I continue to lobby the North Carolina General Assembly on behalf of the arts and enjoy the challenges of lobbying a Republican-controlled legislature. Over the years I have represented organized medicine, HMOs and business and industry. My son is a partner in a law firm in downtown Raleigh and my daughter is in medical sales (software). I have three grandsons, two of whom are fraternal twins. Bothe my children and their families live in Raleigh. I am most fortunate indeed.
Kathryn Brown Williams passed on June 3, 2014 from a very rare disease. She served on Senator McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in the early seventies and later joined the staff of Senator Birch Bayh’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. I was a member of Senator McGovern’s Senate Offfice staff. Senator and Mrs. McGovern were exceedingly kind, supportive and generous to Kathryn and me and we were most grateful and appreciative. Through the years, our respect and support of both remained steadfast. Kathryn and I attended the 2007 McGovern Reunion in DC. I plan to participate in the Zoom gathering and look forward to attending the event at Dakota Wesleyan University in September.
Worked from the opening of the NYC office in approx April 1971 through the General Election. Was responsible for colleges in NY (sending 500 a week to New Hampshire on buses), then eastern upstate NY delegates. Worked for Mike Levett in Maryland during the general election. My sister Nance was a delegate from Wisconsin; I was an alternate delegate from New York. Glad people are pulling this together!
Thanks to Lynn, Marsha, Keith, Stuart, Teresa and David for organizing this opportunity for us to reconnect and celebrate this great moment in our lives and American political history.
I was a precinct captain in Buffalo for the McGovern campaign, not for the regular Democratic organization. The party organization did little to assist us. My voter registration lists were filled with dead people and people who had left the ward years before. The mood of my working class white voters was not friendly to the McGovern campaign. You could see the campaign as I experienced it not as a culmination to decades of New Deal Democratic, progressive politics, but instead as a prelude to the growing conservatism of the white majority. I realize this is a gloomy vision of 1972, when we’d like to create a more celebratory stance. To that, I can only say what I have believed for 50 years: George McGovern was the last truly decent man, with the possible exception of Barak Obama, to aspire to be president.
Greetings from New Hampshire! We have lost campaigners from the Primary — my parents, Alice and George Krasner, Sylvia and Phil Chaplain, other staunch Democrats — Lionel Johnson, Sandy Hicks, and Marie Metoyer.
I had the opportunity to visit with Sen. McGovern on several occasions. In the fall of 2011, I was the new religion and philosophy professor and Sen. McGovern, a former Methodist minister and seminary student, expressed real interest in getting to know me. The civil war in Syria was just heating up and we had a conversation about Hafez al-Assad, the father of the present Syrian president. Of course, George knew Hafez well having met with him on several occasions. George described to me, as we sat in the what we now call “Tiger Cafe,” how he tried to convince Hafez al-Assad that to truly find the respect he desired on the world stage, he had to display to the world a genuine commitment to human rights and the rule of law. Behaving with brutality toward his political enemies was a sure-fire pathway to pariah status on the world-stage. George had a way of being persuasive, especially in areas of his passion such as human rights and rule-of-law. Unfortunately, Bassar, the son of Hafez, has been even more brutal than his father. I wish I had known then, how soon we would lose George. If I had, I certainly would have maximized that time.
Volunteering in the ’72 McGovern Campaign around June of ’72 (at “1972” K Street NW in DC), launched my unforeseen, life changing, and incredibly fulfilling career in Democratic politics.
Then, a few weeks later—at the suggestion of McGovern Radio’s Joe White—I volunteered in the DNC Radio-TV office at the Watergate.
I was a final semester electrical engineering student at the University of Maryland, but most importantly, I could fix tape recorders.
That got me an immediate invitation to volunteer at the Radio-TV office mainly to fix things. Three weeks later I was offered the job of assistant director. The opportunity to work on a presidential campaign seemed like a once in a lifetime experience, so I took it, thinking I would resume school after the election. Did not happen—and that worked out just fine.
That unforeseen, unexpected, unplanned career in Democratic politics included traveling with the the ’76 Mondale campaign as the “radio reporter” sending audio news reports daily from the campaign plane. Add to that 8 Democratic National Conventions as a top staffer or consultant, 4 stints as a Democratic staffer on the Hill, 4 Democratic presidential campaigns, general and primaries, and more.
All of that, ONLY because George McGovern’s outspoken opposition to the war particularly resonated with me, as an Air Force & Vietnam veteran myself.
I almost met George McGovern when I was the location sound engineer for a PBS (Emmy Award winning) documentary “Korean War Stories”. But I had a previous booking that could not be changed. The producer explained to George how disappointed I was to not be there, George wrote me a touching personal handwritten note of thanks.
Thanks to all for putting this together. (Files and photos may come i the near future)
Hello, I just finished editing my photos and ephemera from the campaign and the conventions, thanks to Keith Wessel for his expert training! I hope they bring back more good memories. My favorites were revisiting the atmosphere of the final, sleepless nights and days in the Bronx, that I diaried and have shared online here. I wish I could express my appreciation to Dick Tuck for taking me on as a “staff photographer” for Reliable Source, and to my co-conspirators Richard Hirsch and Dan MacNamee. As ever, thanks to George McGovern for a lifetime of inspiration.
When Senator McGovern stood in an Illinois field to raise concern about Nixon’s “Great Grain Robbery,” the press asked him why Mayor Daley hadn’t met him at the airport.
This focus on “politics”, rather than the substance of governance, has, of course, only become unimaginably, and so tragically worse.
“Panels” are full of pundits opining on the political impact of a decision, rather than subject matter experts discussing the extent to which a policy addresses an important challenge of concern to voters.
And so voters, not informed day to day about the actual hard work of substance-oriented people in government, are turned off by “politics” and easily manipulated by destructive spin.
I would like to help to create at least one TV news program that builds an audience by starting from the challenges confronting people rather than the politics, describes work towards addressing those challenges, and, then makes it clear exactly which representative is voting for, or blocking, the solution.
There are various ways to raise the issue, from a “reality TV” approach with actual families facing actual problems followed over multiple episodes, an “All-in-the-Family/soap opera” approach with ongoing dramatization, or a news program with interviews with those affected by an issue.
But integrated into the narrative should be a focus on “informing the consent” of voters, by explaining what actually is being proposed and who exactly is voting for and against it
I don’t know where/how to begin but ask people with ideas to join a conversation about this.
As to what I have been up to in the last 50(!!?) years, I did manage to get that Ph.D. in Molecular Biology, was a prof of Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, worked in drug discovery (Merck, biotech), wrote a book (Darwin in the Genome). Recently, I have been teaching a required course for non-science majors on the nature of science at St. John’s University (with an emphasis on examples related to emerging infectious diseases).
I also have tried to counteract the attacks on immigrants by presenting data on the astounding number of Nobel Laureates who are the children and grandchildren of the “wretched refuse” immigrants of 1880-1924 who were so hated that our immigration laws were changed to keep more people like that out, thus trapping millions in Europe in time to be incinerated in the holocaust. An example is this talk at a symposium at Duke University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG6QBiX9ghc
I was curled up on a British Air flight from London to New York in 1972 when I read a Newsweek cover story about George McGovern. As an anti-war strike steering committee chair in college, everything the correspondent–whose name is lost in the mists of time–wrote about Senator McGovern resonated. I got home, left college in New Hampshire six weeks before graduation, abandoned my ’til-then career path (English lit professor), and hit the campaign trail
Fortune was kind, and I began my work under the wing of the fabled Joe Grandmaison and with the great tutelage and comradeship of Carol Friedenberg (in D.C.) and John Franzen (in N.H.) during the New Hampshire primary. From there, I went on to be a state press secretary during primaries in Massachusetts, Nebraska, San Francisco (Hi, Henry Weinstein!), and Manhattan. In Miami, at the convention, I was a member of the team that dealt with the hordes of reporters who thronged the Doral. During the general election, some one of the Fates tapped me to be Senator McGovern’s press secretary in Massachusetts during the general. How young was I? So young that, even though I spent 22 hours a day parsing survey results, reading headlines, and dealing with older and wiser reporters who could testing political winds far better than I, I was nonetheless shocked that our hero lost 49 out of 50 states. As a 22-year old who didn’t know what she didn’t know, I was sure the country couldn’t possibly choose Nixon over McGovern, and that overrode every functional neuron I had.
All this was great fodder for my future ventures. I made lifelong, extremely close friends during the campaign, and have only fond memories of our time together.
From there I went on to become Mike Dukakis’s press secretary at the outset of his first term in office. (A very respectful tip of the hat to David Sugerman here),I then joined former President Carter’s campaign in order to run the Zoo Plane, A parenthetical aside: Does anybody remember Timothy Crouse of “Boys on the Bus” fame? No? Well, The Zoo Plane ferried the national print and broadcast media the entire length of the the countrywide, criss-crossing, every-state-traversing of the 1976 general election.
Around 1978, I became head of public relations at ABC News globally under new president Roone Arledge before parlaying an offer from CBS News into the opportunity to take on headline programming as a network news producer. I did this for 10 happy years at ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and at CNN. The one constant in my life throughout the 70s and 80s is that it was nomadic; those network assignments took me from D.C. to Manhattan to Houston to D.C. again and then to Rome and Boston.)
I became a single mother when my daughter, Molly Allis, was five, (Note well: two journalists marrying and moving nine times in 11 years seems like great idea while it’s going on, but, man, it will take the stuffing out of you.) I settled into managing my own strategic consulting firm in Boston for the next two-and-a-half decades. By then, had the good sense to recognize that I a) I was still adventuresome, and b) I still had one more act in me. I went against my urban instincts and moved to beautiful Portland, Maine–population 66,000–in 2011. You can’t get me with a crowbar; sensibly, I retired.
Sending love and good wishes to all the friends, traveling companions, and kindred spirits I was fortunate to find along the way…
Warmly,
Mary
I continue to lobby the North Carolina General Assembly on behalf of the arts and enjoy the challenges of lobbying a Republican-controlled legislature. Over the years I have represented organized medicine, HMOs and business and industry. My son is a partner in a law firm in downtown Raleigh and my daughter is in medical sales (software). I have three grandsons, two of whom are fraternal twins. Bothe my children and their families live in Raleigh. I am most fortunate indeed.
Kathryn Brown Williams passed on June 3, 2014 from a very rare disease. She served on Senator McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in the early seventies and later joined the staff of Senator Birch Bayh’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. I was a member of Senator McGovern’s Senate Offfice staff. Senator and Mrs. McGovern were exceedingly kind, supportive and generous to Kathryn and me and we were most grateful and appreciative. Through the years, our respect and support of both remained steadfast. Kathryn and I attended the 2007 McGovern Reunion in DC. I plan to participate in the Zoom gathering and look forward to attending the event at Dakota Wesleyan University in September.
Worked from the opening of the NYC office in approx April 1971 through the General Election. Was responsible for colleges in NY (sending 500 a week to New Hampshire on buses), then eastern upstate NY delegates. Worked for Mike Levett in Maryland during the general election. My sister Nance was a delegate from Wisconsin; I was an alternate delegate from New York. Glad people are pulling this together!
Thanks to Lynn, Marsha, Keith, Stuart, Teresa and David for organizing this opportunity for us to reconnect and celebrate this great moment in our lives and American political history.
I was a precinct captain in Buffalo for the McGovern campaign, not for the regular Democratic organization. The party organization did little to assist us. My voter registration lists were filled with dead people and people who had left the ward years before. The mood of my working class white voters was not friendly to the McGovern campaign. You could see the campaign as I experienced it not as a culmination to decades of New Deal Democratic, progressive politics, but instead as a prelude to the growing conservatism of the white majority. I realize this is a gloomy vision of 1972, when we’d like to create a more celebratory stance. To that, I can only say what I have believed for 50 years: George McGovern was the last truly decent man, with the possible exception of Barak Obama, to aspire to be president.
What a grand idea! Many thanks to our intrepid organizers (who are STILL organizing 50 years later).
— Peaches
Greetings from New Hampshire! We have lost campaigners from the Primary — my parents, Alice and George Krasner, Sylvia and Phil Chaplain, other staunch Democrats — Lionel Johnson, Sandy Hicks, and Marie Metoyer.
I had the opportunity to visit with Sen. McGovern on several occasions. In the fall of 2011, I was the new religion and philosophy professor and Sen. McGovern, a former Methodist minister and seminary student, expressed real interest in getting to know me. The civil war in Syria was just heating up and we had a conversation about Hafez al-Assad, the father of the present Syrian president. Of course, George knew Hafez well having met with him on several occasions. George described to me, as we sat in the what we now call “Tiger Cafe,” how he tried to convince Hafez al-Assad that to truly find the respect he desired on the world stage, he had to display to the world a genuine commitment to human rights and the rule of law. Behaving with brutality toward his political enemies was a sure-fire pathway to pariah status on the world-stage. George had a way of being persuasive, especially in areas of his passion such as human rights and rule-of-law. Unfortunately, Bassar, the son of Hafez, has been even more brutal than his father. I wish I had known then, how soon we would lose George. If I had, I certainly would have maximized that time.
Volunteering in the ’72 McGovern Campaign around June of ’72 (at “1972” K Street NW in DC), launched my unforeseen, life changing, and incredibly fulfilling career in Democratic politics.
Then, a few weeks later—at the suggestion of McGovern Radio’s Joe White—I volunteered in the DNC Radio-TV office at the Watergate.
I was a final semester electrical engineering student at the University of Maryland, but most importantly, I could fix tape recorders.
That got me an immediate invitation to volunteer at the Radio-TV office mainly to fix things. Three weeks later I was offered the job of assistant director. The opportunity to work on a presidential campaign seemed like a once in a lifetime experience, so I took it, thinking I would resume school after the election. Did not happen—and that worked out just fine.
That unforeseen, unexpected, unplanned career in Democratic politics included traveling with the the ’76 Mondale campaign as the “radio reporter” sending audio news reports daily from the campaign plane. Add to that 8 Democratic National Conventions as a top staffer or consultant, 4 stints as a Democratic staffer on the Hill, 4 Democratic presidential campaigns, general and primaries, and more.
All of that, ONLY because George McGovern’s outspoken opposition to the war particularly resonated with me, as an Air Force & Vietnam veteran myself.
I almost met George McGovern when I was the location sound engineer for a PBS (Emmy Award winning) documentary “Korean War Stories”. But I had a previous booking that could not be changed. The producer explained to George how disappointed I was to not be there, George wrote me a touching personal handwritten note of thanks.
Thanks to all for putting this together. (Files and photos may come i the near future)
Hello, I just finished editing my photos and ephemera from the campaign and the conventions, thanks to Keith Wessel for his expert training! I hope they bring back more good memories. My favorites were revisiting the atmosphere of the final, sleepless nights and days in the Bronx, that I diaried and have shared online here. I wish I could express my appreciation to Dick Tuck for taking me on as a “staff photographer” for Reliable Source, and to my co-conspirators Richard Hirsch and Dan MacNamee. As ever, thanks to George McGovern for a lifetime of inspiration.
When Senator McGovern stood in an Illinois field to raise concern about Nixon’s “Great Grain Robbery,” the press asked him why Mayor Daley hadn’t met him at the airport.
This focus on “politics”, rather than the substance of governance, has, of course, only become unimaginably, and so tragically worse.
“Panels” are full of pundits opining on the political impact of a decision, rather than subject matter experts discussing the extent to which a policy addresses an important challenge of concern to voters.
And so voters, not informed day to day about the actual hard work of substance-oriented people in government, are turned off by “politics” and easily manipulated by destructive spin.
I would like to help to create at least one TV news program that builds an audience by starting from the challenges confronting people rather than the politics, describes work towards addressing those challenges, and, then makes it clear exactly which representative is voting for, or blocking, the solution.
There are various ways to raise the issue, from a “reality TV” approach with actual families facing actual problems followed over multiple episodes, an “All-in-the-Family/soap opera” approach with ongoing dramatization, or a news program with interviews with those affected by an issue.
But integrated into the narrative should be a focus on “informing the consent” of voters, by explaining what actually is being proposed and who exactly is voting for and against it
I don’t know where/how to begin but ask people with ideas to join a conversation about this.
As to what I have been up to in the last 50(!!?) years, I did manage to get that Ph.D. in Molecular Biology, was a prof of Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, worked in drug discovery (Merck, biotech), wrote a book (Darwin in the Genome). Recently, I have been teaching a required course for non-science majors on the nature of science at St. John’s University (with an emphasis on examples related to emerging infectious diseases).
I also have tried to counteract the attacks on immigrants by presenting data on the astounding number of Nobel Laureates who are the children and grandchildren of the “wretched refuse” immigrants of 1880-1924 who were so hated that our immigration laws were changed to keep more people like that out, thus trapping millions in Europe in time to be incinerated in the holocaust. An example is this talk at a symposium at Duke University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG6QBiX9ghc
I was curled up on a British Air flight from London to New York in 1972 when I read a Newsweek cover story about George McGovern. As an anti-war strike steering committee chair in college, everything the correspondent–whose name is lost in the mists of time–wrote about Senator McGovern resonated. I got home, left college in New Hampshire six weeks before graduation, abandoned my ’til-then career path (English lit professor), and hit the campaign trail
Fortune was kind, and I began my work under the wing of the fabled Joe Grandmaison and with the great tutelage and comradeship of Carol Friedenberg (in D.C.) and John Franzen (in N.H.) during the New Hampshire primary. From there, I went on to be a state press secretary during primaries in Massachusetts, Nebraska, San Francisco (Hi, Henry Weinstein!), and Manhattan. In Miami, at the convention, I was a member of the team that dealt with the hordes of reporters who thronged the Doral. During the general election, some one of the Fates tapped me to be Senator McGovern’s press secretary in Massachusetts during the general. How young was I? So young that, even though I spent 22 hours a day parsing survey results, reading headlines, and dealing with older and wiser reporters who could testing political winds far better than I, I was nonetheless shocked that our hero lost 49 out of 50 states. As a 22-year old who didn’t know what she didn’t know, I was sure the country couldn’t possibly choose Nixon over McGovern, and that overrode every functional neuron I had.
All this was great fodder for my future ventures. I made lifelong, extremely close friends during the campaign, and have only fond memories of our time together.
From there I went on to become Mike Dukakis’s press secretary at the outset of his first term in office. (A very respectful tip of the hat to David Sugerman here),I then joined former President Carter’s campaign in order to run the Zoo Plane, A parenthetical aside: Does anybody remember Timothy Crouse of “Boys on the Bus” fame? No? Well, The Zoo Plane ferried the national print and broadcast media the entire length of the the countrywide, criss-crossing, every-state-traversing of the 1976 general election.
Around 1978, I became head of public relations at ABC News globally under new president Roone Arledge before parlaying an offer from CBS News into the opportunity to take on headline programming as a network news producer. I did this for 10 happy years at ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and at CNN. The one constant in my life throughout the 70s and 80s is that it was nomadic; those network assignments took me from D.C. to Manhattan to Houston to D.C. again and then to Rome and Boston.)
I became a single mother when my daughter, Molly Allis, was five, (Note well: two journalists marrying and moving nine times in 11 years seems like great idea while it’s going on, but, man, it will take the stuffing out of you.) I settled into managing my own strategic consulting firm in Boston for the next two-and-a-half decades. By then, had the good sense to recognize that I a) I was still adventuresome, and b) I still had one more act in me. I went against my urban instincts and moved to beautiful Portland, Maine–population 66,000–in 2011. You can’t get me with a crowbar; sensibly, I retired.
Sending love and good wishes to all the friends, traveling companions, and kindred spirits I was fortunate to find along the way…
Warmly,
Mary