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PI: So I stayed in Washington, having dropped out of college. And I spent, after that demonstration ended in February, I went up to New England where my family lived and became an organizer, a political organizer for people who were running for Congress on what was then called peace platforms. One of them was a Harvard professor named H. Stuart Hughes, a history professor. And he had decided to run for the U.S. Senate as an independent candidate. His two opponents were very young, in fact too young to serve in the Senate at the time he was elected -- young man named Edward Moore Kennedy, now Senator Ted Kennedy. And his opponent was the son of another former senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, a man named George Lodge. So the scions of these two powerful political families were running against each other, and Stuart Hughes was mounting a campaign. And we really thought he had a chance, maybe not of winning but certainly of finishing well above expectations. And something happened. And I worked on his campaign, then I went to New Hampshire to organize a congressional campaign for a woman who was running for Congress as a Democrat, and I went from there -- she lost the primary -- to western Massachusetts to organize another campaign for a man who was running for Congress as a Democrat who was supporting Stuart Hughes for the Senate against his own party's candidate, Ted Kennedy. And something happened just before that election that changed everything and that was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. Stuart Hughes had been running about 20, 25 percent in the polls. In fact, we thought he might even come in second and beat the Republican. And as soon as the Cuban Missile Crisis hit and everybody rallied around the flag except our candidates, we died politically. Stuart Hughes wound up with about four percent of the vote. The guy I was then working for, Bill Hefner, running for Congress wound up with about 28 percent of the vote as a Democrat. And that experience showed me that as hard as you work, things can happen unexpectedly that change the situation radically. And you have to be prepared for that and you have to survive those experiences. And I think a lot of the work that I've done in the years since then has taught me, you temper your enthusiasm and your optimism. So you learn that like life, politics is full of unexpected things happening, and that you have got to go back to the grassroots and many times start over. Same thing happened with the Civil Rights movement after Dr. King was killed, and literally the Civil Rights movement had to start over again. So at any rate, those were important events.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.