I learned a good deal about campaign financing and proposed reforms to it from a man named Burt Neuborne, a professor and the legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. I met Burt, and his colleague Josh Rosenkranz, through my association with The Creative Coalition (TCC), which I served as president of beginning in 1995. TCC was founded by the actor Ron Silver. Silver had the ego of an Argentinean polo player. When we traveled together to Albany on an Amtrak train in 1990, Silver masticated every syllable while expertly coaching our group for a meeting with Governor Mario Cuomo about the pending New York State Environmental Quality Bond Act. Silver was there again in 1997, when we gave testimony before Congress regarding the federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts. Silver drilled us with the opposition’s talking points and anticipated questions. He taught us about “cover”—the response we’d have ready when our opponents made the inflammatory remark we hoped they would make—which often served as the counterpunch that won the argument for our side. It was the political education of a lifetime. Silver, who had played Alan Dershowitz in the film Reversal of Fortune, possessed the mind of a lawyer beyond anyone I had ever met who didn’t actually hold a law degree, as well as a political acumen that easily could have put him in office. In fact, several people I’ve met while on the TCC advocacy path were among the most informed and dedicated of activist-artists. Richard Masur, a TCC member and onetime president of the Screen Actors Guild, knew more about health insurance, in terms of both policy and politics, than anyone I’d met. The same goes for Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H regarding the death penalty.
My own political education began in the den of my childhood home as I sat with my father watching the events of the late 1960s, particularly the Vietnam War, unfold on network television news. By the time I was ten, my political consciousness was already nearly concretized. In that regard, I’m no different from people who are raised in a home that is pro or anti any of the issues of the day: the NRA, immigration, gay marriage, abortion, or Obamacare. Politicization starts at home. My politics are my dad’s politics, based on the simple idea that, as the richest nation on Earth, America has a greater obligation to reach out and help those who have not realized even a modicum of what we take for granted here. The standard of living, the freedoms, the educational opportunities, and the hopes for a better life, if only for our children, are either elusive or completely out of reach for an exploding number. This is also true here at home, and it’s unconscionable.
On the cold afternoon of November 22, 1963, my friends and I played in a neighbor’s yard while our mothers huddled around a television watching the news following the assassination of President Kennedy. This was the first political event I recall. I was five years old. My father deeply admired the Kennedy family’s blend of intelligence, wit, and, above all, idealism, so JFK’s death hit him very hard. He drove down to Washington to experience the president’s funeral, standing among the large crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue to view the cortege.
A mere five years later, Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles, an act that would dramatically change my father’s life, as well as the fate of the country. The hope that the United States would leave Vietnam and end the insanity there, for both countries, died in the Ambassador Hotel as well. Bobby Kennedy’s funeral would be different for my dad. He took my sister Beth, my brother Daniel, and me into Manhattan, where we stood in the incredibly long line filing north up Park Avenue from what was then the Pan Am building. The line turned left onto 51st Street, and the mourners were ushered into the northern entrance of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As I was about to enter, a reporter for WOR radio approached me with a microphone, and asked, “Are you going to pray for Senator Kennedy?” I was stunned and silent, but the reporter persisted as my father just shrugged, as if to say, “Well, answer him!” “Are you here to pray for the senator?” the reporter asked again. “Yes,” I replied sheepishly. “What are you going to say?” he asked. “A Hail Mary,” I said. “How does that go?” he asked. On June 8, 1968, at the 51st Street entrance to St. Patrick’s, I recited the Hail Mary at Robert Kennedy’s funeral for a New York radio audience. After that, politically speaking, what other future could I possibly have?
After my unsuccessful run for class president at George Washington, I started to become more jaded. The election opened my eyes to the kinds of people who envision themselves in leadership roles. When I’d arrived for freshman orientation at GW, I unpacked my bags in a six-man suite where four of my five roommates had already declared themselves political science majors, and two of those four stated that they were planning to run for president of the United States one day. (The one guy not studying poli-sci moved out after one semester, as he wanted to live with other premeds, or “anyone who knew what they were talking about.”) At school, I interned for the congressman from my home district, Jerome Ambro. Right away, I was given an assignment working with the organization No Greater Love, a veterans group that wanted each of the country’s 435 members of Congress to help recognize a Vietnam vet from their district who had successfully reacclimated upon returning home. After a couple of days’ worth of research, I recommended Ron Kovic.
Kovic, a Massapequa native who had been taught by my father in high school, was the author of the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, which was later made into a hit film by Oliver Stone starring Tom Cruise. Ambro’s chief of staff and district director went slightly nuts at my suggestion. They brought me in to meet the congressman, who thanked me for my efforts and then explained how Kovic’s antiwar positions made him precisely the wrong vet for the program. I spent the rest of the semester reassigned to “constituent services,” which usually meant helping track down some type of missing government benefit for a voter from the district. The rest of the time, I would join the other interns at receptions all over the Hill, where we drank, ate as many hors d’oeuvres as possible, and lied, expanding the scope of our internship’s responsibilities as much as possible.