16

The End of My Long Sixties

History is like water. It ebbs. It flows. History moves slowly. Until suddenly it doesn’t. Social movements cannot be willed into existence, nor are they created by organizers and activists. They are the product of deep social and historical forces. Economic, social, political, and cultural forces converge. Wars, depressions, demographic changes, new technologies all disrupt old ways of doing things. These large-scale changes sometimes produce extraordinary moments, the moments of social movement when ordinary people feel pulled out of the quotidian trajectory of their lives to do remarkable things.

While leaders and organizers and activists do not bring a social movement into existence, leaders have a huge impact on its direction, its success or failure. Think: Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, or Vaclav Havel. Alongside the leaders there are always organizers working to turn feeling into program, emotion into action, action into lasting organization, working to educate and structure the great awakenings that come with social movements. Organizers prepare for the moments of social movement. Then they take advantage of the high tides of social movements to grab a bit of the ground the waves have made possible and hold some of it once the waves recede, as they always must.

I think of my “long sixties” as the twenty-three years when I went from a young boy to a man, to a father, from an activist to a skilled organizer. Two decades when I tried with every cell of my hyperactive brain to alter history. I started as a despairing adolescent; I traveled across amazing peaks of hope and desperation; I witnessed the dignity and audacity of so many “ordinary” people attempting the extraordinary. I felt a direct connection to history. For twenty-three years the “movement” gave my life purpose and meaning. And yet I emerged humbled and confused.

Starting in 1980, I went through a hideous three-year period. First my mother died an ugly death from cancer, the disease breaking most of the bones in her body. Dealing with her illness and protracted dying was unrelenting, depressing, and disruptive. After she died, my seventeen-year-old marriage reached a final crisis, unraveled, and ended in divorce, leaving me caring for two young daughters most of the time. For two years there had been endless sessions with marriage counselors and perpetual crises at home. Then in the year after Amy and I agreed to divorce, I received a call from my father’s doctor. He had failed to show up at his appointment and was not answering his phone. After getting no answer, I went to his apartment with the police who broke the door, and we found my father dead on the floor by his desk. He had finally experienced the fatal heart attack we had been dreading for years.

As my personal life went from crisis to crisis, Fair Share encountered a severe financial challenge. The organization had grown faster than my ability to manage it. In 1981 we abruptly lost our forty Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) slots as the new Reagan administration moved quickly to make sure no federal resources went into progressive organizing. The proper response should have been to make significant staff reductions and reduce spending. I refused. Feeling battered on all sides, I locked myself into a path of obstinately persevering. I was convinced that we could weather the storm, keep everyone on staff, and somehow will our way through it. Our inexperienced financial team agreed. Our phone fundraising was going remarkably well. The gross revenues from the canvass remained high.

The organization careened from one cash shortage to another. We delayed payments to our landlords and to other vendors. We episodically delayed payroll.

The financial crisis exacerbated tensions within the staff. In 1979 and 1980, as our reputation grew, older longtime organizers from across the country had asked to join Fair Share. While they brought a lot of prior experience and talent, they also brought their own ways of doing things and, in several cases, a distinctly competitive approach. The result was that as the organization experienced financial strain, there was, for the first time, the growth of factionalism inside the large staff and criticism of my leadership, which, to be accurate, was suffering acutely from my personal crises.

We seemed unable to get on top of what we thought were perpetual cash flow challenges. I replaced the finance director with someone who came with experience managing nonprofit finance departments. My choice was a serious mistake. He had neither the skill nor the character to deal with the complexities we faced. Once we fired him, we discovered bookkeeping irregularities along with unsent checks to the IRS in his desk drawer.

Finally, our banker, John Marston, a good friend, requested that we bring in an outside accountant, Tom Feeley. Tom brought in a small team to pour through our books. He then sat me down to deliver the bad news. While we were indeed raising $3,000,000 a year, we had been spending $3,400,000 for the last three years. We had a deficit of $1,200,000 and there was no way we could pay off our debts. We owed money to the bank. We owed money to the IRS that was accumulating exorbitant interest and penalties. The canvass that raised such a large share of our budget had been so costly that there had been no net income for the last several years. We had no system of spending controls. Our books were a mess. The bank would be forced to call our loans. The IRS would demand payment immediately. “Michael,” Tom said, “you are broke and out of options. You need to slash spending, tell everyone who cosigned loans that they must pay back the bank the guaranteed portion of the loans. I will work with you to get an agreement from the IRS to waive penalties and put you on a strict payment plan. The bank will have to eat the loans that are not guaranteed. But to start with, you need to make massive cuts in spending immediately.”

I enacted devastating layoffs of two-thirds of the staff, beginning with myself. Everyone, including me, was in complete shock. At first, I slogged on, heartbroken, dazed. Without a paycheck I was not sure how I would survive, but I refused to abandon Fair Share, thinking I could figure out something.

For the first time in my life, I experienced profound failure on top of failure. I could not save my parents. I could not save my marriage. While I refused to admit it, I could not save Fair Share.

I had to tell friends and donors who had cosigned our loans that now they had to pay the bank. With Tom’s help I was desperately negotiating payment plans with the IRS. I was dealing with irate vendors who had not been paid for months. I was miserable. I was a mess.

After several months of this, the senior women in the organization asked to take me out to lunch. At the meeting, one by one, gently, respectfully but firmly, they told me that it was time for me to leave Fair Share. “You have two small daughters that need your care,” one emphasized. “You’re a wreck and need to take care of yourself,” another said. “While we appreciate your sense of responsibility, you need to resign and step away,” they all said in one way or another. Listening to them I simultaneously felt waves of great sadness and relief. They were right. I was a wreck. I was not really doing anyone any good attempting to soldier on.

I told the Fair Share leaders, many of whom were still in shock and many of whom were furious with me, that I had to resign, and that they needed to find a replacement from within the remaining senior staff. I was delighted that they chose Mark Dyen, who, with some trepidation, was willing to do what he could in the face of enormous challenges. I felt great guilt about leaving Fair Share in such a state. But I was done. I was exhausted. I was a shell of myself, and I had two young daughters who needed me.

Fair Share would continue for several more years. It would even win important victories. But the financial crash had started it on a downward spiral that, despite the heroic efforts of the remaining staff, could not be reversed.

There certainly had been other weaknesses with the organization. We suffered from the inaccurate dichotomy between “organizers” and “leaders” that was common to community organizing in those days. We were too dependent on staff. We also experienced difficulty translating our power into the electoral arena. At the start we had positioned the organization as outside the corruption of Massachusetts politics. We always intended to enter that arena once we had built power and credibility. Having sharply criticized electoral politics, we encountered internal resistance when we proposed directly playing a role in elections. Yet to truly win what we were fighting for, we needed to be able to defeat politicians who opposed us and elect a new wave of leaders who emerged from the organization or supported our program. That new wave of leaders was emerging and beginning in small numbers to be elected to municipal positions, but they were running on their own, without the organization officially throwing its resources into their campaigns. After I left, many of the Boston leaders and many of the Boston staff organized the successful populist mayoral campaign of Ray Flynn and became his political organization. That demonstrated Fair Share’s strength in Boston but also weakened it as they left the organization to join Flynn. With time, Fair Share could have made the needed transition, but our financial crisis short-circuited everything.

While Fair Share did not last, its impact persisted. A remarkable group of young Fair Share organizers went on to work for unions, electoral campaigns, environmental groups, and other organizations. They would lead other community organizations, revitalize several unions, elect mayors, run cities, enter state legislatures, run foundations, work on presidential campaigns, head think tanks, and organize undocumented immigrants. One became a lawyer who won major legal victories for Native Americans, and another filed successful suits against lead paint and tobacco companies. Others would become elected officials, judges, and beloved teachers. They all would say that their time at Fair Share was essential to who they became.

When I left Fair Share in 1983, I was worn out. Certainly, I was drained by three years of an unending succession of tragedies. I was also exhausted by the continuous effort to exert leadership for so many years, starting at such a young age. So much of what I had tried to do had been through acts of will. It is trite but true to say that I had focused so much on the work, I had done little to renew myself. I had believed that being part of the movement would in and of itself be nourishing. It was not enough.

Not only was I exhausted but so were the social movements I had been a part of for so many years. The New Left was no longer. The youth revolt had largely been turned into a marketing ploy. The heroic civil rights wave had accomplished so much but was now meeting an inevitable backlash. The antiwar movement had dissipated. The failure of the movements of the 1960s to create an effective political expression left a vacuum. Still, powerful currents had been unleashed that would travel on, gain steam, and change the country. The women’s movement would forever alter what was possible for women. A growing environmental movement would force new ways of thinking about our world, nature, and our responsibilities. A new gay rights movement would over the next forty years change America, winning seemingly impossible transformations.

I left Fair Share, and my world changed dramatically. No longer was I a full-time organizer. My phone rarely rang. I had no meeting to organize or attend. I focused primarily on my two delightful daughters. And so, like many of my generation, I turned to the one area where, perhaps, I might feel some success: raising my children.

In the next years I would put my daughters first. I would work as a very part-time consultant to the Nuclear Freeze Campaign and the Central American Peace Campaign. Over time I would consult on voter registration strategies and work on political campaigns, including, ironically, Michael Dukakis’s campaign for president. I would stumble into running several businesses. I would retain the fundamental values that had been formed in the movements of the 1960s. But I would no longer define myself as a full-time organizer. In many ways I was adrift without that identity.

In 1996 I would experience a profound midlife crisis and become unforgivably embroiled in a headline-producing scandal around the campaign of the reform president of the Teamsters Union. I would, unknowingly, participate in a conspiracy of money laundering, misuse of union dues, fraud, and extortion of union contractors. I was guilty of multiple felonies. Once I understood, way too late, what I had been part of, I took full responsibility, pleading guilty to one felony count. I would argue with supportive friends who claimed I was the victim of overzealous prosecution, “No,” I would state, “I am guilty.” My negligence was indefensible.

Over the years, I would slowly rebuild my life, become a poet and essayist, and volunteer for campaigns and with nonprofit organizations. However, I would never again have the heady sense that I was leading thousands, that I was making history. I remain acutely aware of my flaws. My hope is to be helpful to a new generation of leaders.

Looking back on my “long sixties,” I was fortunate enough to have been one of roughly 10,000 women and men of my age group who participated full-time in the great efforts of those years: to split apart the relentless hold of racism, to end a war that should never have been waged, to create new organizations that were massive schools of democracy, to support the birth of a movement that irrevocably altered the role of women, to organize low-income and blue-collar communities to have a voice and to fight for their fair share.

Many people today ask me: don’t you miss the sixties? I do miss that feeling of being part of something so much larger than myself. I do miss the sense of being connected to history in such a direct and raw way. I miss being a young, idealistic activist. I miss feeling the power of bending, or at least attempting to bend, the arc of history.

I do not miss the feeling of waking up every day thinking that so many people’s lives depend upon what we—including me with all my shuddering imperfections and immaturities—will be able to do. The feeling, every single day, of not being good enough, not being smart enough, not being effective enough to live up to the imperatives we faced. I do not miss the fear, the experiences of detectives with large guns putting those barrels to my head, screaming, “One of these days I am going to blow your head off you motherfucking maggot!” No, I do not miss that.

I do not miss the feeling that I could not save those well-meaning boys who did not have my student draft deferment and were going to die because we could not awaken enough of the country. I do not miss the terrible sadness of Dr. King gunned down on a balcony in Memphis; of Fred Hampton shot to death in his bed in Chicago; of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney buried in the mud of Mississippi; of the protesting students at Kent State and Jackson State who were killed; of the countless children napalmed; of getting into my comfortable bed knowing that a half a world away, Vietnamese and Americans my own age would meet that night in cramped underground tunnels, and many of them would die.

I do not miss the weight of knowing that we, our band of desperate, hopeful young people, were all that stood in the way of an even wider war.

And I do not miss so much of what was the America of 1960. In twenty-six states, it was illegal for a man and woman of different races to marry. It was illegal for consenting adults of the same sex to make love. Girls were not allowed to play baseball. Law firms did not have women partners. It was a time when the overwhelming number of college students believed the president of the United States never lied. When men were supposed to be “real men.” When people were just beginning to read Silent Spring and have a conception of something called the environment. The rivers in midwestern industrial cities regularly caught fire and no one thought it unusual. It was a time of unrestrained American imperial misadventures, not just in Asia but also in Central America and the Caribbean and the Middle East.

I do not miss the America we set out to change, and I do not miss the grind and fear and endless pressure of a war that had to be stopped.

I do miss the bountiful sense of hope and history, knowing for certain that I was a small part of something so much larger.

Of course, looking back now, I wish I had done better, been smarter. Oh, how I wish I had understood the necessity of always holding the moral high ground, the imperative to always and explicitly embrace nonviolence. I wish I could have grasped a strategy that included both disruptive protest and effective electoral action. I wish I had better understood how much symbolism and words matter; I wish that we had always marched only under the American flag. And of course, I wish that the weight of the war had not driven so many of us crazy. Despite all that I am proud of what we attempted. What we did was important.

And, of course, I would do it all again, in a heartbeat.