Love and Democracy

American Valentine

A few weeks before the Senate debate on the McCain-Feingold bill, I got a call from John Passacantando, head of Greenpeace. They were planning a protest at the Capitol in support of the McCain bill, and they wanted to know if Doris and a few of us with her would be willing to be arrested. He said the environmental groups wanted to make the point that we can’t save the environment if corporate interests continue to rule Congress through their huge political donations. 

        The plan was for forty of us, representing a number of environmental and government reform organizations, to go into the Capitol Rotunda with the rest of the tourists, but then we would step out of the rope line to unfurl a banner promoting campaign finance reform while Doris read the Declaration of Independence to make the point that we needed independence from the shackles of the corrupt campaign finance system. 

Passacantando would be in the group, and many others, including John Moyers, Bill's son. I have our group photo somewhere, which looks awfully respectable. 

        It started the evening before with a meeting at the venerable United Methodist Building, which is wedged between the Supreme Court and the Dirksen Senate Office Building and always something of a surprise to see sitting there, like a reminder for public officials to say their prayers. The forty of us reviewed and discussed the rules of peaceful resistance. The next morning, we assembled on the Capitol grounds and prepared to get in line with the other tourists. We first had a preliminary meeting with the Capitol Police, describing our plans and telling them our intentions were not to be disruptive or dangerous or to resist arrest. “We will certainly be violating your rules, at which point you arrest us.” I remember hearing those words—this gang was all Harvard and no Hee-Haw.

        The Capitol Police lieutenant made a head count and called ahead for zip ties and a bus. 

        Once inside the Rotunda, we unfurled our campaign finance reform banner and Doris began her recitation of the Declaration of Independence. It came off very nicely and the tourists present applauded and seemed shocked when Doris and the rest of us were zip-tied and led away. 

        Outside, history professor Lou Hammond from Gettysburg College was pushed a bit and fell, cutting his nose badly on a curb because his hands were zipped behind and he couldn’t break his fall. He bled in jail without medical help. Otherwise, it was fine. 

I made my one phone call from jail to Maureen in Phoenix. I didn’t need to call a lawyer, as a crew of lawyers had volunteered in advance to represent the forty of us. I just called her to say, “Honey, I’m in jail,” because I thought it would be a way to spark up what could sometimes be a dull day in her newsroom. 

        She knew it was all planned. “Remember everything,” she said. “It’s content.”

        Around midnight we were released one by one from the D.C. jail as our assigned lawyers posted bail. We trickled into a rented church hall where each new-arriving criminal was cheered. The party ran late.  

        Days later, the D.C. trial judge gave Doris a hug after finding her guilty but beautiful. 

From Judge Hamilton’s sentence: 

• “As you know, the strength of our great country lies in its constitution and her laws and in her courts, but more fundamentally, the strength of our great country lies in the resolve of her citizens to stand up for what is right when the masses are silent. And, unfortunately, sometimes it becomes the lot of the few, sometimes like yourselves, to stand up for what’s right when the masses are silent.”

        He gave us all time served. Anyway, that’s how we met John Moyers. And as it happened, he and his father owned a brownstone directly behind the Supreme Court. John was living there at the time with a student friend or two. The house was always full of interesting people. At one gathering, I had a visit with Tucker Carlson. He approached me with a request to interview Doris for an article in New York Magazine. John Moyers told him he must deal with me to interview Doris, which wasn’t true, but I welcomed the role of gatekeeper as far as Carlson was concerned. I knew his writing well enough to suspect he would make fun of her and trash campaign finance reform, right on the eve of the Senate debate. 

        I told him he could interview her, but only if he would do it over the dinner table in his own home, with his wife and kids at the table. It worked well—Doris sold his kids on campaign reform, and the article came out kindly and respectfully to Doris, at least for him. 

Now, as to Doris’s around-the-clock circling the Capitol while fasting: Every third or fourth trip in her circle around the Capitol, she would make a detour behind the Supreme Court, often at the insistence of the volunteer walking with her, watching her strength and breathing. Behind the Court, she could disappear as if by trap door into John’s house for a brief rest—even a catnap during late night hours. She could warm up and get a leg massage. That’s how she did it. It was a real 24-hour, four-day walk, and a real fast, but she did it with the support any athlete would need for a swim across the Channel. You don’t do heavy stuff like that without a team and a plan to stay alive. This was happening as the Senate was now debating the bill. 

        By the fourth day she was wearing down, and I was asking her to call it off. Then I received a call from McCain’s staffer in charge of getting the bill passed. The staffer said there might be a deal for passage, and it could happen fast. He said McCain and Feingold wanted Doris to be in the gallery above the Senate floor for the big moment of passage. 

        “What kind of a deal?” I asked. 

        “Do you think you folks are going to hold out for the perfect bill, or could you go along with a pretty good bill?” he asked.

        “What kind of a deal?” I repeated.

        He described what sounded like a big loophole—state parties would be exempt from the restrictions affecting national parties, which meant the baffles on the maze would just be slightly rearranged, and the rats would still find their way to the cheese. There would be no control of independent expenditure groups, which could act, raise and spend just like parties or candidates. 

The bill would put a thumb in the leaky dam over here but open a floodgate over there. 

        The original intent of the reform, and the thing Doris had gathered petitions for and walked 3,200 miles for, was to eliminate “soft money.” That was defined as unregulated donations. If you gave $1,000 to a candidate, that’s hard money, and there was a strict limit. If you gave $1,000 to a political party for “party building,” that was soft money, even if everyone knew it was going to be used to elect a particular candidate or slate, and there was no limit on money coming to the candidate from the party. But yes, the bill would regulate soft money at the federal level. So, if you were desperate for a win, you could call it that. McCain wanted to call it that, I gathered. 

        His staffer on the phone said it was the best they could get and maybe it could be strengthened in the House or in conference. We both knew that was unlikely, but I could sense that McCain’s people, who had fought hard for years on this, were finished. They wanted something that looked like a win so they could move on to other issues. 

        It was an opportunity to get Doris out of the cold. I told the McCain guy that we understood the situation, but I should have bluffed and said we would carry on with our protests. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but I should have anyway. We needed millions of people who would call and march, but we only had a few thousand. We would need McCain and Feingold, but they were spent. McCain didn’t want Doris out there saying it was a shitty deal, but she—we—should have because it was. 

        Anyway, it passed the Senate. Doris walked with McCain and Feingold across the Capitol grounds to deliver the bill to the House. Those two guys knocked her famous hat off with a group hug. Doris understood that the victory was slight, but she was not afraid of gradual progress, nor should any of us be. 

• New York Times, April 3, 2001: The Senate voted today to approve the most wide-ranging overhaul of the nation's campaign finance law since the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, shifting the struggle over the influence of money and politics into a divided House.

        Yes, the bill now had to get through the House, and again through the Senate if the House changed it. We would come back to D.C. for that, and to see if they would eliminate the loopholes—unlikely in the extreme—but you must be an optimist in this world if you’re going to have enough joy to keep going. 

        It was now time for Doris to go home and recharge, as it would be months before the bill was up for debate in the House. We disbanded our happy few. The collection of people who regularly showed up to support our efforts in D.C. included history professor George Peabody, who was at the time helping to plan the World War II Memorial on the Mall. We also had the beforementioned and still nose-bandaged Professor Lou Hammond and his wife, Patricia, and author Mathew Lesko, who wore an outrageous suit of question marks. Ken Hechler came often, as did Doris’s grandchildren and a few mountaintop removal activists from West Virginia, led by Janet Fout. 

        George Ripley, who converted the basement of his D.C. brownstone into a factory for ten-foot-high protest signs for us, would come and would always be the first person I called when we needed big vertical signs on tall poles. He could deliver giant messages within the hour. 

        Strange people also came, including a woman who lived in her car with plastic sheets taped over the air conditioning vents to foil the CIA from taking over her brain. I never got the full details on how all that worked, but she was there, night and day, nice as pie, sometimes in an oversize orange hazmat suit. 

        Also always on hand were John Anthony, Matt Keller, Nick Palumbo and of course Doris’s son, Jim. 

        When debate finally started on the House side in February of 2002, we returned to Washington. The big news of those weeks was still the emotional aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and now also the Enron scandal, in which many members of Congress had taken Enron money in exchange for protecting Enron from investigation. I asked George Ripley to make a good number of 10-foot-high pole banners that said “Enron Congress! Redeem Your Sorry Selves! Pass Campaign Finance Reform Now!” We occupied the sidewalks between the Capitol and the House office buildings.  

        On the day before Valentine’s Day, our volunteers perched on the Capitol steps making pretty, “Don’t break our Hearts!” valentines for hand delivery to each House member. When Doris and I tried to leave a valentine with John Lewis’s staff, we heard him from inside his office:

        “Is that Granny D I hear?” He came roaring out for a hug. We visited quite a while in the hall as he pressed the message into us that, whatever happened with the bill, we must never give up. He gave me his card and said to call for any inside advice or contacts we might need.  I still have his card—a magic thing on my desk. 

        It was freezing weather. At one point, the wife of Republican Chris Shays came along with hot tea for all of us on the sidewalk. Her husband had partnered with Democrat Marty Meehan to put the bill forward in the House. At another point that day, Doris invaded Congressman Bill Ney’s office and started reading off his unsavory campaign donations for a TV reporter. Chris Shays ran from his office to prevent her arrest and inform her that Ney had suddenly come aboard the bill, thanks to the CSPAN hammering he was getting from the Phoenix hearing. 

        Toward the end of that day, a courier came down from the office of Dick Gephardt, asking Doris and a few of us to come up to his leadership office. He said he had the votes for passage, and we should please be in the gallery that evening. We were. It passed at 2 a.m.  

        Gephardt, Shays, Meehan and others looked up from the House floor and saluted Doris. I told her to stand up and she did. 

        In the dawn’s early light, Doris and a few of us walked down the House side of the Capitol’s East Steps with Shays, Meehan and their wives. It was Valentine’s Day. 

        It had to go back to the Senate one more time to iron-out differences in the two bills, which would be easy. President Bush would then reluctantly sign it into law. The measure’s four main sponsors, to a man, said for the Congressional Record that the bill would not have passed without Doris.

• “John McCain and Bill Bradley were looking over her shoulder, reading her speeches and watching how she succeeded in making campaign finance reform an emotional and patriotic issue with many Americans. When presidential candidate Al Gore finally signed on to campaign finance reform, his speech cited McCain, Bradley and Doris Haddock.”  —Bill Moyers

• "Granny D, you exceed any small, modest contributions those of us who have labored in the vineyards of reform have made to this Earth.”  —Sen. John McCain, from Senate floor

It’s important to understand why Doris was successful while so many reform efforts fail. Doris was consciously following Gandhi’s five steps. With her “Tuesday Academy” book club friends in New Hampshire, she had made sure of the facts around big money’s corruption of democracy. Making sure of your facts before spouting off is Gandhi’s first step. The second step is respectfully asking those in power to fix a problem. For that, she spent two years gathering petitions, often in freezing parking lots, and making phone calls and writing letters to her members of Congress. That didn’t work. The third step is to engage the conscience of the community. She did that with the publicity around her walk. 

        That was Gandhi’s third step but also his fourth, which is to demonstrate the seriousness of the issue by engaging in personal sacrifice, and then to increase that sacrifice as needed. Her effort at her age and infirmity was indeed a creative sacrifice. She was doing it the right way: make it very difficult but not self-destructive. If you are signing up as an agent of love, you can’t also be an agent of destruction, even self-destruction. 

        Down the road, Doris and I would meet Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who perched in an old-growth tree south of Eureka, California to prevent the clearcutting of its grove. She came down from that tree just as healthy as she went up—after two years and eight days aloft. Volunteers sent her food and supplies by rope. The grove stands today, protected by an agreement finally made with the lumber company. Her sacrifice was Gandhian in that it didn’t involve self-harm, just incredible fortitude and deprivation of personal comfort. Julia’s daily messages from her high perch, just like Doris’s emails from the road, were joyful celebrations of beauty. 

        Protests are far more effective when they are joyful, because joy gives activists the energy to carry on. We all have experienced the joy of participating in marches, even when the issues are grave. Joy also makes it more likely that humor will be used, and very few villains can survive that, because humor shows confidence in victory. ICE thugs are no match for people dancing in inflatable animal costumes—not in the long run, which is how we must think of things. 

        If you wonder why some of today’s protests don’t achieve enough, it’s often because the element of sacrifice is missing. Showing up somewhere convenient on a Saturday with a sign and a water bottle won’t usually do the trick, though everything helps. 

        Gandhi’s fifth step is to take your victory with grace, letting your opponent save face, but that would be a long way down the road for Doris. The fifth rule is necessary because the first four, done correctly, usually succeed, so long as the villain is even a little sensitive to public opinion. So, you take your victory with a graceful bow to your opponent because you will likely meet them in combat again, and you’ll be more successful if you have been treating them like people all along and maintaining a respectful line of communication. When World War II gave India the perfect opportunity to split from the very distracted British Empire, Gandhi said, no, we’ll not take advantage of them at such a time. We’ll wait until after the War so that we can part as friends. 

        All this history may seem from another world, given our current crisis. But Gandhi still works, and we will still want friends in our neighborhoods after our victory for democracy. 

To order the book:  Love and Democracy