two, I hoped I might learn, contribute, or both.

  That’s why, on a November day, I was sorting clippings while Ted hurried to finish a speech for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. He ran the final copy out onto the White House lawn, where a helicopter waited to take the president to Air Force One. I watched as Kennedy, that familiar man I’d never met, walked into the wind from the whirling blades.

  It was the last time Ted or I would ever see him.

  In New York the next day, I could tell, from the faces of people in the street, who knew about the shooting and who did not. Ted called to say the bullet had shattered the president’s skull. There was no hope.

  I thought, When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.

  —

  ONCE VICE PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON was president, Bobby Kennedy stepped down as attorney general to give LBJ the right to name his own. Then this younger Kennedy declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate from New York State. It seemed to be a painful effort to fill his brother’s shoes. Bobby Kennedy hated even public speaking. I once heard him give a brief talk, and I related to his uncomfortable voyage from one sentence to the next.

  Hoping to publish a freelance article, I followed Bobby Kennedy around for a day of campaigning in New York City. He was a very unusual candidate. When avoiding a reporter’s question, for instance, he didn’t just give a skillful nonanswer, as most politicians do. “As you can see,” he would say, “I’m trying to avoid that question.” He seemed interested in engaging only with people who asked questions to which they really didn’t know the answers.

  Jack Newfield of The Village Voice told me the secret of interviewing Bobby: Bring along someone who doesn’t know the subject—or better yet, who disagrees. Then Bobby will see a purpose in explaining, and you’ll get lots of quotes.

  In Manhattan, two famous writers, journalist Gay Talese and novelist Saul Bellow, joined Kennedy’s Senate campaign for the day. I knew Talese and had recently met Bellow when I interviewed him and followed him around his beloved Chicago. The three of us shared a taxi to Kennedy events. Sitting between them on the backseat, I was in the midst of passing along Jack Newfield’s useful advice when Talese leaned across me—as if I were neither talking nor present—and said to Bellow, You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl. Then they began to discuss the awful traffic.

  My initial response was to be embarrassed. Would Bellow regret having given an interview to someone now being called an unworthy writer?

  But once I was out of the taxi and away from their self-assured presence, I got angry. How could Talese behave as if I weren’t even there? Why didn’t I object? Yell? Get out and slam the door?

  —

  FOUR YEARS LATER I was volunteering for Eugene McCarthy’s primary bid for the Democratic nomination—not imagining I would ever write about it—when I climbed up to a barren, third-floor campaign headquarters in Manhattan. I sat in a circle of rickety chairs with other writers and editors who were helping with press releases and position papers for a candidate we hadn’t met. McCarthy had been the third choice of the anti–Vietnam War peace movement, but he was the only one who said yes to challenging President Johnson in New Hampshire, the first primary of the 1968 campaign. Senator Robert Kennedy and then Senator George McGovern had been asked first, but both had refused. For anyone opposed to the Vietnam War, this reserved, sardonic senator from Minnesota was the only game in town.

  All this helped to explain why we were such a disparate group, including a Republican woman who hoped that strengthening the antiwar cause would help a dovish Nelson Rockefeller beat the hawklike Nixon in the Republican primaries, and one other apostate Democrat I knew from our effort to organize writers and editors to withhold the percentage of our tax money going to Vietnam. Though we had imagined dire consequences, it turned out to be like punching a pillow: our unpaid taxes were just collected from our bank accounts, an odd form of voting.

  Because McCarthy was coming to town for a benefit, four of us volunteer writers were assigned to interview him and write a Sunday newspaper supplement for his New Hampshire campaign. We met him at his suite at the St. Regis Hotel, all prepared with questions on his key issues. As it turned out, we might as well have stayed home. Whatever we asked, McCarthy just turned to an aide and instructed him to find this or that quote from the past. He was aloof and cool. Unlike Bobby Kennedy, he didn’t seem to care whether we knew the answer or not—only that he had once given it. This awkward session became more so when he cautioned us not to write about Vietnam. Why? Because New Hampshire was “a hawk state.”

  We recovered enough to protest that his opposition to the Vietnam War was the source of his appeal, especially to kids all over the country who were volunteering to work in New Hampshire, even cutting their long hippie hair and adopting the motto “Clean for Gene.” Finally, he agreed that we could include Vietnam, but only if we put it right next to his support for veterans’ benefits. By the end, he reminded me of the executive at Household Finance who used to listen to my father’s plea for a loan, lean back, put his fingertips together in a steeple, and say, “No.”

  —

  FOLLOWING MCCARTHY’S SURPRISING SHOWING in New Hampshire, Bobby Kennedy announced that he would run for president after all. Also LBJ, a sitting president embarrassed by this little-known senator from Minnesota, stunned the country by announcing that he wouldn’t run again. Now that Bobby Kennedy was the only other major outside contender, the McCarthy campaign set out to portray him as an opportunist for not having braved “the snows of New Hampshire.” His absence from that primary nullified all virtue, just as McCarthy’s presence in New Hampshire nullified all faults.

  In the upstairs McCarthy headquarters where I was still volunteering, it was no longer enough to be for McCarthy as a candidate; one also had to be against Kennedy as a man. Bitter social divisions broke out among people who otherwise agreed on issues. Friends no longer spoke to friends, common goals were forgotten, and gossip about who had switched to whom politically was suddenly as juicy as who was having an affair with whom—but less tolerant.

  Four decades later, I would be reminded of this painful tension when the followers of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fell into a similar division
. Though those two presidential candidates were far more the same on issues than were McCarthy and Kennedy—and though they actually liked each other, unlike McCarthy, who had contempt for Bobby Kennedy and considered him a bad Catholic—Obama became the face of the future, just as McCarthy had done after New Hampshire, and Hillary Clinton supposedly became a part of the past for sharing a political name, just as Bobby Kennedy had done.

  Of course, this parallel was imperfect. Bobby Kennedy was not the “past” to the big majority of black and Hispanic voters who supported him as a symbol of hope, and McCarthy’s constituency for the “future” was overwhelmingly white and not poor. Also, neither McCarthy nor Kennedy embodied a huge and historic breakthrough, as did both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their politics were also too organic to imagine either one metamorphosing, as Eugene McCarthy would later do, into supporting Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, a stunner for aging idealists who had been “Clean for Gene.” But in each era, deep feelings about social justice at home and an unpopular war abroad produced candidates who were not so different in content, yet different enough in form and style to generate conflict among intimate allies. McCarthy/Obama came to symbolize hope because they were new and unknown, while Kennedy/Clinton seemed like pragmatists just because they had been near power. In fact, all four were both.

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  I FLED THIS UNCIVIL civil war and went to California, where Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers had asked me to help get the word out about the consumer boycott that they hoped would pressure growers into giving farmworkers the same rights as other workers. And it was Cesar and his main organizer, Dolores Huerta, who reminded me of what I’d learned in India: the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy’s compassion, his peculiar ability to identify with the excluded, was far more important than whether he had declared before or after a New Hampshire primary. Only Bobby Kennedy had supported the farm workers’ strike, even though the growers were key Democratic contributors. Only Bobby Kennedy had credentials and a track record acceptable to the Latino and African American nation-within-a-nation.