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Overview
Blending the historical, biographical and political, the wide-ranging Bright, Infinite Future describes how the values of the '60s are creating a new progressive majority in '16. The multi-faceted Mark Green—bestselling author, public interest lawyer and elected official—is our guide through contemporary American politics as Nader launches the modern consumer movement; Clinton wins the 1992 New York primary and therefore the nomination; and Green loses the closest NYC mayoral election in a century to Bloomberg after 9/11 in a perfect storm of money, terrorism, and race.
As Public Advocate, Green is Mayor Giuiliani's bête noir, exposing NYPD's racial profiling, killing off Joe Camel, and then running against a "Murderer's Row" of Cuomo, de Blasio, Schumer, and Bloomberg.
Starting with the consequential movements of the '60s, Green shows how a rising tide of minority and millennial voters, GOP's lurch from mainstream to extreme, and the contrast between the presidencies of Bush and Clinton Obama are leading to a new era of "Progressive Patriotism" built on four cornerstones: an Economy-for-All, Democracy-for-All, Compact on Race&Justice, and Sustainable Climate.
Full of behind-the-scenes stories about bold-faced names, this will be the 2016 book for liberals looking to a "bright, infinite future" (Leonard Bernstein), conservatives wanting to know what they're up against, and readers who want to know "what-it-takes" in the arena.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466882713 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
MARK GREEN is "next to Nader, the leading public interest lawyer of his generation," according to The Nation. He was on PBS's Firing Line and CNN's Crossfire debating Buckley and Buchanan in the ‘90s, was the last president of Air America, and founded the nationally syndicated radio show, Both Sides Now, now in its fifth year on 200 stations. He has taught at NYU Law School and has written or edited numerous books, including New York Timesbestsellers Who Runs Congress? and The Book on Bush.
Read an Excerpt
Bright, Infinite Future
A Generational Memoir on the Progressive Rise
By Mark Green
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Mark GreenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8271-3
CHAPTER 1
THE SIXTIES
Boomers and Backlash
Republicans made a living off the excesses of the Sixties until the 2006 election.
— President Bill Clinton
In a sense, I'm a pure product of that era.
— President Barack Obama
I come from the Sixties. ... There was a lot of activism on campus and I do appreciate [today] the way young people are standing up and speaking out.
— Hillary Clinton, 2015
We think we're on the brink of something big, "really really big," as campy icon Ed Sullivan puts it. It's 11:59 p.m., December 31, 1959, in Alan Branfman's backyard at 41 South Drive. Seven of us, all ninth graders at Great Neck South High School, are grabbing for the rebound to make the last shot of the decade.
"Yes!" I bank one from the left side with 30 seconds to go. Larry, Tony, and Alan are scrambling for the ball. Tony grabs it, dribbles back, and lets fly. clang. It bounces high off the back rim and into the sure hands of Steve Eliot, by far the best shooter of the Magnificent Seven, as we self-reverentially would later call ourselves. He calmly waits until 11:59:57 and releases a jumper from 20 feet. Swish.
Bring on the Sixties! It's our time.
SCHOOLED IN THE SIXTIES
Unlike 9 p.m. election night when you count votes, social and cultural progress don't have a simple metric. It's only later when a moniker is born that we can figure out what especially bound us together and what made us different from our parents ... that we were, in fact, a "generation."
"The Greatest Generation" earned its name by surviving a depression and winning a world war. My Uncle Phil regaled us with stories of his landing at Normandy, when as a lieutenant he led 30 men out of their swaying landing craft onto the beach and into withering fire. Later that day he directed flamethrowers into German bunkers and incinerated brazen enemies who knew that morning, looking out at the massive armada offshore, that would be the day they died.
My generation is born when the Phils come home, marry, raise families, start careers, and spend money jump-starting a consumer engine that doesn't really slow down until the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. But as "the child is father to the man," the Fifties — derided as static, conformist, repressed — are prequel to the tumultuous decade to follow.
The president had been a warrior, but as a politician, Dwight David Eisenhower wants to govern more peacefully. Historians later dub it his "hidden-hand" presidency, reflecting Ike's modest Kansas temperament and infectious grin. On the one hand, knowing war too well, he avoids military entanglements, so there are reportedly no American military deaths abroad in his eight years in the Oval Office (not counting the winding down of the Korean conflict). On the other, he never denounces Senator Joseph McCarthy, assuming that "Tail Gunner Joe" will destroy himself, which happens only after McCarthy rips up much of our social fabric. And Ike's all-white upbringing, wartime staff, and presidential cabinet ill-equip him to understand, much less play an active role in, the ripening civil rights movement.
Other events plant the seeds of the Sixties. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission's report on racial segregation in 1958 meticulously documents the evils of Jim Crow; France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 presages how America stupidly stumbles into the same Big Muddy; Sputnik in 1957 awakens the country out of a smug complacency. And assembly lines of housing, food, and cars — in Levittown, McDonald's, and Detroit — create a mass consumer culture that in turn creates a new generation resenting such homogenization.
The arts also provide a foundation for boomers. The writings and prosecutions of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and D. H. Lawrence inspire a counterculture that becomes the culture itself in the next decade. Holden Caulfield's disgust with "phonies" and Elvis's fusion of soul and country penetrate deeply into the youth psyche. The brooding contempt of Marlon Brando and James Dean depict a generation dissatisfied with its generational dowry.
Adults are often infantilized or frightened. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and The Organization Man are the best of a literature about the conformity required to rise in the new corpocracies. C. Wright Mills, Vance Packard, and John Kenneth Galbraith write huge best-sellers about how the corporate economy allows private pursuits to "crowd out" public needs. Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best are completely at odds tonally with Modern Family and Glee a half century later. And films like On the Beach ensure that people are in a state of perpetual anxiety, especially kids like me cowering under school desks during air raid drills.
Then, boom!
From John Kennedy gracefully announcing his presidential candidacy on January 2 in the Senate Caucus Room to a besieged Richard Nixon in the White House ten years later — one rising on a wave of hope, the other on a backlash against anti-war protestors — the intervening years frame the progressive-conservative tension that has divided America ever since.
Demographically, it's not hard to chart what's happening. It starts with, obviously, a baby boom: Todd Gitlin summarizes it best in his monumental 1987 generational biography The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. The number of births jumps by 19 percent from 1945 to 1946, then another 12 percent the next year ... and continues to grow into the early Sixties. More babies are born between 1948 and 1953 than in the previous 30 years. By 1964, 77 million Americans make up the largest expansion in our history. By decade's end, the number of students is triple the number of farmers.
This reordering only accelerates when the federal government builds highways and makes home loans to spur suburban development. Millions of families, including mine, move into split-levels from 1948 to 1957, like on the South Shore of Long Island, and then from 1958 to 1973, on the North Shore.
Other political and social upheavals, however, are not as easy to spot as births and homes. No one has uncovered a great, collective aha moment that sparks the explosion of creativity and disruption to come. Earlier eras have some obvious triggers, like Black Tuesday, October 29, and the "Day of Infamy." But not the Sixties. They are far too kaleidoscopic for such a singular lens: the Kennedy-Nixon debates, Tet and My Lai, MLK and Malcolm X, Watts and Chicago, assassinations and the Free Speech Movement, Easy Rider and The Green Berets, the Voting Rights Act and Earth Day, Unsafe at Any Speed and speed, Dylan and the Silent Majority, Stonewall and the moon landing.
Critics of this period casually pigeonhole it as merely the "Woodstock Generation," hoping its only memory will be feather-haired acid freaks screwing in muddied tents during a Grateful Dead show. Former GOP congressman Dick Armey once blustered, "To me, all the problems in the country began in the Sixties." Even as astute an observer as author Kurt Anderson asserts that "hippie selfishness" contributed to the greed-is-good ethos of the roaring Eighties.
True, this boomer generation is in part about lifestyle, "doing your own thing" in the phrase of the day. There are also gross excesses as sanctimonious protestors call cops "pigs" and soldiers "baby killers." Little surprise that the initial impact of the decade is to pull the country to the right starting in 1966, since it's way more popular to salute the flag than burn it.
But the Sixties are far larger than that. Serious social movements begin or grow that tap us on the shoulder a half century later. The names Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem, and Rachel Carson — classic outsiders who radically overturn the status quo — will continue to historically overshadow the Yippie Left. But their very movements inspire a backlash, more like a whiplash, that becomes a living demonstration that in politics, like physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The political divisions start early. In February 1960, "Negro" students sit in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, South Carolina, a heroic nonviolent tactic that spreads throughout the South. In 1962, a meeting of old and new leftists under Tom Hayden's direction draft the Port Huron Statement, which lays down an ideological marker for how to restore the promise of America: "We are people of this generation ... looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit."
Port Huron leads directly to the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and a swelling anti-war movement. Senator Barry Goldwater publishes The Conscience of a Conservative, articulating a polar opposite right-wing view of how small government can keep America great. Which in turn creates the Ripon Society and, ultimately, the successful Nixon and Reagan candidacies of 1968 and 1980.
Oddly, there is no economic decline or domestic repression of the kind that has produced revolutions, from 1776 to 1848 to 1917. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, relative prosperity — real income is rapidly climbing — a generation of students is able to focus not on how good America is but how much better it should be. It's a classic revolution of rising expectations as the deal of affluence for acquiescence offends millions of the young. For members of this new generation, a life of organizational obedience is too dispiriting, and John Kennedy is way more appealing than John Galt.
I'm one.
FROM RUSSIA TO CORNELL
It begins in 1905 when my paternal grandfather flees from Kamianets-Podilskyi on the Ukraine-Russian border, hiding in a wheelbarrow to escape pogroms that every few decades kill thousands of Jews. Nathan Greene (at Ellis Island they drop the third e) sells buttons ("notions") from a cart on the Lower East Side before settling down in attached housing off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The next-door neighbors are Morris and Eva Suna — he's a plumber and she a clerk — who emigrated from Konsk (later Kinsk), Poland, at around the same time. They are among the 18 million who arrive after the turn of the century to the "new country," as they come to call it.
Nathan and Fannie Green's son Irving (1907) and Morris and Eva's daughter Anne (1912) grow up next door to each other and, presumably because of love and not just proximity, marry in 1933. Irv's a quick-witted kibitzer, the life of the party in a "yesterday I flew to Europe, boy were my arms tired" kind of way. He is also on the short side, bald, brusque, almost handsome. Amazingly for a Jew from the Bronx, then Brooklyn, he attends the University of Virginia as an undergraduate and then New York Law School. Anne is far more subdued, shy almost, pretty and petite; she attends Mills College to become a grade school teacher.
Stephen is born in 1938. He proves to be a terrific athlete, a fair student, popular, and 60 years later not only one of the largest influences in my life but also founder of SL Green Realty Corp, the largest owner of commercial buildings in Manhattan. Between 1938 and 1945 there are five miscarriages — five — before Anne and Irv make one last attempt. I arrive in this context, regarded almost as a miracle child, on March 15.
In 1948, we move from Bensonhurst to Elmont, literally a stone's throw from Queens if, like me, you recklessly throw rocks over traffic on the Cross Island Parkway. We live in a modest two-story home three long blocks away from the Belmont Race Track, where I hear trumpets announcing races and occasionally sneak in to watch. The community is composed of largely middle-class Jews and, decades later, middle-class Asians. I'm a good but poorly behaved student, a "smart aleck" in my mother's constant refrain. My teacher Vera Fisher writes on my report card, "In his utter disregard for authority and lack of respect, Mark has failed to measure up to our expectations for 4th graders in the development of good citizens." In a newspaper interview 15 years later, she says that she expected big things from me, adding, "The worst thing I can say is that he was a bit of a show-off."
I have a clique of buddies who play lots of touch football and also discover girls (Judi Calflisch, if you're reading this, please call to say hi). I like winning at whatever I'm doing. My default activity is playing stickball with next-door neighbor Carl Shreck, whom I once beat 63–0 in obnoxious overkill, this apparently being before the invention of the Mercy Rule.
Like so many families in this era, Dad's the decider. A small-time lawyer and landlord, he buys a Lincoln Continental every couple of years — not just another Cadillac but a Lincoln. I think that's so different and very cool. But it's not cool when I periodically take phone calls from building supers and tenants screaming about various emergencies involving water, fire, you name it. "Oh, you want my father, bye." He also founds a Reform synagogue, Temple B'nai Israel, on Elmont Road just off Hempstead Turnpike, for which he and I occasionally go door to door to raise funds. It's where I'm bar mitzvahed in 1958, presciently discussing in my speech (given my later career) how to keep "Jews honest in their business dealings in the marketplace." Even as I become steeped in the tradition of tikkun olam ("repairing the world"), I'm displaying some cha-cha steps at the post-Haftorah party that are the talk of the congregation.
Then, like a Jewish Jeffersons, we move on up in 1957 to Great Neck, a North Shore enclave of spacious, upscale homes on rolling hills off the Long Island Sound made famous by The Great Gatsby's fictitious West Egg. There I'm ceaselessly borne forward from seventh to twelfth grades, first at the 1895 brick-covered Great Neck North High School (Frances Ford Coppola, '56) and then the 1958 glassy Great Neck South (Andy Kaufman, '67) on the Phipps Estate right off what soon becomes exit 33 of the Long Island Expressway.
It's a crisis-free adolescence of grades, sports, and girls, in that order. Summers are spent at Camp Oquago in the Catskills, where I'm in athletic heaven nine hours a day. That includes basketball with the best white player I'd ever seen (Gary Goldberg, later creator of Family Ties) and with a mediocre but very determined ball-handler (David Stern, later the head of the NBA). The summer of 1960 I play in sanctioned Eastern Lawn Tennis Association tournaments in order to attain a top eastern ranking. But in my last event, I lose in an upset and fall to number 10. The next morning, with no more events to recoup the season, I practice all day in a frenzied attempt to get ready for the next summer.
To this day, with chagrin, I recall my exact grade point average and earned run average as the starting pitcher in high school, my tennis record as first singles from ninth to twelfth grade, as well as the team's 49 straight wins in '62 and '63 that make us Island champions. For years, people only refer to me as Mark Green, the tennis player.
That's fine, because the competitive impulse honed on those courts becomes embedded in my approach to politics later. "Jeez, I'm down one set and 4–1 in the second. But I'm better than this guy! Stay calm, win your serve, get to a third set, think about this point, not the last one, outlast him ..." I'm what's called, with disdain by opponents, a "pusher" because I always keep the ball in play and try to wear down the other guy more with willpower than power. One New Year's Eve, I listen to Fontella Bass sing Rescue Me 43 straight times, a level of obsession that pretty much sums up my later ability to sit in the same place for hours putting out 80 calls a day every day, every month for two years running for the U.S. Senate and then NYC mayor.
Politics hasn't yet penetrated my consciousness. Indeed, like most kids, I simply mimic my father's politics — he's a Rockefeller Republican who ran for state senate in 1940 in the Lower East Side and campaigned on a platform with, he claims, Wendell Willkie. (When I later ask why he ran, he candidly admits "to boost my law practice," a rationale that does not inspire my future campaigns.) So, choosing sides in a mock presidential debate in 1960, I pick Nixon! Experience counts and Ike chose him, right? But, like my guy, I lose the debate. And like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren decades later, both of whom start out as Goldwater Girls, I sin and, apparently, spend a lifetime atoning.
Strikingly, the sports symbol at Great Neck South is the Confederate flag and the football team's name is the Rebels. And in case anyone misses the branding, our newspaper is The Southerner — even though this is the year of Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and the murder of four black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. I don't recall anyone making a fuss in this liberal community in the early Sixties; that happens only in 1980 when the flag is dropped and the Rebels become, in a smart pivot, the "Colonial Rebels."
What were we thinking?
It's August 20, 1963. My dad, mom, and I hook up the U-Haul stuffed with boxes of books, clothing, and other knickknacks to set off for the nearly five-hour drive from Great Neck north up the New York State Thruway and then west on Route 17 to Cornell.
We follow the exact path, month, and year that Jennifer ("Nobody puts Baby in the corner") Grey travels in Dirty Dancing, by the same rural Catskills towns, same schlocky motels, same music on our car radio over and over — "Twist and Shout," "Heat Wave," "One Fine Day," "Louie Louie" — plus ads mysteriously saying only "the Beatles are coming" with no indication whether it's a band, movie, or plague. We stop halfway en route at the famous Roscoe Diner where I devour a giant hamburger as my folks try to also stuff me with last-minute wisdom and ease any anxieties.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bright, Infinite Future by Mark Green. Copyright © 2016 Mark Green. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Preface: Intertwining Arcs,
Introduction: The Progressive-Conservative Clash,
1: The Sixties: Boomers and Backlash,
2: Nader: Present at the Creation of the Consumer Movement,
3: The Advocate: Consumer Cop and Democracy Czar,
4: What It's Like-New York Politics,
A. 1976-2000: Welcome to New York,
B. The 9/11 Election: A Gathering "Perfect Storm",
C. 2006-2009: Lessons Learned from "the Arena",
5: What It's Like-National Politics: Gary, Bill, John, Hillary ... and Fidel,
6: What It Takes: 12 Skills,
7: Media Politics: From Buckley to Fox News to Air America,
8: Economy and Democracy: The Fringe Fourth vs. the New Progressive Majority,
Appendix: The Book of GOP "Twistifications",
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,
Photographs,
Also by Mark Green,
About the Author,
Copyright,