Politics

I’ve written several times about my father’s life in the book business, which shaped quite a few careers, including mine. Here’s one. Andanother. This post, for Mother’s Day weekend, is about my father’s other great passion: my mother.

Eleanor Oshry Shatzkin — Elky to everybody who knew her — was the first woman to graduate from the engineering school at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon), earning her degree in physics in 1941. She was, in a way, a management consulting pioneer, running the consulting operation for the accounting firm J.K. Lasser and Company from 1957-1962. For a dozen years after that, until Dad dragooned her into the family book distribution business, Two Continents (the place where I really learned about the trade), Elky ran her own consulting company. She was a “better, faster, cheaper” consultant: a designer of systems and the rigorous author of “procedures” (as workflow documentation was called then.) Her clients included substantial law firms, for which she designed billing systems in the days before computers, and the Young & Rubicam Advertising Agency.

One of Mom’s clients for many years was The Longacre Press, a printer of book jackets based in Mt. Vernon, New York. Among other things, she designed a scheduling system for them. Working for Mom on that project was a critical piece of my early education in the book business.

She was a feminist before Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique”, although she explicitly resisted the label. But she was so totally devoted to my Dad that there were aspects of her capabilities and personality that we didn’t see in full flower until after he died when they were in their 80s.

Elky Shatzkin grew up in Pittsburgh, the younger child and only daughter of a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist family. Her father, Sam Oshry, sold life insurance in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. It was family lore that when Sam encountered a person begging for money for a meal, his frequent response was to bring them home for dinner. Mom’s older brother, Howard, was her intellectual inspiration (before she met my Dad) and since he became a physicist, her inclination was to follow in his footsteps.

Elky and Len got married in Harlem in 1940 (Len’s family lived in New York) and went back to Pittsburgh for their senior year at Carnegie Tech, living together at the Oshry home. Their marriage was not announced on campus to protect Elky’s scholarship, but they were serving together on the school paper, the Carnegie Tartan: Len as editor-in-chief and Elky as managing editor.

In the winter of that year there was a strike at Kaufman’s Department Store in Pittsburgh and scabs were hired to break the strike. Len wrote and published an editorial castigating that practice in the Tartan; the problem was that the Kaufman that owned the store was a regent of the university. About two months later, the administration used the claim that an April Fool’s issue that imitated past practices of lampooning faculty and staff was in bad taste as the excuse to fire Len from his position. My mom, his secret wife, took over as editor for the balance of the school year and, in effect, nothing changed. That incident characterized their 62 years of marriage: they had each other’s backs.

During World War II, Elky worked for Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, doing pioneering work with radioactive isotopes. In early 1943, she was getting bored with the job and she went to Columbia University to apply for another position. It didn’t sound appealing to her, so she decided to decline it by saying she expected Len to be drafted soon and she expected to be going to wherever he was in basic training and interrupting her career. “What does your husband do?”, she was asked. “He’s a printer,” she said. Len was then Production Manager for House Beautiful magazine. “Where is he?” “He’s waiting for me downstairs.”

This led to Len being interviewed and hired to work on the Manhattan Project, which kept him out of the war. But while the war was going on, he didn’t tell Elky what he was doing. The secrecy requirements were stringent and she would have understood that and not pressed him.

About a year later, Elky and Len went to the theater with a woman friend who had a loud voice and a vivid imagination. Len had to visit the draft board every six months to get his deferment renewed, and that was the night, so he didn’t arrive at the theater until the intermission. While they were outside between acts, friend Florence said, “I know what you’re doing, Len. You’re working on that new atomic bomb!”

Elky jumped in immediately. “Oh, no, Florence. Of course, he isn’t. We discussed the possibility of an atom bomb in my senior class in physics at Carnegie Tech. It’s simply not possible to gather enough fissionable uranium to create a chain reaction. You can’t make an atomic bomb.”

Elky could never have told a lie. If she didn’t believe that to be true, she wouldn’t have said it!

After the war and after my sisters and I were born, she got a job, with her physics background, working for the Picker X-Ray Corporation in White Plains. In short order, she was reorganizing their files and systems. That piqued her interest in management consulting and she was lucky enough to get a meeting with Peter Drucker for career advice. He hooked her up with a consultant named Bill Porter, who took her in and trained her. That led to her consulting career.

Aside from being a devoted wife, career woman, fantastic hands-on mother (she created a Benjamin Franklin costume for me on Halloween in 1957 that was definitely the coolest one in the entire village of Croton-on-Hudson that year), and running a complicated house that always had guests coming and going, Elky was a very active “citizen.” For example, she went by herself to the March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. (I never really got the story about why she went and Len didn’t and we didn’t and now it is too late to ask.)

Elky’s greatest civic achievement was the Croton Shakespeare Festival, which she organized in 1962 with two other local Moms and which ran every summer, introducing the Bard and theater skills to local students and their parents, for 25 years. The full story of the Festival could take a book, let alone a blogpost, but it was a product of her boundless energy, unbelievable organizational skills, and public-spiritedness.

Over the years, Mom mentored countless young people. I have many childhood memories of the children of her friends coming to our house to be tutored in algebra. My sisters and I have many contemporary friends who learned office and organizational skills working for Elky. She was a tough boss: a perfectionist who never tired of making you go back and do it again to get it right. She could yell and scream at you too, and she terrified some people. But you found out pretty quickly that she had a heart of gold and unlimited generosity and, in fact, her demanding perfection of you was a compliment, because she knew you could do it.

For the last few years before Len died in 2002, Elky’s singleminded focus was helping him maintain a high quality of life as congestive heart failure progessively weakened him. They didn’t cut back much on their lifelong habit of traveling as often and as broadly as possible. In the last two decades of Len’s life, they traveled to every continent and spent months at a time living and doing volunteer work in Brazil, Venezuela, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Russia, India, and other places too numerous for me to recall. They maintained a wide circle of friends the world over.

When Len died, Elky lost the focal point of her life, but it didn’t slow her down for very long. A month or two later she was bouncing back, joining a weekly vigil and protest of America’s impending entry into Iraq. In 2004, she spent the last week before the election walking the precincts of Florida, trying to get John Kerry elected.

In the winter of 2006, Elky discovered a Democratic Congressional candidate in her local (always Republican) district named John Hall. She quickly “sold” him to my activist sister Nance (whose family had lived since 1990 with Elky and Len in the house we grew up in) and they joined the campaign. Elky didn’t let the pancreatic cancer diagnosis she got six weeks before Election Day slow her down; she ran phone banks and volunteer operations for Hall right up until Election Day. And the very last trip she took was to Washington in January, 2007, to be in Hall’s office to congratulate him when he came off the House floor after being sworn in. She died about two weeks later.

My mother was a great person, a great teacher, a fabulous parent. She didn’t teach me as much about the book business as my Dad did, so she doesn’t show up on this blog as often, but she sure taught me as much about life.

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To regular readers of this blog: I know I haven’t posted much lately, and this post has almost nothing to do with publishing (although there’s a book link in it!) I’m in London on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair as I write it. I will resume more regular contributions to the dialogue about publishing and digital change, but posts may remain sparse for a couple more weeks…

Last weekend, the New York Times carried an obituary of a Polish cardiologist, socialist, and Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Marek Edelman. One untold part of his life story touched my family.

Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of what were (according to the Times) 220 armed fighters who constituted the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19, 1943. Two of the others were a man named Friedrich (whose first name I’ve forgotten if I never knew…and, as you’ll see, I’m running out of people to ask who might remember) and another named Bernard Goldstein. Goldstein came to the US in 1948 and I knew him well in my early youth; Bernard died on December 7, 1959, which was the only day of my childhood when I remember seeing my father cry.

Friedrich was credited with being the man who followed the tracks out of Warsaw that carried the railroad cars that took Jews being removed from the ghetto to an unknonwn destination. Friedrich reported back that the destination was a concentration camp where the Jews were being exterminated. For that effort, and for his part in the doomed uprising of April 19, he was deemed a hero by the survivors after the war, particulary those in the Jewish Socialist Bund, which also claimed Edelman, Goldstein, and my grandparents on both sides as members.

Friedrich had a daughter named Elsa, born on December 18, 1936. Elsa was smuggled out of the Ghetto to live in hiding with a Catholic family in about 1941. Thus she escaped being killed when the Jews in the Ghetto were virtually exterminated during and after the uprising.

As the Ghetto was burning, Friedrich and Edelman were on a rooftop watching the final carnage. Friedrich extracted the promise from Edelman that if Edelman survived the war and Friedrich didn’t, Edelman would take guardianship of Elsa.

And, indeed, that came to pass. Elsa had been about 5 years old when she was “adopted” by the Catholic family, and although she recalled the necessity of concealing her story during the war, she was apparently happy in her new home. So when Marek came and took her away from her familiar and comfortable surroundings, honoring the promise he’d made to her father, it was a wrenching experience for a child then only about 9 years old.

The global organization of the Bund knew about Friedrich and knew about Elsa’s circumstances. They considered it anathama that the daughter of a hero could be consigned to such a bleak future, growing up in poverty-stricken, anti-Semitic Poland, even as the control of the hated Soviets (the socialists were very anti-Communist) was being established in the country.

So, using their power as a global organization, the Bund hunted for an American family that would take Elsa in and raise her in this country. My father’s parents, Julek and Helen Shatzkin, agreed to accept the responsibility. They were then in their early 50s; my father and his younger brother, Uncle Sock, were both in their 20s, married, and starting their own families. My grandparents moved from New York City, where they had lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn since arriving as immigrants in 1920, to northern Westchester. They built a house and prepared for a new life, raising a daughter in suburban post-World War II America. The political clout of the Bund found sympathetic help from New York Republican Senator Irving Ives, who sponsored the special legislation that allowed Elsa to immigrate legally to the United States.

Elsa was a girl of great talent: very beautiful and also brilliant. She was also always troubled, always haunted by the lives (intentionally plural) she had left behind. The spiritual gap between this young woman striving to be a “normal” American and my grandparents, who were culturally still very Old World, created strains. My grandmother was never particularly comfortable with the arrangement; my grandfather was smitten with his new daughter and wanted to spoil and indulge her. From the perspective of her 10-1/2 years younger nephew (which I was), Aunt Elsa was hip and pretty and virtually unapproachable for most of my childhood.

In the mid-1950s, Elsa graduated from Lakeland High School and went off to Cornell, majoring in English, from which she graduated in about 1957. She went on to study for a master’s at Columbia, where she met and fell in love with ayoung historian named Robert Dallek. They got married in about 1958. By that time, Elsa had changed her name to Ilse. I remember that Robert always pronounced it as she spelled it; she remained Elsa to the rest of us.

In about 1960, Ilse had a nervous breakdown. I remember visiting her in a mental institution of some kind (once again; I’m short of surviving family old enough to give me more details.) But she got out, ostensibly recovered; her marriage to Robert resumed. He continued to study for his PhD and she for her master’s.

Bernard Goldstein, like Marek Edelman, was a leader of the armed resistance. For the ten years I knew him in my childhood, he was much like a 3rd grandfather. My father had translated his memoir into English and it was published by the house Dad worked for, The Viking Press, as The Stars Bear Witness in 1948. (We have a copy of The Wallinscribed to Dad from John Hersey because Bernard’s book was critical research material.)

Elsa was always very uncomfortable in Bernard’s presence, which was very painful for him. He wanted to relate to her affectionately; he had known her father; to him, she was a flower that had amazingly survived the conflagration of Warsaw. But to her, he was a reminder of the beginning of her traumatic life and the loss of her real family. These perspectives could never be reconciled.

I remember spending the night at the apartment of Aunt Ilse and Uncle Robert in my early teens along with my friend,Tony Klein (now a Vermont State Legislator), after a rained-out Yankee game we had intended to go to. Ilse was then in her mid-20s. She and Robert came in from an evening out and Ilse proceeded to change into short shorts and start cleaning up the apartment. Tony was agog. This is your aunt, he said? His aunts were all old and dowdy; mine was young and vital and attractive. And tortured.

In October of 1962, Ilse committed suicide. She checked into a hotel on the upper west side, near where she and Robert lived, and took an overdose of sleeping pills. Apparently she left a note; I never saw it. My father got the task of identifying the body at the morgue. My grandfather went into an immediate depression; the pain of losing an adopted daughter he loved was compounded by the feeling of having failed in a political responsibility to the Bund. The electro-shock treatments prescribed at that time to snap him out of it were blamed by my family for the blood cancer that ensued and killed him in November of 1964.

In college, Ilse’s best friend was a woman whose married name was Faith Sale; her husband was the historian and social thinker Kirkpatrick Sale. Faith became an editor at Putnam. She died, much too young, of cancer a decade ago. Before Faith died, I had lunch with her to talk about my Aunt. This was more than 30 years after Ilse’s death, but Faith was still touched to uncontrollable tears by recalling the tragedy and pain of her friend’s existence.

In 1980, my parents’ proclivity for going where the revolutions were (a story that requires some research for another blog post some day) took them to Poland, where Solidarity was leading the change which ultimately swept across the Soviet-dominated countries. Marek Edelman, by then a prominent cardiologist, was a key player in Solidarity. He and my parents connected.

As I understood it from Dad, Edelman regretted that he had ever taken Elsa from her Polish Catholic family. He had done that to honor the commitment he had made to her father, and then he relinquished her to the Bund’s equally well-intentioned and equally ill-fated desire to find her a better life in America. He felt pain similar to my grandfather’s. He had tried to save this girl, but the demons within her played cruel tricks with those intentions.

There are few of us left to remember Elsa: my Uncle Sock’s widow; my sisters; and my cousins in Sock’s family. What we’re left with is the lesson that great tragedy can come from the best of intentions, and the fact that some victims of Hitler died two decades after he did, my aunt and my grandfather being among them.

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The debate about the Google settlement, like most of any consequence or intellectual interest (what the government should do about health care or energy, for example) actually engages a wider range of knowledge than most of us have. But we feel comfortable having an opinion about what we should do about health care or energy without necessarily knowing much about the logistics, requirements, actual state of affairs, or cost-value relationships of what we favor or oppose.

We each start with a general position. For example, mine on health care is that government intervention is required to make sure everybody has a minimum reasonable standard of care. On energy I believe government policy should encourage energy development and consumption that is efficient and unwasteful while increasingly substituting renewable energy for resource-consuming energy.

My personal political positions are directional, not very specific. Others, perhaps because they’re better informed, have more aggressive and articulated views. I know people who think health care isn’t worth fighting for unless it is single payer; that anything else could make matters worse. I am sure there people that hold similar positions on energy that I would deem “perhaps desirable, but not politically achieveable at this time”. They’re my allies unless their idea of “perfect” blocks my idea of “better”.

And then there are others, of course, who aren’t allies at all: people who believe that market forces can be trusted with social challenges or simply resist the idea of any expansion of government or increase in taxes.

But when it comes to the details of legislation, most of us just plain citizens are pretty helpless even to have an informed opinion, let alone to have any influence. The staffs of our legislators are hearing about the details from the experts representing doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, drug companies, left- and right-wing lobbyists. If Charlie Rangel says that a very modest tax increase on people making over $350,000 or $500,000 a year will bring the costs into line with the parameters President Obama says are economically necessary. Assuming there is no chorus of objections from sources I trust (Krugman), I’ll just accept that as fact. It advances my philosophical position and I tend to trust him. I mean, who really “does the math” for themselves on things like this? Without being a professional, how could you?

The Google settlement might not be as complicated as health care or energy, but the debate about it also revolves around a lot of unknowns. Although the argument between those who say “approve it” and those who say “reject it” or even, “reject it if you can’t change it” is superficially waged on the “merits” and on the words in the settlement, I believe most of us come to this extraordinarily complicated question with a position and then put each new piece of information (or argument) into a “context” that won’t require us to change that position. And since we’re dealing with a lot of unknowns, that’s not really very hard to do.

My dominant prejudice I bring to this conversation is a belief that copyright laws have been extended so that they are abusive to the public interest and result in a lot of intellectual property being walled off from use for no good commercial reason. With that as a background belief, I saw what Google did (scanning all the work) as cutting a Gordian knot. Others come to this discussion with a dominant concern of respect for copyright or a dominant concern of bullying monopolies. Their prejudice might lead them to be against the settlement while mine pushes me to favor it.

Today’s post is not to argue that the settlement should be approved, but to consider what the situation will be if the settlement is rejected. The proponents and opponents of the settlement certainly seem to differ on what the world will look like if the settlement is approved; might there be somewhat greater agreement between the sides about what the world will look like if the settlement is rejected?

To me, it looks a short story.

The consequences of the settlement being rejected seem catastrophic to settlement opponents if it is turned down because the litigants are deemed not to fairly represent the classes (that is: the judge buys into the the idea that foreign authors, contributors, and orphans and perhaps others are “left out”). If the class representation is overturned or curtailed, it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible for these lawsuits to go on (and there are two lawsuits, even though there is one settlement.) If the settlement is rejected for some other reason (perhaps: the judge agrees that it can’t be allowed because it grants Google what would be a monopoly), then presumably the litigation could go on.

If rejection of the settlement is because the AAP and/or AAR don’t represent the class, Google would be in a stronger position than they were before the suit. There would be no database of orphan works to sell litigation-risk free, but the scans for search and returning of snippets would just continue. Authors could individually sue for copyright infringement if they wanted to try. Nobody would be any more tempted to “compete” with Google by scanning in-copyright works than they are now. And Google would have the benefit of having smoked out a lot of potential litigants because the faux settlement got a lot of copyright holders to come forward.

A little-known fact is that most of the value of the database Google was going to sell was in the in-copyright works that would have been ceded to the database. (This came up obliquely because these are the copyright holders who are going to get bonus revenue from the money earned by the page views on orphans, a fact settlement opponents have raised.)

That being the case, somebody will want to distribute that database, even without the orphans. That somebody will have to negotiate with Google to get the digital files and then with each of the publishers for their rights, without a BRR to help them. A pain in the neck, but in a few years it would probably happen.

If the settlement is rejected for some other reason, all of the above (except the part about still selling that database, since the copyright owners would still be in litigation with Google over this scanning and their lawyers would advise them against it; they can’t license a use for the scans they want to say Google shouldn’t have!) remains true and the AAP and the AAR get to decide whether to continue to fund the suit for the next several years while they and Google keep talking, presumably, about something that would satisfy the court (a bit odd, since they already satisfied each other!) If that were to happen, would the opponents of the settlement somehow help them carry on? Or step in to litigate in their stead?

If this analysis is right (and I float it with all humility: IANAL), then the opponents of the settlement walk a fine line. They want it rejected, or remanded to the litigants with some instructions they can actually follow. But they don’t want the plaintiffs discredited as representatives of the class. It would be the height of irony if Google, which probably had foregone challenging the standing of the AAR and AAP at the beginning to avoid antagonizing two organizations they ultimately need to work with, gets a court victory they didn’t seek handed to them by people motivated to make their lives more difficult. This could end up being a textbook demonstration of “unintended consequences.”

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Michael Wolff has written in Vanity Fair about Politico, which demonstrates many of the priciples of verticalization that I have written about often on this blog. He begins with a summary of a startlingly prescient piece Michael Crichton wrote in the fourth issue of Wired Magazine. Wolff writes:

“In the fourth issue of Wired magazine, in the fall of 1993, just as the Internet was entering public consciousness, Michael Crichton, the author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, wrote an essay arguing that newspapers were doomed because they were too dumb. As information became cheaper, more plentiful, and easier to get, consumers, he argued, would become ever more immersed in their specific interests and understand that their more generally oriented paper—at least in the matter of a reader’s special interest, but also by inference everything else—had no idea what it was talking about.”

As for Politico:

They are narrow and deep.

They have established a brand that trumps, or soon will trump, the formerly established brands in their niche.

They built an “Internet-first” model, but they have a “spinoff” print product that is a major contributor to their revenue.

They’re (apparently) profitable.

And if you publish a book on politics. I guarantee you’ll be knocking at their virtual door.

Have a great 4th of July weekend!

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This is a post about New York State Democratic politics but not about the coup this week in the State Senate, which is a rapidly-developing story being covered by reporters on the scene. Comic operas could certainly be written about either New York or California state politics without having to change a single fact.

Like most liberal Democrats who have been frustrated for most of the last 40 plus years, with a very brief respite for Jimmy Carter and some years of sympathetic agony with Bill Clinton, I’m a huge fan of President Obama (and his whole family.) Whatever compromises he’s making with what would seem to be liberal principles are dwarfed by the enormous strides he is taking to make America a fairer and more equitable society.

But I’m also a New Yorker and being a Democrat in New York carries its own set of frustrations. We haven’t elected a Democratic mayor in New York City since the kind but feckless David Dinkins 20 years ago. We replaced the brazenly imperious Giuliani with the more gently imperious Bloomberg, and we seem stuck with Mayor Mike for as long as he cares to pay to stick around.

But it is at the state level that the annoyance is greatest. There was cause for great optimism when we followed three terms of Pataki by electing crusading Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer by a record 70+% majority in 2006. Even before his weakness for paid sex became public, Governor Spitzer had stamped himself as an even more arrogant tyrant than Giuliani himself (although Spitzer’s public policies were more socially conscious and at least he paid for his own out-of-wedlock dalliances; Giuliani used city funds to “protect” his paramour and now wife while he was still married to Donna Hanover, the woman he got elected with.) And meanwhile we found out that the State Comptroller we elected, Alan Hevesi, was abusing the public trust as well and was forced out of office.

What a mess. But it got worse. David Paterson, whose limitations were not readily apparent when he was the Minority Leader of the NY State Senate, replaced Spitzer as Governor and has demonstrated almost daily that he’s not up to the job. Among the many things he did that we might wish he hadn’t was to appoint a relatively conservative upstate Congresswoman, Kirsten Gillibrand, to replace Senator Clinton when Hillary became Secretary of State. The calculus, apparently was “upstate” and “female”, and that narrowed the choices to a second term Congresswoman whose family is at least as Republican as it is Democratic and whose Palin-like credentials included that she and her husband slept with a gun by their bed to ward off possible intruders.

Now here’s where I part company with my new President.

It is a reality of New York State Democratic politics that, in a statewide primary where there is a clear liberal and a clear “moderate” (we NY Democrats don’t do “conservative”), the liberal will always win. This rule was formulated by my late friend, Professor Richard Wade, who demonstrated it by helping Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo to the governorship. Carey defeated the highly favored (and more “moderate”) Howard Samuels in the primary in 1974; Cuomo knocked off favored NYC Mayor Ed Koch in 1982.

In fact, just about any clearly-liberal downstate Democrat would beat Gillibrand in a primary in 2010.

The New York Democratic establishment, which now consists primarily of Senator Chuck Schumer but also includes the Clintons, is supporting Gillibrand. I don’t know their reasons. The White House is involved too, putting pressure on potential opponents in the 2010 primary to stay out of the race. They were successful in persuading Congressman Steve Israel to withdraw. Congresswoman McCarthy from Long Island, who isn’t that liberal on many issues but is a champion of gun control (as is Schumer, for that matter), has also pulled her hat out of the ring. So now the one chance we have to knock off this faux Democratic senator foisted on us by a weak Democratic governor is that NYC Representative Carolyn Maloney will take her on. Congresswoman Maloney is my representative in Congress and I fervently hope she’ll make the attempt, even though the White House is strongly discouraging a race.

From the President’s perspective, he is just seeking peace within the Democratic Party. I am sure he — and his political strategist, Rahm Emanuel — thinks that avoiding primaries makes the party stronger. So he’s also trying to prevent new Democrat Arlen Specter from having to face a primary for his Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

But I think that notion is just plain wrong and Obama need look no further than his own election last year to prove it. Primaries energize the Democratic Party. They bring in new blood and they inspire volunteer effort. Congressman John Hall in the Hudson Valley, who won his seat in 2006 at the same time Gillibrand was winning hers, had to beat several candidates in a Democratic primary. Without the several-month organizing runway that primary fight gave him, he wold never have beaten 6-term Republican incumbent Sue Kelly in November.

If Maloney opposes Gillibrand, she’ll beat her. And Maloney would be a stronger candidate against the Republicans (not that we need it; any Democrat will win) in November because she’ll have an enthusiastic party behnd her. Similarly, if Congressman Sestak beats Specter in Pennsylvania, he’ll beat whatever arch-conservative the Republicans nominate on their side.

So if the White House would just stay out of these battles, they would end up with stronger support in the Senate in 2011. Primaries in the Democratic Party are far more likely to build the party than to weaken it.

For you publishing junkies, my apologies for staying clear of it today. But remember that from this Friday morning, June 12, until Monday morning, June 15, the full video of my “Stay Ahead of the Shift” speech will be linked from this site for anybody to see. For those of you who are subscribers to PublishersMarketplace.com, you don’t have to wait. That’s where it lives.

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Richard C. Wade is credited with inventing urban history as a field of American history. He taught at the University of Rochester in the 1950s, at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, and became — along with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. — one of two Distinguished Professors of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1971. He died last July.

I delivered this eulogy to Dick to a small group of historians who were in New York for a convention in early January. These were the people in his field, some of whom hadn’t met him; they just knew him as a titan in his field. Many knew nothing, or very little, about what you’ll read in my eulogy. I found that stunning.

But when I bumped into PBS pundit Mark Shields at the newsstand on Sunday morning and asked him, “Did you know my friend Professor Wade?”, Shields lit up and said “yes, wonderful man.” I think if you could ask George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Hugh Carey, and Mario Cuomo, among those still alive, they’d tell you the same thing.

St. Patrick’s Day is the right day to do this post.

I met Professor Wade in August 1968 at the Democratic convention in Chicago. George McGovern had become the replacement candidate for Robert Kennedy, who had been assassinated in June. McGovern had three heavyweight political operatives working for him there. I was working as an assistant to Pierre Salinger; of course everybody knew Frank Mankiewicz, who had been Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary. And then I met Dick Wade, at the time a Housing Commissioner in Chicago under Mayor Daley and a historian on the faculty of the University of Chcago.

In March of 1971, the 1972 McGovern campaign kicked off with a full-page ad in the New York Times with the headline: “I’m tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” And one of the four signers of the ad was Professor Wade, who had just become a Distinguished Professor at City University Graduate Center in NY. I went to work as a volunteer on that campaign and began a friendship with Dick Wade that was one of the most important in my life until his passing last summer.

Dick and I shared love for American history, liberal politics, baseball, and urban living. I was his eager acolyte, lending a hand to any political effort he tapped me for and constantly interviewing him about his own life. I want to share a few of the things I learned about him FROM him over our nearly four decades of conversation. Dick was very modest about his involvement in history, almost as if he felt it would compromise his credentials as a historian to write himself into the story. Well, I have no credentials as a historian to sully; I’m just Dick’s friend. This is what I know.

Dick grew up near Chicago, a White Sox fan because Democrats were White Sox fans. William Wrigley, who owned the Cubs, was both a Republican and a Klan sympathizer. Dick was also a superior athlete, a Junior Davis Cupper in tennis and a football player. He enrolled at the University of Rochester just before World War II; I don’t know if Dick was pulling my leg when he told me that HE thought he was going to Rochester, Minnesota right up until he got his train ticket to go to college.

The way Dick told it, he wasn’t much of a student his first three years. But in his senior year, he suffered a serious football injury. He never actually said so, but he led me to believe that injury turned his hair gray and made him unable to father children (although he did a great job with two he adopted.) While he was recovering, he had to sit around for the first time in his life. “First I taught myself to smoke a pipe,” he told me. “After that, I was looking for something to do while I smoked the pipe and I read the first book I had ever read without it being required of me. I loved it.” And that, he would have had me believe, was how he discovered that he wanted to be a scholar.

In 1946, Dick was a graduate assistant at Harvard when young John F. Kennedy came by looking for support in his first race for Congress. That began a friendship which lasted until JFK’s tragic death and an association with the Kennedy family that was one of the defining aspects of Dick’s life.

Dick had two fabulous stories about 1948. I can’t remember all the details, but at an ADA convention, he ended up being put up in an extra room in Eleanor Roosevelt’s suite. His story about that was he was awakened by the sound of the typewriter well before dawn, as she wrote her daily newspaper column. That same year, Dick wrote the famous civil rights speech delivered by then-Mayor of Minneapolis Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic Convention. Dick said that if that speech had been delivered at a time other than the middle of the night, it would have been the end of his political career. As it was, it was the start.

Dick was at the University of Rochester in the 1950s, deeply involved in the New York Stevenson campaigns in 1952 and 1956. In 1954, Dick collaborated on the history brief for the historic Brown versus the Board civil rights case.

In 1960, he was an important player in JFK’s successful run for the White House. Dick had a story about working in West Virginia and complaining at one point to Robert Kennedy about the lack of contact between the West Virginia campaign and the national office. RFK’s response was to give Dick a roll of dimes and to tell him to call whenever he needed to check in.

What proved to be one of the most dazzling demonstrations of Dick’s insight and prescience came at a Yankee-White Sox doubleheader we went to during the summer of 1971. While we watched the full two games, Dick laid out the McGovern strategy to get the 1972 nomination. Dick said we would come close in New Hampshire which would take the shine off Muskie’s inevitability; New Hampshire was a home state for a Maine senator. Then we’d win the Wisconsin primary, which would knock Muskie out because his top-down campaign couldn’t run without a constant flow of money.

The key to understanding how this could work, the Professor explained, was to know that polls were meaningless in primaries because of low turnouts — 10% or 15% was not uncommon — and that, with our superior canvassing and volunteer operation, we could drive up the turnout among OUR supporters to achieve what we needed in New Hampshire. We needed about 20,000 votes to do it. This was in July, and the New Hampshire primary was eight months away. McGovern at that point ranked last or near last in every national poll, registering about 2% support. But Dick’s explanation made the challenge seem manageable, which it was. And his scenario played out precisely. 

What I think was the most sensational achievement of Dick’s political career came in 1974. Howard Samuels had co-chaired McGovern’s post-convention NY State Campaign, alongside Dick’s good friend, ex-Mayor Robert Wagner. I don’t know exactly what the root of the problem was, but I do know Dick and Samuels didn’t like each other. This was a unique situation; I am not aware of Dick having animus like that for anybody else, but he didn’t like Howard Samuels.

In 1974, Samuels had an apparent hammerlock on the Democratic nomination for Governor. He had the designation of the State Democratic Party. There was a challenge from Brooklyn Congressman Hugh Carey, but the polls showed Samuels in the lead by 30 points or more and, with Carey having no money or statewide name recognition, it looked like Samuels would coast to the nomination.

Dick had always told me that he’d never lost a contested Democratic primary. In July of 1974, with the primary about 8 weeks away, he called me and asked for the phone numbers of a couple of people upstate, which had been my territory during the 1972 McGovern campaign. I gave him the information he needed and asked him “does this count?”, meaning “does this count as a contested primary? Are you risking your perfect record?” He knew what I meant and said, “I’ll tell you after the weekend.”

And after the weekend, he said “yes, it counts.” He had engineered a coalition among Carey, attorney-general candidate Robert Abrams, and lieutenant-governor candidate Maryann Krupsak to share poll coverage on election day. And all three of them swept to victory; Howard Samuels never had any power in state politics again.

One lesson Dick taught me, applied in 1974, was that in a statewide Democratic primary in New York, if you can establish that one candidate is clearly the liberal and another the moderate, the liberal will always win. I used that knowledge to win quite a few bets in 1982, when Mario Cuomo, again with Dick’s help, defeated Ed Koch for the gubernatorial nominantion in a result not expected by anybody except Dick Wade and the people who learned their politics from him.

For the last several years, even though his health had been in a gradual decline for more than a decade, we kept up having lunch every few months. Most of the recent times, I would go visit Dick with Ed Rogoff, whom I met on the NY McGovern campaign. Our last visit with the Professor was in June when we discussed the happy prospect of an Obama presidency. Dick’s comment on Obama was the hushed, almost reverent observation: “he has made so FEW mistakes!”

Right after we saw Dick, I read two books, both called “The Last Campaign.” The first one was about Truman’s 1948 race and in it were a lot of things I needed to ask Dick about. The book reported that it was the ADA that did the work for Truman of painting Wallace as too close to the communists, and Dick was a charter ADAer. I know he would have had interesting things to say about that.

But the second one was about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, and Dick was all over it. I had known that Dick had a lot to do with Richard Hatcher’s election as mayor of Gary. But I did not know that Dick had — according to this book — led a faction in the RFK campaign that said “keep campaigning among the black voters and keep talking about civil rights” that was opposed by another faction that said “we have the black vote wrapped up; let’s just go after the white voters and not take chances alienating them.” According to this book, Ted Kennedy was the leader of the cautious faction.

I was reading this book in London. I emailed Ed and said, “we have to go visit the Professor as soon as possible. We have to ask him about the things in this book.” Ed reached out immediately, but was told by Dick’s wife, Liane, that he was not up to a visit. We should try again next week. And the next week he died.

Dick Wade was a great man. He spent decades close to power and the powerful, but he never wanted anything except what was right for the country. For him, race was America’s exceptional challenge and devotion to civil rights was every citizen’s greatest responsibility. He was also fun, witty, kind, and a great storyteller. His loss is irreplaceable. It was an enormous privilege and joy to have been his friend.

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