Heroes, Hacks, and Fools

Memoirs from the Political Inside

Ted Van Dyk

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989709
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

Ted Van Dyk, a shrewd veteran of countless national political and policy fights, casts fresh light on many of the leading personalities and watershed events of American politics since JFK. He was a Pentagon intelligence analyst during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and an aide to Jean Monnet and other leaders of the European movement before serving at the Johnson White House as Vice President Humphrey's senior advisor and alter ego. He was involved in that administration's Great Society triumphs and its Vietnam tragedy. In the late 1960s, Van Dyk moved to Columbia University as vice president to help quell campus disorders which threatened the university. Over a period of 35 years he was a senior advisor to presidential candidates Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Ted Kennedy, Mondale, Hart, and Tsongas; contributed regular essays to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Fortune, and other national publications; and led two national think tanks. In 2001 the Bellingham, Washington, native returned to the Northwest to write a regular editorial-page column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Van Dyk's memoirs contain many previously untold stories from an historic period of national politics, portray brilliant and not-so-brilliant leaders and ideas, and also illuminate politics' darker side. They bring to life the flawed realities and enduring opportunities of public policymaking in our time.

1
DEPRESSION KIDS

I was born at 9 AM, Saturday, October 6, 1934, the only child of Ted and June Ellen Van Dyk, at St. Luke's Hospital, Bellingham, Washington, then a blue-collar town of 30,000 at the north end of Puget Sound. Although I was twenty-four inches long, my birth weight was only six pounds. Few Depression babies were fat. It was unseasonably cold outside and snowing—a rarity for October on Puget Sound.

My family's circumstances were typical of the time. My parents owned no automobile and had no phone service. They brought me home from St. Luke's to 2701 Superior Street, at the edge of town, on a streetcar. They placed me near the kitchen wood stove for warmth. When temperatures neared freezing, our windows quickly iced over on the inside.

My father, born in the Netherlands as Theodorus Johannes Cornelius van Dijk, was an unskilled worker at the Bloedel-Donovan sawmill on the Bellingham waterfront. His daily pay was $1.84. On one occasion a log rolled over his right index finger and crushed it. Dad walked from the mill to a downtown doctor's office, waited his turn in the reception room, and had the finger amputated. He was back at work the following day. For three years during the 1930s he and his fellow workers went on strike until they won the right to unionize the mill. The strike was straight out of a John Dos Passos novel. My father spent time in the jail in the basement of city hall after leveling with a folding chair three strikebreakers who had invaded the Labor Temple, where he was on duty alone. There were far more violent incidents than that. Once, my father related, strikebreakers had driven a full load of lumber out of the Bloedel-Donovan mill through his union's picket line. He and others had followed the strikebreakers out onto the Mt. Baker highway, pulled them from their truck, and then pushed both the truck and its load down the mountainside. From my fifth birthday onward I went with my dad every Saturday morning to meet his mill buddies for shots and beers at the Up and Up Tavern in downtown Bellingham, then to the Labor Temple for a brief meeting. They were my heroes in work shirts.

Both my parents had come to Bellingham from prior lives not untypical of their own generation. My father was born the second of seven children in The Hague. His formal schooling ended at age seven. His family migrated to South Africa, where his father and uncles supervised a railroad-building project in the Transvaal. When the Boer War broke out, my father, his mother, and his siblings were interned in a schoolhouse that also served as a barracks for British Tommies. His father and uncles took to the hills to join the uprising. My father would sit in the laps of the Tommies each evening and polish their uniform buttons. Some would be missing the next evening; when he asked about them, he would be told that they had been “killed by the bloody Boers” (perhaps, he thought, his father and uncles). When the Boers recaptured the territory he saw Winston Churchill led down the street a war prisoner, his hands cuffed behind his back. His childhood experience in the Transvaal stuck with him. He expressed horror at the lashings and beatings he had seen inflicted on the black construction workers by their white supervisors. He never came to terms with his own father's cruelty at the time.

After the war the van Dijk family migrated to a Dutch-German farming colony in Southern Chile and then, when my father was seventeen, migrated again to a wheat-farming region near Gull Lake, Saskatchewan. Because he was in a vital occupation as a wheat farmer, Dad was rejected for World War I service in the Canadian Army. In Gull Lake he met my mother, June Ellen Williams, the youngest of thirteen children in a family that had emigrated to Saskatchewan from their farm in Christian County, Missouri. She was the teacher in the town's one-room school. Her fiancé had been accepted for army service and had been killed in Flanders by a bullet through his heart. It passed through a letter from her which he carried in his vest pocket; the army returned it to her with the bullet hole and bloodstains.

My mother was drawn to my father, she later said, by his rough-edged goodness. Throughout my childhood I saw him work tirelessly but always without complaint and with a buoyant optimism. There was a kindness that shone from his face; as a child I sometimes imagined it to be an aura.

When hard times hit the Canadian prairies, my father headed south to work, drilling wells in Montana, picking fruit in eastern Washington, and then hopping a freight train to the Puget Sound area. Arriving in the middle of the night in the Everett, Washington, freight yard, he was undecided whether to jump another train south, toward Seattle, or one headed north toward Canada. To decide, he spun his Jackie Coogan cap. He would go in whatever direction the bill pointed. It pointed north. So he crawled onto a freight car headed for Vancouver, British Columbia. When the train reached Bellingham, twenty miles south of the Canadian border, he saw a Help Wanted sign at the gate to a sawmill near the tracks. He jumped off the train, was hired at the mill, and sent for my mother in Saskatchewan. A few years later he would become a naturalized American citizen, changing his name legally to Ted Van Dyk. That is how I came to be Ted Van Dyk Jr., an American.

Radio was our channel to the outside world. My mother, listening to Orson Welles's 1938 Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, believed, as millions of others did, that the broadcast reports of an alien invasion were real. She broke into inconsolable tears. Dad, in a stab at reassurance, told her: “Better the Martians than Hitler.” We and our neighbors sat by our table-model Philco to listen to Adolf Hitler's rants, via shortwave from Europe, and to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inspiring fireside chats. It is hard to imagine now the extent of FDR's hold on the American people in his time. Many homes, including ours, had several Roosevelt photographs mounted on the walls. “President Roosevelt” normally was uttered as a single word. (I consider it a special honor that for many years I have been a board member of the Roosevelt Institute, associated with the Roosevelt library at Hyde Park, New York.) I cast my first vote at age six, when my father took me into a voting booth in the Bellingham High School library in 1940 and I pulled the lever for FDR and a straight Democratic ticket.

A year later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we were at war, and Bellingham kids were being killed in the Pacific and other war theaters. Both my father and mother, now a bookkeeper and secretary, worked six-day, nine-hours-a-day workweeks—as did everyone else not in uniform. Our First Christian Church at A Street and Girard became a barracks for soldiers. Beaches were closed, blackouts instituted, and sand and shovels distributed to house-holds in case of air-raid fires. A big political shift also took place. World War II had broken the Depression, as the New Deal had failed to do, and political discourse moved from sometimes strident class rhetoric to ways in which a unified America could defeat international totalitarianism. A distant cousin by marriage, “Red” Wallace, and his brother had been radical voices in the Bellingham labor movement and distributed left-wing literature from Red's Railroad Avenue secondhand store. But with the advent of war, local workers no longer wanted to hear about class struggle and leftist doctrinal fine points. Their biggest fight—for unionization—had been won, wages were good, and it was time to defeat Hitler and Tojo. At war's end, our leading local political figures became Senator Warren Magnuson and Representative Henry (Scoop) Jackson, both practical New Deal liberals with progressive voting records who also delivered federal contracts and jobs to the home folks.

My generation's parents served in the war and the war effort. We had to take care of ourselves and each other while they were absent. We were what later would be called “latchkey kids.” In Bellingham, following our parents' examples, most of us got summer or other part-time jobs in our preteen years. When the June harvest season began, in the early mornings I walked to a downtown parking lot where farmers' trucks would collect us for daily work in Whatcom County berry fields. By the time I was ten I had an after-school paper route, hustled the Bellingham Herald on the corner of Holly and Commercial (“Herald paaaaper!”), and vended hot dogs and soft drinks at local sports events. All of these things no doubt constituted violations of child labor laws. It was simply what we did to help out in difficult times.

We were largely removed in those days from the outside world. Many families, like my own, had no automobile. Those who did were unable to go more than a few miles from town during the war years because of gasoline rationing. (I first ventured east of Spokane when, as a University of Washington senior, I took the Great Northern Empire Builder to Chicago, and another train to Columbus, Ohio, for a student editors' conference. I took my first airplane flight a year later, in 1955, when I flew from Seattle to New York, where I would attend graduate school; the Northwest Airlines flight took 13½ hours and stopped in Spokane, Billings, Minneapolis, and Detroit.) We saw our first television as high-school students. Wavy black-and-white images, relayed from Seattle, could be seen through department-store display windows along Cornwall Avenue. You had your choice among three channels.

We Depression kids were not the Greatest Generation. But we saw it and tried to emulate it. Our growing-up experience made us a We rather than Me generation. The Korean War, which broke out during our teenage years, was just as unpopular as the later Vietnam War. Yet it never occurred to us to protest the war or to seek asylum from it in Canada. Like it or not, Depression kids reported for duty. The political leaders probably most representative of our generation were 1984 and 1988 Democratic presidential nominees Walter Mondale and Mike Dukakis—honest, hardworking, modest, substantive, serious, and generally unappealing to voters outside their own generation and their party's core constituencies.

Participation in high-school and college class reunions in recent years has been, for me, a dramatic step back to another time and other values. Serving as master of ceremonies at my fifty-fifth high-school class reunion in 2006, I observed that we probably constituted a representative snapshot of our generation. Two-thirds of the class were still living, and a majority of these attended the reunion. Class members spoke mainly of their long marriages and their families and of fond growing-up recollections. None mentioned money or professional status. Perhaps one in six of us had entered college directly from high school; others had gone into military service or to work. Yet a huge percentage of class members had been teachers or employed otherwise in education. Others had worked in medicine, the military, and other serving professions. A majority were involved in community volunteer service of one kind or another. The names of deceased class members were read aloud; they were genuinely missed.

The changes in our hometown of Bellingham, I thought, reflected changes in American society at large. The city's population had increased from a static 30,000 during our growing-up years to 75,000 in 2006, with additional population just outside the city limits. The city had not one high school but three. The payroll jobs in canneries, wood, pulp and paper mills, and a coal mine had been replaced by white-collar and no-collar jobs in higher education, hitech, and service industries. The waterfront industrial area was being cleared for green-space and business/residential development. In our graduation year, 1951, the city had one black family, a few Asian families, and one Latino family. The nearby Lummi Indian reservation provided our only other firsthand contact with minorities. By 2006 the city still had a far smaller percentage of minority residents than did Seattle or nearby Vancouver, B. C. But in Bellingham and surrounding Whatcom County, a diverse minority community had formed and been welcomed.

Homeland security had become an immediate issue in our town. Coast Guard and Border Patrol facilities and staff had been strengthened to deal with cross-border movement of terrorist suspects and trafficking in weapons, drugs, and people. Back in our time, both Americans and Canadians had crossed the nearby international border at will.

Our Class of 1951 had, I thought, been clearly marked by our entry point into American life, and remained basically unchanged. There we were, together, still looking out for each other and trying to do the things our role-model parents would have expected of us. We came up in demanding times, stuck together, and came through. Yet we also grew up pre–drug culture, pre-Vietnam and Watergate, pre–political assassinations, pre-cynicism, and with limited options compared to the myriad choices that later generations would face. I suspect most Depression kids would tell you that times today are better but that we were fortunate to come in when we did. Whatever else they did, those years provided us with a sense of duty and responsibility that seems to be missing today.

There was, of course, a flip side to the duty/responsibility values with which we grew up. In the 1950s our society as a whole accepted far too readily policies and actions that should have been questioned. Having passed through both depression and major war, Americans of that period bought homes and automobiles, went to college, started big families, sought jobs with security, and focused on enjoying a consumer-goods-centered “good life” they had missed in the previous two decades. They also, however, continued their World War II habit of obedience to government directives and, as the Cold War came to dominate U.S. foreign policy, were all too willing to accept huge allocations of public resources to national defense and restrictions on their civil liberties.

The University of Washington, then as now, had a reputation as a center of liberal political thinking. But during the McCarthy era several faculty members were accused of Communist affiliations. Most were accused falsely. During my undergraduate years there (1951–55), political dissent was minimal. One day I saw a posted notice of a meeting called to discuss McCarthyism at the home of a favorite history professor, Giovanni Costigan. I attended, expecting to find at least fifty to sixty students (on a campus of 16,000); no more than a dozen were present. I wrote a senior thesis on the Oppenheimer Case (which centered around nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppen-heimer's loss of his government security clearance), and another research paper on the so-called Centralia Massacre, a bloody confrontation in 1919 in Centralia, Washington, between American Legionnaires and Industrial Workers of the World members (known as Wobblies). The clash had resulted in deaths, including the lynching from a bridge of a young Wobbly, and jail sentences for others who may or may not have been involved in the incident. I spent time in Centralia reviewing documents and interviewing people who had witnessed the events. But few classmates had interests beyond the campus or their search for a job after graduation. As an editor and columnist for the campus daily, I wrote principally about campus issues.

I left the sometimes isolated and provincial Pacific Northwest in August 1955 to attend the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. New York was a revelation. I lived in a $7-a-week room on West 122nd Street near the Columbia campus and saved my money for Broadway shows, jazz clubs, and Dodgers, Yankees, and Giants games. Evenings and weekends my J-School classmate Dick Schaap and I rode a crowded subway one and a half hours each way to Jamaica, Queens, and part-time work in the sports department of the now-defunct Long Island Press. Our pay of $8 per night barely covered our subway fare and the cost of a meal, but we considered ourselves well on our way to becoming big-time sports writers. (Dick, as it turned out, was to have a long career as one until his untimely death during routine surgery in 2001.) The J-School assigned its sixty students to daily coverage of New York events, as though we were working for one of the daily newspapers. I was fortunate to draw assignments to interview Governor Adlai Stevenson, then pondering a second run against incumbent Dwight Eisenhower in the 1956 presidential election, and former president Harry Truman, who invited me to join him for a brisk morning walk around midtown Manhattan before buying me breakfast at the Sheraton-Astor coffee shop in Times Square.

During that year in New York I was to meet my future wife, Jean Covacevich, a Kansas girl who had been raised partly in Mexico City and who was studying for her own master's degree at Columbia Teachers College. I also had my first exposure to the American South. When midterm vacation time came, my classmate John Lee (later to be a senior New York Times editor) invited me to join him as he drove south to pick up his fiancée, Becca, at her family home in Baltimore and on to his home in Walterboro, South Carolina. As we crossed the 14th Street Bridge connecting Washington, D. C., to Virginia, we were suddenly in another culture. Confederate flags and decals appeared on shops and shop windows along Highway 1 and became more and more commonplace the farther south we drove.

John drove me around Walterboro. It was like a punch to my solar plexus. Public restrooms and drinking fountains were labeled “Colored” and “White.” So were waiting areas at the bus and railroad stations. Black neighborhoods were abysmally poor. Shacks, their paint peeling, sat on pilings several feet above the ground. Books, articles, films, and photographs had not prepared me for what I should have expected. John's parents, who were hospitable and generous, must have been pleased to see me depart a few days later on a train to Florida. I filled much of their time with lectures about racism and questions about their presumed acceptance of it. They clearly were on the right side of things but taken aback by my own certitudes. It dawned on me, when I left, that I had spoiled John's and Becca's visit. But immersion in the 1950s South made me almost physically ill. On the way back from Florida I stopped to explore Savannah, the home of J-School classmate Ross Stemer, then drove back north with him to New York. New York, to a transplanted Northwesterner, had seemed an unfamiliar culture, but after the South it seemed like home.

In mid-1956, having returned to Seattle after graduate school, I began what I thought would be a journalistic career by working weekdays for United Press and weekends for the Seattle Times before accepting a full-time offer from the Times at a big pay increase (from $65 to $85 per week). I expected to remain there until retirement.

As the 1950s came to a close, Eisenhower and a Republican-dominated Congress governed conservatively and cautiously. Domestic reforms were few and incremental. Democratic congressional leaders Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, both Texans, recognized Eisenhower's war-hero popularity and seldom challenged him directly.(They had, however, intervened with Eisen-hower in 1954 to block the proposal of Vice President Richard Nixon and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford to use U.S. nuclear weapons to save French forces at the decisive Indochinese battle of Dien Bien Phu.) They accepted liberal domestic-reform proposals by Senators Paul Douglas, Hubert Humphrey and others, and grudgingly allowed Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler to form an advisory council that issued foreign- and domestic-policy manifestos that were more leftward than those that could be passed in Congress.

The country was, in fact, on the verge of a new decade of tumult and change, and my own life was taking a path that would put me in the middle of it.

2
CAUGHT UP IN THE COLD WAR

Military service was obligatory in those days. You either were drafted or volunteered for reserve duty in one of the armed services. I chose the Army Reserve. After attending weekly meetings for eighteen months, I received a call to six-month active duty in 1957, after I had been at the Seattle Times for barely a year. I went through basic training at Ford Ord, California, then was assigned to military intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, in the industrial outskirts of Baltimore.

I am probably one of the few Americans who can attest to enjoying both Army food and Army training. I welcomed the “take all you want, eat all you take” policies of the enlisted mess halls. At Fort Holabird I found myself placed unexpectedly in charge of a thirty-eight-man group of intelligence-analyst trainees, all privates and all college graduates. The school dispensed with much day-to-day military routine and even left us to manage ourselves, hence my designation on my first day at Holabird as my training group's leader—for what reason I will never know. Our thirteen-week training course was a college-level immersion in all aspects of intelligence, ranging from counter-intelligence techniques to photo interpretation to document analysis. In one class we concentrated on Indochina, identifying military installations and targets. We were warned pointedly that our research should not be seen as indicating a U.S. intention to become militarily involved in the area, and were reminded that, as all our work was classified, our Indochina work should never be mentioned outside our training group.

I had intended to return to the Seattle Times, and a Seattle-area Reserve unit, after my active-duty service. However, while visiting New York on leave, I interviewed and was hired for a staff position at Sports Illustrated...