Five presidents and several wars ago, I wrote direct mail for the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) a group fighting the way media stars, groupthink and corporate bias influence reporting. Sound familiar?
I was thrilled to learn that Daniel Ellsberg had agreed to sign this “lift note” for the mailing, to accompany the two page letter we mailed around the start of the Gulf War. ( I invented a Media Bias Detector that was later used in a college curriculum—see below).
Daniel Ellsberg left the track he’d been on that took him through prep school, the Marines, Harvard, Cambridge, the RAND Corporation and the Defense Department, to become an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. But for Ellsberg, this was more than a political, academic or practical disagreement.
For Daniel Ellsberg, taking a stand became essential. The New York Times obituary included this telling passage:
As American involvement in Vietnam deepened, he went to Saigon in 1965 to evaluate civilian pacification programs. He joined Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, the counterinsurgency expert, and for 18 months accompanied combat patrols into the jungles and villages.
What he saw began his transformation. It went beyond the failure to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. It was a mounting toll of civilian deaths, tortured prisoners and burned villages, a litany of brutality entered in military field reports as “clear and hold operations.”
…In August 1969, he went to a War Resisters League meeting at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and heard a speaker, Randy Kehler, proudly announce that he was soon going to join his friends in prison for refusing the draft.
Profoundly moved, Mr. Ellsberg had reached his breaking point, as he was quoted saying in “The Right Words at the Right Time” (2002), by the actress Marlo Thomas. “I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room,” he said. “I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.”
Mr. Ellsberg began to oppose the war openly. He wrote letters to newspapers, joined antiwar protests, composed articles and testified at the trials of draft resisters. He also resigned from RAND, under pressure.
I didn’t know that story before, but I remember how moved I was when I saw John Kerry throw his medals over the Capitol fence. I totally got the point of politics—to make a difference. It can make me cry too.
I won’t quote the whole Robert Kennedy passage again, but he urged us to engage in “acts of courage and belief” that can overcome the “mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
That’s why some of us continue to care about politics, and why it’s heartbreaking to see how many more people don’t—particularly young voters (and non-voters).
The youth vote is the great white whale of progressive politics. Each election cycle, we hear rumblings of a generational shift that will change the face of the electorate.
Polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight before the 2020 election showed that 78% of young people said they planned to vote in 2020.
But according to the Census, voter turnout that year was lowest among those ages 18-24, at 51.4%.
Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote. The actual turnout was 27%.
That’s an improvement—in fact the second-highest youth turnout for a midterm in almost three decades—but older, more conservative voters still make up the lion’s share of voters. They’re the ones electing officials who won’t vote for gun safety, health care, voting rights, the environment, gender equality and racial justice, and all the other issues that Gen Z cares about.
They’ll march on state Capitols and takeover social media, but getting them to care about elections will depend on tapping into the well of courage and belief Daniel Ellsberg exemplified. There’s a direct line from all those issues, and each of those deeply held values and beliefs to a strong Democratic House majority and 60 votes (or close to it) in the Senate.
I’ll come back to that in a future Substack, particularly if you leave your thoughts in the comments.
R.I.P. Daniel Ellsberg.
P.S. Don’t miss the song of the day!
And because I promised…note the archaic reference to something called a “VCR"