I am mildly annoyed by a few lines in the introductory matter in an otherwise interesting article by Matthew Continetti about John Kerry’s Yale College days:
In 1965, John Kerry, a junior at Yale and the newly appointed head of the Yale Political Union, was invited to give a speech at Choate, the tony prep school known mainly for its famous alumni Franklin Roosevelt and John F.Kennedy. . . .
Head of the Yale Political Union is a high-profile position, a launching pad for careers both literary (William F. Buckley Jr., for example) and political (think Joseph Lieberman).
Mr. Continetti apparently took this information from Douglas Brinkley’s Kerry hagiography. He ought to know not to be so credulous. Neither Buckley nor Lieberman was ever president of the YPU. Their springboard was chairmanship of the Yale Daily News. I cannot, in fact, think of any Union president who went on to a conspicuous career in national politics before John F. Kerry. His immediate successor, Jay Wilkinson, now a federal appeals court judge, perhaps places second. Of Kerry’s Yale contemporaries who are now politically prominent, only George Pataki had a substantial Union career. George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and Howard Dean didn’t bother to join.
The facts about the Yale Political Union, c. 1962 to 1966, aren’t important to the Presidential election, but it would be nice if the media could get them more or less straight. Therefore, I’d like to sketch the main features of the organization during that time, with special emphasis, naturally, on John Kerry’s role. I can testify first hand, having overlapped John at Yale and been extremely active in the Union, albeit on the Right rather than the Left side of the House.
The Political Union is usually described as a “debating society”, but in those days it was a bit more complex than that. It combined three elements: parliamentary debates mimicking the British House of Commons, guest speakers (almost always politicians of greater or lesser renown) and internal politicking. There were typically eight meetings a semester, plus an election meeting to choose officers for the following term. The regular meetings were of three types: debates with no guest speaker, guest speeches with no debate and keynoted debates, in which the guest speaker addressed the resolution that would then be debated by the members.
The real life of the Union was, however, not in the meetings but in the activities of its “political parties”. All but a handful of members signed up for one or another of these groups. The chairmen of the parties were automatically members of the Union’s executive board (along with the organization’s elected officers), and two members from each party formed the Rules Committee, which selected debate topics. To maintain official recognition, a party had to have at least 25 “qualified voters”, members who attended half or more of the semester’s meetings. One that failed to meet that minimum for two semesters in a row lost its rights as a party.
In terms of size and activity, the Union had its ups and downs. During John Kerry’s freshman year (1962-63), it experienced a revival after several weak years and a debilitating financial scandal, rising to over 600 members from about half the number. (There were then about 4,000 undergraduates at Yale.) There were four parties: From left to right, the Liberal Party, the Progressive Party (an ostentatiously centrist faction that claimed to eschew ideology), the Conservative Party and the Party of the Right (which several years later fissioned between a substantially modified “Party of the Right” and the Tory Party, of which I was the first chairman). The Conservatives were by a wide margin the largest grouping, comprising roughly 40 percent of the total membership. The Liberals were second in size. The Progressives and PoR were relatively small, but the PoR was disproportionately influential, because the great majority of its members qualified to vote. The other parties had high proportions of “deadwood”.
At the end of his freshman year, John ran for chairman of the Liberal Party. His opponent, Lou Sigal, was a year ahead of him and had the advantage of seniority, but John campaigned much more vigorously. I was later told by Liberal Party members that his platform consisted of two planks: his initials (“J.F.K.”) and the argument that electing a Jewish chairman would “give people the wrong idea about the party”. That may sound bizarre, but Yale had only recently dropped its Jewish quota, and antisemitic attitudes lingered, even among the soi disant apostles of tolerance.
In Fall 1963, John’s first term as Liberal chairman, the Political Union enjoyed (or suffered) a rare moment in the national spotlight. It invited George Wallace to speak, outraging the Mayor of New Haven. The Mayor called on his friend, Yale Provost and acting President Kingman Brewster, Jr., to stop this affront to decency. Brewster, a bully by nature, summoned the members of the Union executive board to meet with him and told them that they had two choices: They could rescind the invitation to Governor Wallace, or they could be expelled from Yale. After a heated debate, they voted five-to-four for rescission, with John among the majority. The incident made its way into the newspapers and generated much unfavorable publicity for Yale, but Provost Brewster’s thuggery pleased the Mayor and, evidently, the Yale Corporation, which voted a few months later to install him as President of the College.
John was reelected chairman for the Spring 1964 term, but all was not well with his party. Membership and activity declined sharply. Only 13 members qualified to vote in the May 1964 Union elections (about a third as many as the next smallest party), and almost all of those were openly hostile toward their nominal leader. One of the most vocal Kerry critics was elected to succeed him as chairman.
Happily for John, the Conservative Party and the Party of the Right, each with about an equal number of qualified voters, were at loggerheads over how to divide the Union’s elected offices. When the Conservatives insisted on taking not only the presidency, which the PoR was willing to concede, but also the office of speaker (the presiding officer at meetings), the chairman of the PoR, who wanted to be speaker himself, offered to back John for president. In return, John promised not just to support Party of the Right candidates for three of the five elected offices (the maximum that any one party could constitutionally hold) but to give its members half of the appointed positions, too.
Though the Liberal chairman could deliver few votes beyond his own, the deal put him into office, albeit as a largely passive spectator in a Right-dominated administration. At the end of his term, the Conservative Party put together an anti-PoR coalition, which easily swept to victory. The Conservatives were content to let John run unopposed for reelection, because each of their two leading figures aimed at becoming president in the following semester. They wound up running against each other in May 1965 in one of the Union’s most memorable and hard-fought elections, but that is a story for another time.
As President, John Kerry had one clear objective: to gain national exposure for the Political Union and, corollarily, for its leader. At Executive Board meetings, he ruminated about means of accomplishing this, but nothing happened. His most ambitious plan was a banquet to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the organization’s founding. Initially projected a huge affair ornamented with a host of famous YPU alumni, it was scaled back because no one was willing to put in the necessary work, ending as a dinner for about 75 people, at which Rep. Jonathan Bingham (D-N.Y.), who had been the first president of the Union, delivered a forgettable after-dinner oration.
The reader has doubtless surmised already that the ideological makeup of the Union did not fit the stereotype of 1960’s political activism at elite universities. The right-of-center parties dominated, and the ones to their left were not all that liberal. John’s successor as Liberal chairman was Jorge Dominguez, a Cuban refugee of firm anticommunist views. When, in February 1965, the House debated a resolution calling for American withdrawal from Vietnam, only one Liberal (not John Kerry) favored it, and it went down to defeat by roughly a three-to-one margin. A left-of-Liberal challenge to Dominguez’s Cold War liberalism appeared in the form of a new “Party of the Left”. It was authentically left-wing, chaired by the grandson of Spanish Stalin toady Juan Negrin, but proved to have minimal appeal. Within a couple of years, it had dwindled to a rump kept alive, in a strange turn of events, by the Party of the Right. Its last chairman was a self-proclaimed conservative.
From the viewpoint of my segment of the Right, John Kerry was a perfectly satisfactory YPU leader, because he did nothing to upset an acceptable status quo. In our view, the organization was as large as it could naturally grow without deemphasizing debate in favor of outside lecturers. Certainly the year’s roster of speakers, highlighted by such luminaries as Senator Thomas Kuchel of California (the slowest, dullest political orator I have ever endured) and Governor John Reed of Maine, did nothing to detract from the luster of undergraduate forensics.
John himself was not sympathetic to things as they were. He wanted a much bigger Union where national and international leaders would deliver speeches with worldwide impact. That there was a potential to expand membership dramatically was demonstrated the following year, when Jay Wilkinson, a far more dynamic figure, pushed the rolls past a thousand (though George W. Bush still wasn’t attracted). In my view, that ephemeral success was the beginning of the Political Union’s decline, but no blame for it can attach to the somnolent Kerry administration.
I’d like to note, as a corrective to inferences that many draw about the collegiate John Kerry, that he was not notably wooden or arrogant. I knew him moderately well and always found his company pleasant. He was also quite a good speech maker, albeit with a baroque tendency that was then commonplace in the Political Union. (Full disclosure: He appointed me Union historian, so one should view my opinions with appropriate reserve.) He was overtly and intensely ambitious, but so were plenty of other Yalies. Indeed, he was not the most ambitious of my contemporaries. (That would be Victor Ashe, whose subsequent career reached a climax of sorts when he spent millions of dollars to win 34 percent of the vote in a Senate race against Al Gore.)
Does any of this have much bearing of whether Senator Kerry would be a good President of the United States? Not really. The only moral that I would draw is that Yale University in the middle 1960’s was not like the simple, two-dimensional image that formal and informal Kerry biographers tend to paint. Nor was John Kerry himself a simple, two-dimensional character. We can apply that lesson to many other pictures that we make of the past.
Tom -- I always enjoy your essays. This one reminded my of my time as a PoR member. Do you recall a rather big event when the YPU took over the Conn. Capitol (peacefully and with appropriate authorization)along with other collegiate types and, as I recall, Kerry made a big effort to be "elected" as something or other? Also, I agree that he was friendly and a rather decent speaker -- and totally uncommited to any ideology that I could perceive.
All the best, Jim Coyne(Yale '68)
Posted by: jim coyne | Friday, September 10, 2004 at 12:45 PM