One of my favorite stories about politics. Seven words. Such wisdom. He was 34. At 17.5, I began work as an intern in Senator Ted Kennedy's office, and learned how to pick up the phone. (Yes, my mentors taught me to give good phone.)
Harris Wofford died yesterday, January 21, 2019, 58 years and one day since he and JFK desegregated the Coast Guard.
What a life.
Here is the obituary from National Public Radio:
Harris Wofford, Former Senator, Civil-Rights Activist, Dies At 92
Former Sen. Harris Wofford, a life-long civil-rights advocate and backer of progressive causes died Monday at a Washington hospital at age 92.
Wofford died after suffering a fall, his son told The Washington Post.
His death on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday was perhaps, appropriate. He marched alongside King in Selma, and played a key, behind-the-scenes role in the 1960 presidential campaign, by encouraging Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy to reach out to Corretta Scott King, after the Rev. King was imprisoned for a minor traffic violation in Georgia.
Late in his life, Wofford, whose wife Clare died in 1996, married Matthew Charlton, a man 50 years younger whom he met some years earlier on a beach in Florida.
In an essay in the New York Times, Wofford wrote:
Wofford was born in New York City in 1926 and grew up in suburban Scarsdale, N.Y. When he was 11, he accompanied his grandmother on a six-month world tour. He said he saw Mussolini denounce the League of Nations, visited Shanghai after it was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army and, in India, became "fascinated" by Mahatma Gandhi.
He volunteered for the Army Air Corps in World War II, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1948. He later attended Howard University Law School, becoming one of the first white graduates. He also received a law degree from Yale.
He served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and became a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. After Kennedy's election, he became a special assistant to the president for civil rights, and helped found the Peace Corps, becoming its special representative to Africa, and later an associate director.
After leaving the government, Wofford went into academia, becoming president of the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and then just the second male president of Bryn Mawr.
He also found time to get himself arrested during protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
In the spring of 1991, after spending time as a private practice lawyer and as Pennsylvania's Secretary of Labor and Industry, Wofford was appointed to fill the vacant Senate seat left after Republican Sen. John Heinz III was killed in a plane crash.
He won the special election that November over Republican Richard Thornburgh, in part, by making health care his primary issue. In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, Wofford was asked by host Bob Edwards why it had taken so long for health care to become a major political issue:
But Wofford's tenure in the Senate was short lived. He was defeated in the 1994 GOP congressional sweep by Republican Rick Santorum.
Wofford returned to public service, becoming CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the parent organization of AmeriCorps.
In 2008, he introduced Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama before his Philadelphia speech on race, "A More Perfect Union."
He also became a commentator for NPR. In 1995, during a national debate over affirmative action, Wofford wrote:
"This is still an issue that lays bare the secret heart of America. Let's do it not in the spirit of political warfare, not with partisan hammers, and not with the kind of broad-brush denunciation coming from those whose real goal is to sow division and reap votes. "
"This is still an issue that lays bare the secret heart of America. Let's do it not in the spirit of political warfare, not with partisan hammers, and not with the kind of broad-brush denunciation coming from those whose real goal is to sow division and reap votes. "
From The New York Times:
Harris Wofford, Ex-Senator Who Pushed Volunteerism, Dies at 92
Harris Wofford, a former United States senator from Pennsylvania whose passion for getting people involved helped create John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps and other service organizations and made him America’s volunteer in chief, died on Monday night in Washington. He was 92.
His son Daniel said his death, at George Washington University Hospital, was caused by complications of a fall at Mr. Wofford’s Washington apartment several days earlier.
By the time he became a senator in May 1991, appointed after his predecessor was killed in an aircraft accident, Mr. Wofford was already 65. He had been a lawyer, an author, a professor, the president of two colleges, a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, an adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, the state’s secretary of labor and industry, a champion of civil rights and a leading force in America’s national and community service movement.
ADVERTISEMENT
A month after Senator H. John Heinz III, a Republican, died, Gov. Robert P. Casey was still searching for a replacement, having been turned down by Lee Iacocca, the chairman of Chrysler, and others. Whoever accepted would have to run in a special election in November against the United States attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, a popular former two-term governor who had signaled his intention to seek the seat.
Governor Casey turned to Mr. Wofford, an old friend, who accepted a six-month appointment to the Senate seat pending the special election. Polls showed Mr. Thornburgh with a whopping 47 percent lead, but Mr. Wofford gained steadily in a winning campaign that stressed health care and the economy, themes that resonated with voters and that would underlie Mr. Clinton’s campaign for the presidency a year later. (James Carville and Paul Begala were strategists for both campaigns, and Mr. Wofford was considered for the vice presidency, although Senator Al Gore was chosen.)
Mr. Wofford served out the three remaining years of Mr. Heinz’s term and was narrowly defeated in 1994 by Representative Rick Santorum, a Republican 32 years his junior. But Mr. Wofford had one thing to show for his term: the National and Community Service Act of 1993, which created AmeriCorps, the Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America, federally funded programs that have enlisted hundreds of thousands of volunteers for education, health, environmental cleanups and other public service projects.
After leaving the Senate, Mr. Wofford was named head of AmeriCorps and its parent corporation by Mr. Clinton, who counted the program as a major achievement. Mr. Wofford helped organize America’s Promise, the Alliance for Youth, a nonprofit national service organization to improve children’s lives. In 2001, after six years with AmeriCorps, he succeeded Colin L. Powell as chairman of America’s Promise.
Mr. Wofford’s wife, Clare (Lindgren) Wofford, whom he married in 1948 and with whom he had three children, died in 1996. In April 2016, writing in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, Mr. Wofford disclosed his pending marriage to Matthew Charlton, 40, a designer with whom he had been living for 15 years. They married that year.
“At age 90,” Mr. Wofford wrote, “I am lucky to be in an era where the Supreme Court has strengthened what President Obama calls ‘the dignity of marriage’ by recognizing that matrimony is not based on anyone’s sexual nature, choices or dreams. It is based on love.”
ADVERTISEMENT
In the article, Mr. Wofford did not define himself as gay, writing: “Too often, our society seeks to label people by pinning them on the wall — straight, gay or in between. I don’t categorize myself based on the gender of those I love. I had a half-century of marriage with a wonderful woman, and now am lucky for a second time to have found happiness.”
In addition to his son Daniel and Mr. Charlton, Mr. Wofford is survived by a daughter, Susanne Wofford; another son, David; a brother, John; a sister, Anne Wofford; and six grandchildren.
Harris Llewellyn Wofford was born in New York City on April 9, 1926, and grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was precocious. When he was 10, his maternal grandmother took him out of school for six months and around the world on tramp steamers. He saw 16 countries, witnessing Mussolini’s balcony rant the night he took Italy out of the League of Nations and the ruins of Shanghai after a Japanese bombing.
While a student at Scarsdale High School in 1942, Mr. Wofford — inspired by the journalist Clarence Streit’s idea of world government, a union of democracies — founded an organization, Student Federalists, that expanded to become a 2,500-member movement; he was elected its president in 1943.
In 1944, with World War II well underway, he volunteered for the Army Air Forces but did not leave the country. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1948 and married Clare Lindgren that year.
He and his wife traveled for seven months in Pakistan and India, studying with disciples of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had recently been assassinated. They worked on a kibbutz in Israel for a year and together wrote “India Afire” (1951), which argued for land redistribution.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Wofford studied law at Yale and historically black Howard University, receiving law degrees from both institutions in 1954. He began practicing law in Washington and was a counsel to the United States Civil Rights Commission until 1958. He taught law at the University of Notre Dame in 1959-60 and joined the Kennedy campaign.
ADVERTISEMENT
After the election, he became a special assistant for civil rights and helped R. Sargent Shriver found the Peace Corps, later becoming its representative in Africa and its associate director. In 1965, he joined Dr. King’s civil rights movement in the South and a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and was arrested with other protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In an article in Politico Magazine in 2015, Mr. Wofford recalled passing a note to Dr. King as he spoke to marchers before stepping off in Selma. “First Amendment,” the note said.
“He was eloquently invoking the Bible to support the march,” Mr. Wofford wrote, “and then, glancing down at the note, he added: ‘And we march in the name of the Constitution, knowing the Constitution is on our side. The right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances shall not be abridged. That’s the First Amendment.’ ”
From 1966 to 1970, Mr. Wofford was president of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury (now known as SUNY Old Westbury), on Long Island, and from 1970 to 1978 he was the second male president of Bryn Mawr, the women’s college in Pennsylvania. He practiced law in Philadelphia from 1980 to 1986, when he became state Democratic chairman. He was the state’s secretary of labor and industry from 1987 to 1991.
Mr. Wofford lectured widely and wrote a memoir, “Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties,” published in 1980. In recent years he worked for many service organizations, including Experience Wave, which enlists retirees to tutor in schools. An early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential race, he introduced Mr. Obama in Philadelphia for his celebrated speech on race in America, “A More Perfect Union.”
President Obama, in 2012, awarded Mr. Wofford the Presidential Citizens Medal, the nation’s second-highest civilian honor, for a lifetime of humanitarian work.
In an interview in 2011 with Liz Fanning, the founder and executive director of CorpsAfrica, a Peace Corps project that helps African volunteers work in their own countries, Mr. Wofford hailed the concept of home-country volunteering, especially by students in Africa.
ADVERTISEMENT
“There isn’t the big overseas transportation problem,” he said. “Also, in most cases, there would not be a linguistic problem, which requires a lot of investment.
“Money will of course be a limiting factor, but there is something special about a long journey that is part of one’s education. There should be long journeys in your life, whether in your own country or abroad.”
From The Washington Post:
Harris Wofford, civil rights activist who helped Kennedy win the White House, dies at 92
Harris Wofford, a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, university president and lifelong crusader for civil rights who made a crucial contribution to John F. Kennedy’s slender victory in the 1960 presidential contest, died Jan. 21 at a hospital in Washington. He was 92.
The cause was complications from a fall, said his son, Daniel Wofford.
Raised in a privileged business family, Mr. Wofford attracted national media attention as a teenager during World War II. He helped launch the Student Federalists group, an organization that sought to unite the world’s democracies in a battle against fascism and to keep the postwar peace.
Mr. Wofford became one of the first white students to graduate from the historically black Howard University Law School in Washington. He was an early supporter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and marched alongside him in the civil and voting rights flash point of Selma, Ala. Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother who served as U.S. attorney general, once referred to Mr. Wofford as a “slight madman” in his zeal for advancing civil rights.
Mr. Wofford went on to a wide-ranging career, serving as President John F. Kennedy’s special assistant for civil rights, helping Kennedy in-law R. Sargent Shriver launch the Peace Corps and heading two colleges, including Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania.
In 1991, he defeated a giant of Pennsylvania politics — former Republican governor and U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh — to become the state’s first Democratic senator in more than 20 years. In Philadelphia in 2008, he introduced then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) before the stirring “A More Perfect Union” speech on race relations during the presidential race that would propel Obama to the White House.
President John F. Kennedy with Mr. Wofford and other members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1961. (Byron Rollins/AP)
In 2016, Mr. Wofford described the merging of his personal and political ideals in an essay published in the New York Times, “Finding love again, this time with a man.”
Mr. Wofford, by then a widower, described how he met Matthew Charlton, an interior designer 50 years his junior, and the two became a couple. The essay ended with Mr. Wofford’s announcement that he and Charlton would soon exchange marriage vows. They wed that year.
The courtly, professorial nonagenarian said he did not consider himself gay. “Too often, our society seeks to label people by pinning them on the wall — straight, gay or in between,” he wrote. “I don’t categorize myself based on the gender of those I love.”
He admitted that he had once viewed same-sex marriage, which was legalized in a landmark 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, as a political impossibility. But, as he reflected in the essay, the dramatic social and political change he had witnessed decades earlier should have banished such pessimism.
The 'blue bomb'
In 1960, student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters and restaurants were exploding across the South. That October, at one such protest in Atlanta, King was arrested and jailed.
His predicament worsened after the judge in the case learned of a prior conviction: Several months earlier, King and his wife had been driving a white friend to the hospital in a neighboring county and were pulled over by a police officer suspicious of the interracial group of travelers. The civil rights leader, who had been found guilty of driving with an out-of-state-license, a misdemeanor, was sentenced to four months of hard labor.
His wife, Coretta Scott King, then pregnant with their third child, feared her husband would be killed in jail. Her fear turned to terror after he was yanked from his cell in the middle of the night and taken to a maximum-security prison in Reidsville, Ga. By the time she reached Mr. Wofford, a friend since the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, she was hysterical.
Mr. Wofford, who had been a lawyer for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights before joining the Kennedy presidential campaign, wanted to help but understood the political risks. Knowing that any overt sympathizing with the jailed leader might alienate Southern white voters, Kennedy’s top strategists ruled out any action. His opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, also was staying out of the fray.
Mr. Wofford helped hatch a plan.
“The idea came to me. . . . Why shouldn’t he just call Mrs. King?” Mr. Wofford recounted in the oral history “Voices of Freedom” by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer. “She was very anxious. . . . Why can’t Kennedy at least just call her and say, ‘We’re working at it; we’re going to get him out. You have my sympathy.’ A personal, direct act.”
With encouragement from Shriver, Kennedy placed the call during a campaign stop in Chicago.
King was released the next day after Robert Kennedy, his brother’s campaign manager, made another call — this time to the judge. Kennedy drove home the political importance of freeing King and assured the jurist that his help would make him “a welcome visitor in a future Kennedy White House,” biographer Larry Tye wrote in his 2016 book “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon.”
In black communities across the country, “the grapevine telegraph lit up” with jubilation over the Kennedys’ efforts, Tye wrote.
Mr. Wofford led the charge to tout the phone calls in a pamphlet distributed at black churches across the country the Sunday before the election. Dubbed the “blue bomb” because of the color of the paper on which it was printed, it contrasted “No-Comment Nixon” with the “Candidate With a Heart.” It also featured a powerful endorsement from King’s influential Baptist preacher father.
The pamphlet “circulated below the registry of the news and white culture. It had enormous influence among black voters,” King biographer Taylor Branch said in an interview. Executed behind the backs of the campaign’s leaders, it “shows Harris Wofford’s real shrewdness and possibly his decisive role in history.”
The pamphlet “circulated below the registry of the news and white culture. It had enormous influence among black voters,” King biographer Taylor Branch said in an interview. Executed behind the backs of the campaign’s leaders, it “shows Harris Wofford’s real shrewdness and possibly his decisive role in history.”
Kennedy won the election by 84 electoral votes and a popular margin of 112,000 votes. Seventy percent of black voters cast their ballots for him. In “The Making of the President, 1960,” historian Theodore H. White credited Kennedy’s success to “the master stroke of intervention in the Martin Luther King arrest.”
A precocious start
Harris Llewellyn Wofford Jr., whose father was an insurance executive, was born in New York City on April 9, 1926. He grew up mostly in suburban Scarsdale, N.Y., and was the oldest of three children.
He was 11 when his maternal grandmother took him on a life-altering six-month world tour.
In Rome, he said, he saw dictator Benito Mussolini “thundering” from a balcony against the League of Nations. In Shanghai, he and his grandmother walked through the rubble from the Japanese attack and occupation. In the streets of Mumbai, he said, he saw Mohandas Gandhi.
He later told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he returned to seventh grade as a “know-it-all foreign policy expert.” His fascination with activism was ignited. Within a few years, he had organized the first chapter of the Student Federalists, which later merged with other groups to form what is now Citizens for Global Solutions.
Mr. Wofford served stateside in the Army Air Forces, then graduated from the University of Chicago in 1948. That year, he married fellow student Clare Lindgren and traveled with her throughout India and Pakistan on a fellowship to study the work of Gandhi, who had just been assassinated.
Studying civil disobedience in India spurred Mr. Wofford to enroll at Howard, which he described in his 1980 memoir, “Of Kennedys and Kings,” as “the center of the civil rights law I intended to practice.” He earned law degrees from Howard and Yale University, both in 1954.
Studying civil disobedience in India spurred Mr. Wofford to enroll at Howard, which he described in his 1980 memoir, “Of Kennedys and Kings,” as “the center of the civil rights law I intended to practice.” He earned law degrees from Howard and Yale University, both in 1954.
Five years later, Mr. Wofford helped arrange and underwrite a month-long tour of India for Martin and Coretta King to meet many of Gandhi’s disciples. The trip widened King’s vision and gave him “a more sophisticated view of how social injustice and evil could be combated by the method of nonviolence,” historian David J. Garrow wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King, “Bearing the Cross.”
Mr. Wofford was arrested for protesting police brutality during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and spent a night in jail. He later told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he became disillusioned with the radical youths leading the protests.
“One of the common threads all my life,” he said, “has been a disagreement with those who see politics as primarily focused on their own psychic or ideological satisfaction, those people that want to vote or to protest or be witnesses [without being interested] in the art of persuasion or what the results will be. The protest movement of the late 1960s ended by appalling me.”
From 1966 to 1970, Mr. Wofford served as president of an experimental branch of the State University of New York at Old Westbury on Long Island. He spent the next eight years leading Bryn Mawr as the second male president since the women’s college was founded in 1885.
In 1991, he was Pennsylvania’s secretary of labor and industry when Gov. Robert P. Casey Sr. (D), an early political mentor, appointed him to fill the vacancy created by the death of Sen. John Heinz (R) in a plane crash. Promising balm for the frustrations of the middle class — including a proposal for national health-care reform — Mr. Wofford then defeated Thornburgh with 55 percent of the vote.
Three years later, the discursive former college president lost his seat to Rep. Rick Santorum (R), the hard-charging conservative who helped the GOP take control of the Senate. After leaving office, Mr. Wofford served six years as chief executive of AmeriCorps, the national community service program that was one of his chief legislative achievements as senator.
Clare Wofford died in 1996. In addition to Mr. Wofford’s husband, of Washington, survivors include three children, Susanne Wofford of Manhattan, Daniel Wofford of Bryn Mawr, Pa., and David Wofford of Washington; a brother; a sister; six grandchildren.
Mr. Wofford met Charlton on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., beach.
Quoting a Robert Frost poem about love at first sight, he wrote in his New York Times essay: “Twice in my life, I’ve felt the pull of such passionate preference. At age 90, I am lucky to be in an era where the Supreme Court has strengthened what President Obama calls ‘the dignity of marriage’ by recognizing that matrimony is not based on anyone’s sexual nature, choices or dreams. It is based on love.”
No comments:
Post a Comment