The Wicked Wine of Democracy: A Memoir of a Political Junkie, 1948-1995

1. A Political Junkie

1 A POLITICAL JUNKIE i was born to be a political junkie. a political junkie is distinguished by one universal characteristic—a fascination-absorptioncompulsion -passion for politics that sometimes defies rationality. There were periods in my life when my entire being was consumed by politics, as family , friends, food, and sleep were forgotten in the chase for the holy grail of political success. When I emerged from those periods, it was with a sense of shock that I had let myself become so possessed. It is hard to understand until it happens to you. Political junkies have always been around. From the time of Plato and Socrates, Caesar and Cato, they have been an integral part of the political process, camp followers drawn irresistibly to the flame of potential power. They have come in every form of humankind: the idealists and the cynics, the enchanted and the disenchanted, the lost and the lonely, the dreamers and the pragmatists, the reformers and the plunderers, the dilettantes and the dedicated, the limousine liberals and the hoi polloi—in short, the people, the populace, demos, democracy. Politics is the one game in which everyone can play, and new blood almost always is welcomed. Motivations are as diverse as the players are. Mine were mixed. I did have a general notion that society’s underclass—particularly people of color—was getting the shaft from the ruling class. Otherwise, I was drawn to the political arena by a youthful lust for the action. I wanted to bust the heads of Republicans and businessmen, and I fantasized that success could make me 3 an instant celebrity. Early on, I dreamed of being on the cover of Time magazine as “the new Democratic kingmaker.” It was a role I craved. I almost made it. My high-water mark came on September 17, 1957, when the Washington Post and Times Herald profiled me as “the Democrats’ answer to Madison Avenue.” My head inflated like a Macy’s parade balloon, and I made some implacable enemies, including Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Francis Kennedy. It was not a smart thing to do. Bobby Kennedy and I clashed over the Oregon and Wisconsin presidential primaries of 1960, and I ended up relegated to a meaningless role in the general election campaign. No matter how right I thought I was, it made no sense to challenge the candidate’s brother. I had to learn it the hard way. Lyndon Johnson and I took an instant dislike to each other, and things deteriorated from there. During one heated exchange, I lost my temper. He paid me back within a week of assuming the presidency. My two principal clients fired me—at his personal request. I only survived in Washington, D.C., because I had two Oregon clients he didn’t know about. But this is getting ahead of the story, which began on January 1, 1922, when I was born at Manhattan Maternity Hospital under the shadow of the Queensborough Bridge in New York City. My dad, Herbert Rinehart Miller, was a former actor who had left the stage after twelve successful years because his dying father thought it was a wicked place. Now he was a lawyer-lecturer living on the margin. My mother, Dorothy Lillian Spencer, had grown up in affluence in St. Louis, her father the secretary-treasurer of the world’s largest shoe company. She had gone to Smith College and aspired to a stage career in New York when she met Dad. The Crash of 1929 would wipe out the comfortable world in which I was raised. By 1932, we were flat broke, dislodged from a handsome house in the suburb of Mt. Vernon, New York, and living in an apartment house in northern Manhattan. Dad saw the Great Depression as a plot against him personally . Almost fifty and a onetime “golden boy,” he had never known adversity, and he was unable to cope with it. He took out his frustration on the person closest to him—my mother. Life at home became hell much of the time. Mother disappeared in November 1934, taking my four-year-old brother Jonathan with her, and Dad descended into bouts of alcoholism. I was pretty 4 a political junkie much left to my own devices under the general aegis of “Aunt Delia” Stebbins , a Manhattan schoolteacher who had lived with us. Much of my time was spent learning...