Journeys to War and Peace: A Congressional Memoir

Prologue

prologue The Making of a Congressman • It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out . . . where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again . . . but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms . . . who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst . . . at least fails while daring greatly. • theodore roosevelt • “The Man in the Arena” Who can say for sure what factors determine someone’s destiny in life? My path to Congress was neither predictable nor easy. There were several contributing factors: a father with an intense interest in politics; a broken home that left me with wounded self-esteem; a group of friends and classmates who gave me confidence in myself; a drive to seek validation as early as sixth grade, when I discovered in myself a capacity for leadership; and a desire that my life should make a difference. But my trajectory also involved a series of fortuitous coincidences and opportunities that could never have been predicted. I was born September 12, 1940, at the height of the London Blitz—a brutal battle mirrored in a small way by the fighting between my mom and dad in our apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. My parents divorced a few months later; they had been married less than two years. Among other grievances, my mother apparently resented my father’s spending almost every evening campaigning on the streets for President Franklin Roosevelt. For reasons I didn’t discover until many years later, my mother decided not to keep me and the court awarded custody to my 2 prologue father. My birth mother disappeared from my life and was never spoken of again in the family. It would be twenty years before I met her for the first time. A few years later, my father married Laura Sussel, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and I grew up loving her deeply. But it was a troubled marriage . My father often shouted at my stepmother. She would lock herself in the bathroom while he stood outside, banging angrily on the door. For a young child it was a traumatic experience. My father and Laura divorced when I was ten, and she too completely vanished from my life. I tracked her down about three decades later and was deeply disappointed to discover that she had no interest in reestablishing a relationship with me. After my father’s second divorce, I went to live with my Aunt Beattie , my father’s older sister, in Brooklyn. She was widowed and had two sons, Howard and Billy, both in their early twenties. Meanwhile, my father moved in with his parents, who also lived in Brooklyn. I spent weekdays with my aunt and cousins in the Midwood section of Brooklyn and weekends with my father and grandparents in Flatbush. For the first time, my life became relatively normal. My Aunt Beattie clearly loved me, and I was grateful to her for taking me in. I idolized my cousin Billy, a great athlete who charmed virtually everyone he came in contact with. My cousin Howard, much more subdued, was handicapped by a pronounced and persistent stutter, though he had a certain sweetness. On my aunt’s tree-lined block lived about a half-dozen boys my age.My life growing up with friends like Mark Groothuis, Ross Brechner, Howard Siegel, Bennet Perlmutter, Elliot Puritz, Johnny Plaskow, and Warren Kronenberg was joyful: an endless round of softball, stickball, stoopball, football, basketball, and slapball. The boys on the block became a kind of family for me, a genuine band of brothers. Sixty years later, we still get together for annual reunions. I have never quite sorted out how this unconventional upbringing affected me. My father, an attorney with his own practice, was very intelligent and had a good sense of values. I was the center of his universe. He passed on to me his love of books. He took me to my first theatrical productions , An Enemy of the People, about a courageous doctor who discovers that the healing waters that constitute the major tourist attraction in his Norwegian town are infected with disease and must be closed down, [3.145.119.199] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06:01 GMT...