My Initial Interest in Politics; Monroe, Columbia, 2006, R 1-20

I’ve been interested in politics throughout my life. My first experience with national politics was the 1948 presidential election, when I was nine years old. I vaguely knew the Truman was running against Dewey, but knew nothing about them. I knew that Truman was president and Dewey was Governor of New York. One morning on the way to school, Dickie Oatman, a friend of Stuart’s, asked who I was supporting for president, and having no idea I answered “Dewey”. Dickie then twisted my arm until I agreed that I was in favor of Truman. When I got home, I asked my parents who there were voting for, and they said “Truman”. That settled it; I was a Democrat for life…. thanks to Dickie Oatman.

In fourth grade, we had daily verbal reports on the news by a group of five or six kids. The reporting encouraged us to be aware of what was going on and read the newspapers and listen to the radio (this was before television!). I always reported on international and national affairs for our group and read the Times Union and Democrat and Chronicle daily. The New York Times was not available in Rochester at that time!

Our family bought our first television set around 1950. In the summer of 1952, I was glued to the TV set watching the conventions. As an aside, I didn’t like overnight camp very much although I did go to Boy Scout Camp Eagle Island or the JY Camp Seneca for a couple weeks over a few years. My summers were spent riding my Schwinn red and silver bicycle (Stuart had an English Raleigh), going to Charlotte Beach by bus, and reading. In high school, I worked for Uncle Less’ Workingmen’s Family Stores, a discount clothing chain, and in college was a U.S. Mailman, usually using Stuart’s Ford sedan while he went to some medical programs working over the summer.

1952 was the first year that the Democratic and Republican inventions were televised live, and they were not then shows prepared for television viewer consumption, but rather real political conventions, filled with drama and surprise. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower battled Senate majority leader Robert Taft of Ohio for the Republican nomination and it went right down to the wire, with Gen. Douglas MacArthur receiving only a handful of votes. In those days there were few primaries, and the governors controlled how their state delegates would vote. No one will probably remember that it was Gov. Phil Fine of Pennsylvania, controlling at that time the second or third largest delegation, who just a week before the convention met with both Eisenhower and Taft and simply announced that all of Pennsylvania’s deletes would vote for Eisenhower. That practically wrapped it up.

The traditional conservatives supported Taft, mostly from the Midwest and Mountain states, and the international wing of the party, led by Gov. Dewey, who had pushed the Eisenhower for President movement, was firmly for Ike. Gov. Earl Warren of California was also a candidate but shifted all of his votes to Eisenhower, who might have named him vice-presidential candidate (not sure if he wanted it). However, Ike chose the young Sen. Richard Nixon of California and later appointed Warren to the Supreme Court (an appointment he later regretted).

The Dewey-Eastern Establishment rivalry with the powerful Taft-Ohio party had been going on for many years, as Dewey won the Republican nomination for president in 1944 and 1948 against Ohio’s Bricker in ‘44 and Taft in ‘48 (the two Republican senators both wanted to be president).

The Democratic convention was also dramatic, with no front runner once Truman decided not to seek reelection, particularly after being beaten by Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee in the New Hampshire primary. Kefauver was a reformer and rebel who got to the Senate by beating the machine that controlled the state, flakily always wearing a coonskin cap while campaigning. But he understood the power of television before anyone else in politics, and held hearings in major cities around the country, that were televised live, investigating the mafia, with major figures dragged before the committee to face the public for the first time in their lives. That propelled him to his serious run for the presidency.

Truman and the other party leaders were intent on stopping him, and finally talked Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois into being the candidate and pushed Kefauver aside.

I was captivated by the entire process, watching both conventions all day and into the night, and began to read about politics and political history. 1952 was prior to immense reach and power of television since it was not in great use nationwide. The candidates held whistle stop tours by train and I went to the New York Central station in Rochester carrying a Stevenson sign when he came to Rochester. I also did that when Ike came too!! And I had the only such sign at the station---no one bothered me.

A few years later, Stevenson came to Rochester to speak at some event and I went to the Seneca Hotel to hear him, and somewhere I have a picture of Stevenson sitting in an open convertible about to leave, with me standing alongside the car. I don’t recall if we exchanged any words. Stevenson’s speeches were works of art – – – intellectual, eloquent and accessible, a standard for any public speaker. He probably would have been a great president, certainly better than many we have had, but had the misfortune of running t against Dwight Eisenhower twice.

I always wondered why Eisenhower chose Warren for the Supreme Court, and Dewey’s international advisor, John Foster Dulles, for Secretary of State, when Dewey would have loved either position.

I carried my political interest into school elections at Monroe High, and I managed the campaign in our junior year of my close friend Mark Kolko for vice president of the school student government. Everyone in the school voted so these campaigns were major practice in politics, and the halls were filled with posters as the principal means of communication, along with talking up your candidate to as many people as possible. The basement of our home at 237 Berkeley St. was the site of all of the poster painting parties for Mark. Honora ran for Secretary and held poster painting parties at her home. Mark won but Honora lost; our friend Don Pfaff was elected president. We and many of our friends were on the Student Council, which met monthly. I served on it automatically as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Monroe Life, won the award as the best upstate high school newspaper as determined at the Empire State School Press Association conference at Syracuse University School of Journalism held each year. Honora was the news editor, and we both went to the convention our senior year, and attended a Syracuse football game and saw the great star Jim Brown in action.

At this point, I should describe a side issue. There were two honor societies at Monroe, the usual one for everybody, along as one just for male Jewish students, to which I was elected. I soon concluded that it was totally unfair and inappropriate for there to be a religious or ethnic-based honor society and I resigned. I also took the position that it shouldn’t exist and refused to allow news of the new members to be covered in the monthly issue of Monroe Life. Honora didn’t yet share those values, and insisted on putting it in the paper. I thereupon fired her as news editor. I hired her back shortly thereafter.

As a senior, I ran the campaign for a friend and fraternity brother, Steve Malley, who was a delightful, popular and colorful guy, running against one of the very brightest people in the class, also a good friend. I believed that electing Steve would be important in order to make student government more inclusive, and not simply the domain of the very brightest people in the school. I felt Steve would be a unifying influence, and he did turn out to be just that.

Aside from being involved in the painting parties, I also realized that the younger classes did not know the candidates, so I organized and enlisted a team captain for Steve in every single homeroom of the lower grades (8th and 9th). While the vote counts were never released, I understand that Steve won almost all the votes of kids in the lower grades through the campaign system I created of having one student who was in charge of contacting every kid in his or her homeroom and urging them to vote for Steve. I don’t recall how we identified them, but that was the beginning of my political organizational skills!

When I got to Columbia College, I decided to enter campus politics, rather than the student newspaper, probably a mistake. However, I ran for the board of representatives of the student body and was elected, serving both my freshman and sophomore years. At the end of our freshman year, I was elected a member of the Van Am society, along with others who became among my best friends: Dave Blicker, Mal Jozoff, Joe Lane, John Leonardo and my fraternity brother and junior year suite-mate, Burtt Ehrlich, and others. Blicker was designated as a junior to be the freshman week coordinator and he chose me to run all the organizational aspects for the freshman week operation, relating to rooming, events, meals etc. and everything worked out beautifully. Later in my junior year I was awarded the Milch Prize, presented to one junior each year, probably for my work on freshman week.

I then decided to go behind the scenes and didn’t run for office again, but I managed the campaign of Dave Blicker for president of the student body. There was also fierce rivalry for elections in our class that year, and our slate narrowly lost until it was determined that a few of the friends of the other slate had arranged for classmates to vote more than once. That led to a scandal with one student being expelled, and the election was held again, which our side won. The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, ran a major article analyzing the efforts of the two campaigns and it was titled “The Kaplan Machine versus The Tsucalas Machine.” John Tsucalas was later also active in alumni affairs and was a good guy, whom I would see from time to time at Columbia events. At that point it was simply a laughing matter for all of us since student government in those days was powerless and disregarded by the administration.

For example, we on the student board petition the administration for permission for girls to visit our rooms, with of course strict guidelines such as the door left open etc. etc. there was turned down. This was of course before the freedom movements of the 1960s, which along with antiwar activism and civil rights, swept away much of the musty and fusty rules that most colleges tried to enforce throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.

One of the losers in the Columbia uprising of 1968 was the president of Columbia, Grayson Kirk, who had been a professor and was the successor to Dwight Eisenhower as president of Columbia when Ike went to the White House. Kirk was always very formal, almost a regal figure with a close-cropped gray mustache. He rarely met with students. I regarded him as distant and cold, at least until the day of our graduation, when graduating seniors and their parents were invited to a reception at the presidential mansion on Morningside Drive. My parents and I did that and toward the end of the reception when there were very few people around, I decided to check the place out and wandered around the first floor of the mansion. I walked into a room in which I saw President and Mrs. Kirk standing in a room looking out one door with their backs to the entrance which I was just entering. President Kirk’s hand was firmly placed on his wife’s rear and. I beat a hasty retreat before all three of us would have been embarrassed.