Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Read Online Free

one’s perfect,” she huffed.
    My mother was the proverbial middle child. Her older brother, Bill, was a great student who ran track and field for New York University. My uncle went on to become a noted war correspondent for
Yank
, an award-winning magazine writer, and the author of thirteen books. He was the apple of his parents’ eyes. And little sister Sally was their baby, leaving my mother the odd child out, craving approval and determined to achieve.
    I’ll never know what caused my parents to get together, the driven woman and the drifter. Willful as she was, perhaps Myril saw in this bright, gentle man someone she could mold. Maybe Joe saw in this ambitious, attractive woman someone who would bring needed ballast to his life. Whatever the source of the attraction, in 1942, they married.
    By then, World War II was raging. Dad was drafted into the army, and the newlyweds shipped off to Omaha—the town in Nebraska, not the beach in France where D-day began—and then Florida. After the war, they returned to New York City, where my dad used the GI Bill to pursue a doctorate in psychology while my mother landed a coveted reporting job at
PM
, a short-lived but celebrated New York daily. The paper, funded by Chicago newspaper magnate Marshall Field III, had a decidedly leftist bent. To ensure its independence, it accepted no advertising, and its roster of writers was a veritable Who’s Who of progressive literati. I. F. Stone was the Washington correspondent. Dorothy Parker and Ben Hecht were contributors. Theodor Geisel, better known later in life as Dr. Seuss, was the paper’s cartoonist.
    My mother wasn’t an ideologue, but
PM
was a great gig for an aspiring young reporter. In those days, women were scarce in the nation’s newsrooms, and those women who did get jobs were generally assigned to the society beat. Not Mom. She covered education and worked her way onto the City Desk. While at
PM
, she also was detailed to Stone to assist on a series of stories that became his 1946 classic,
Underground to Palestine
, which chronicles the harrowing journey of European refugees who defied a British blockade to return to the Jewish homeland. It was a great assignment, but not entirely won on the merits. Mom explained that she got it, in part, because Stone’s hearing was failing, and she had a high-pitched voice. “He could hear me,” she said.
    In 1948,
PM
closed after less than a decade, buried under the weight of its unsustainable business model and growing pressures over its left-leaning editorial bent. My mother turned to freelance magazine writing. My father got his PhD and went to work at a Veterans Administration hospital in Westchester, New York. The couple, now contemplating a family, settled in Stuyvesant Town, the mammoth new housing development that hugged the East River and divided the Lower East Side from Midtown Manhattan.
    My sister, Joan, was born in 1949. After my mother suffered a miscarriage, I came along on George Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1955. Everyone likes to believe they chart their own life’s course, but it’s hard to ignore my mother’s role in mine, considering that she gave me a name she said would “look good in a byline” and insisted on decking our apartment with red, white, and blue bunting on my birthdays. If I couldn’t be the next Walter Lippmann, she figured, maybe I could be a congressman or senator.
    In 1956 my mother made the transition from journalism to the emerging field of qualitative research. She began with a few freelance projects for advertising agencies, interviewing consumers about their attitudes toward various products. Within a couple of years this led to full-time work conducting focus groups. The objective was to get small, homogenous groups of people together to explore their feelings about issues and products. And with the probing instincts of a reporter, my mother was a natural, eliciting valuable insights for ads and marketing campaigns.