If I ran for president of the United States, you’d be lucky. Just as if you ran for president, I would be lucky. This country needs to see some new faces in that arena. American politics needs some new blood, because the problem in our country today is one of choice. We don’t have enough men and women who would make good public servants who are willing to run for elective office as well as submerge themselves in the immorality of our current campaign system. You really do have to sell your soul, or a significant portion of it, to corporations, super PACs, and rich donors in order to win most statewide elections today. And that transaction is a big part of what is killing this country.
I learned a good deal about campaign financing and proposed reforms to it from a man named Burt Neuborne, a professor and the legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. I met Burt, and his colleague Josh Rosenkranz, through my association with The Creative Coalition (TCC), which I served as president of beginning in 1995. TCC was founded by the actor Ron Silver. Silver had the ego of an Argentinean polo player. When we traveled together to Albany on an Amtrak train in 1990, Silver masticated every syllable while expertly coaching our group for a meeting with Governor Mario Cuomo about the pending New York State Environmental Quality Bond Act. Silver was there again in 1997, when we gave testimony before Congress regarding the federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts. Silver drilled us with the opposition’s talking points and anticipated questions. He taught us about “cover”—the response we’d have ready when our opponents made the inflammatory remark we hoped they would make—which often served as the counterpunch that won the argument for our side. It was the political education of a lifetime. Silver, who had played Alan Dershowitz in the film Reversal of Fortune, possessed the mind of a lawyer beyond anyone I had ever met who didn’t actually hold a law degree, as well as a political acumen that easily could have put him in office. In fact, several people I’ve met while on the TCC advocacy path were among the most informed and dedicated of activist-artists. Richard Masur, a TCC member and onetime president of the Screen Actors Guild, knew more about health insurance, in terms of both policy and politics, than anyone I’d met. The same goes for Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H regarding the death penalty.
My own political education began in the den of my childhood home as I sat with my father watching the events of the late 1960s, particularly the Vietnam War, unfold on network television news. By the time I was ten, my political consciousness was already nearly concretized. In that regard, I’m no different from people who are raised in a home that is pro or anti any of the issues of the day: the NRA, immigration, gay marriage, abortion, or Obamacare. Politicization starts at home. My politics are my dad’s politics, based on the simple idea that, as the richest nation on Earth, America has a greater obligation to reach out and help those who have not realized even a modicum of what we take for granted here. The standard of living, the freedoms, the educational opportunities, and the hopes for a better life, if only for our children, are either elusive or completely out of reach for an exploding number. This is also true here at home, and it’s unconscionable.
On the cold afternoon of November 22, 1963, my friends and I played in a neighbor’s yard while our mothers huddled around a television watching the news following the assassination of President Kennedy. This was the first political event I recall. I was five years old. My father deeply admired the Kennedy family’s blend of intelligence, wit, and, above all, idealism, so JFK’s death hit him very hard. He drove down to Washington to experience the president’s funeral, standing among the large crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue to view the cortege.
A mere five years later, Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles, an act that would dramatically change my father’s life, as well as the fate of the country. The hope that the United States would leave Vietnam and end the insanity there, for both countries, died in the Ambassador Hotel as well. Bobby Kennedy’s funeral would be different for my dad. He took my sister Beth, my brother Daniel, and me into Manhattan, where we stood in the incredibly long line filing north up Park Avenue from what was then the Pan Am building. The line turned left onto 51st Street, and the mourners were ushered into the northern entrance of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As I was about to enter, a reporter for WOR radio approached me with a microphone, and asked, “Are you going to pray for Senator Kennedy?” I was stunned and silent, but the reporter persisted as my father just shrugged, as if to say, “Well, answer him!” “Are you here to pray for the senator?” the reporter asked again. “Yes,” I replied sheepishly. “What are you going to say?” he asked. “A Hail Mary,” I said. “How does that go?” he asked. On June 8, 1968, at the 51st Street entrance to St. Patrick’s, I recited the Hail Mary at Robert Kennedy’s funeral for a New York radio audience. After that, politically speaking, what other future could I possibly have?
After my unsuccessful run for class president at George Washington, I started to become more jaded. The election opened my eyes to the kinds of people who envision themselves in leadership roles. When I’d arrived for freshman orientation at GW, I unpacked my bags in a six-man suite where four of my five roommates had already declared themselves political science majors, and two of those four stated that they were planning to run for president of the United States one day. (The one guy not studying poli-sci moved out after one semester, as he wanted to live with other premeds, or “anyone who knew what they were talking about.”) At school, I interned for the congressman from my home district, Jerome Ambro. Right away, I was given an assignment working with the organization No Greater Love, a veterans group that wanted each of the country’s 435 members of Congress to help recognize a Vietnam vet from their district who had successfully reacclimated upon returning home. After a couple of days’ worth of research, I recommended Ron Kovic.
Kovic, a Massapequa native who had been taught by my father in high school, was the author of the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, which was later made into a hit film by Oliver Stone starring Tom Cruise. Ambro’s chief of staff and district director went slightly nuts at my suggestion. They brought me in to meet the congressman, who thanked me for my efforts and then explained how Kovic’s antiwar positions made him precisely the wrong vet for the program. I spent the rest of the semester reassigned to “constituent services,” which usually meant helping track down some type of missing government benefit for a voter from the district. The rest of the time, I would join the other interns at receptions all over the Hill, where we drank, ate as many hors d’oeuvres as possible, and lied, expanding the scope of our internship’s responsibilities as much as possible.
When I went to New York to attend NYU and then started my acting career, I put politics on the shelf. Ronald Reagan had been elected president in 1980, and as unhappy as I was about that, I was consumed with getting my bearings in the business. The period between 1979 and 1987 was largely one of political dormancy for me, but when Reagan was reelected in 1984 (and I was near the peak of my drug addiction and alcoholism), I made the exception of a brief and odd little stopover in the office of Tom Hayden. I contacted the California assemblyman’s Santa Monica office and explained that I wanted to volunteer for him. Some of the women in the office watched Knots Landing and asked me what I was doing answering Hayden’s mail. I explained that I had been bound for law school before I picked up acting and that, once in LA, I had a lot of time on my hands. A guy who worked there, unsure of what I was after, gave me a job in, you guessed it, constituent services. This time, my task was usually getting to the bottom of an overcharge on a water or power bill.
In 1985, Hayden invited me to his home for an event he was hosting with his wife, Jane Fonda. All of a sudden, I was sitting in one of the premier salons of political Hollywood. The biggest film and music stars of their day, representing different generations, were gathered in Jane and Tom’s backyard to listen to a speech by Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu. At any given moment, I fully expected someone to ask me to put on a white jacket and start serving canapés. I thought to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” But Hayden, in addition to being an incredibly bright and dedicated political fighter, was completely unpretentious. His attitude was, “If you care, if you’re engaged in the fight, and if you want to learn, you’re welcome here.” We stayed in touch, and in 1988, Hayden put me on the list for a party in honor of his latest book, Reunion, to be held at the home of Courtney Kennedy Ruhe, one of Bobby Kennedy’s daughters. There, I came face-to-face for the first time with Ethel Kennedy. Though her husband had been gone twenty years, to me it might as well have been a month. I spared her my recollection of the ten-year-old me at St. Patrick’s, but to say that I was overwhelmed when I met her is an understatement. After a brief moment of small talk, Mrs. Kennedy did what all Kennedys do: she changed the subject, charging into some issue of the day.
In July 1988, my connection with Hayden got me invited to the Democratic convention in Atlanta as a guest of the California delegation. The group I was with included Ally Sheedy, Sarah Jessica Parker, my brother Billy, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe. Dukakis was the nominee, and although I had my doubts about his electability, I was ardently opposed to Vice President Bush as president, if only because he had been director of the CIA. (I believed then, and I believe now, that having been the head of any secret intelligence agency in this country disqualifies one from being president.) In October of that year, Ethel invited me to her home in Hyannis Port. With my sister Beth in tow, we watched Lloyd Bentsen wither Dan Quayle during their debate with the famous line “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Sitting with Ethel, one wall going up a staircase covered with Kennedy family photos, my sister Beth and I looked at each other, both giddy, in a way that clearly said, “Do you think Dad can see us?”
Not all of the Kennedys are created equal in terms of the ineffable quality that distinguishes them in American political life. The blend of charisma, the ability to articulate the facts, and the high level of passion are rare in politics these days. For me, Bobby Jr., his late brother Michael Kennedy, and his sisters Kathleen and Kerry are examples of how the best of the Kennedy genetics resurfaced in the next generation. But no one can top Ethel for her sheer life force. She is sharp, indefatigable, funny, intense, and well practiced (as all Kennedys must be) at granting strangers a chance to experience the Kennedy zeitgeist. I could not begin to imagine where she found the personal courage she had accessed in order to carry on with her life. A few years later, after Bill Clinton—who carries some of that Kennedy spirit—had moved into the White House, I was invited to a party there featuring a screening of Ron Howard’s film The Paper. To my delight, I was seated next to Ethel. At one point in the movie, a gun went off and Ethel grabbed my arm. To see the look on her face, all those years later, showed me that though she is tough, that moment is still there.
My romantic feelings for nearly all things Kennedy aside, the fall of 1988 was also when another invitation arrived, and with it, one of the greatest political contacts I’d ever make. While shooting Miami Blues in south Florida that year, I was invited to attend a Dukakis fund-raiser at the Los Angeles home of Norman Lear. I wondered if flying across the country while I was shooting, to feel out of place among a pack of powerful Hollywood celebrities again, was the best idea, but a friend told me I’d be crazy to pass up such the chance.
At Norman’s home, a line snaked its way through the property to reach Michael Dukakis, perhaps the last Democratic candidate to win the nomination with such a deficit of charisma. Like Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, and Mondale immediately before him, Dukakis was old school: an earnest and ultimately uninspiring candidate, the kind that one assumed Reagan had knocked off for good. The Massachusetts governor was a decent enough guy, yet he made priggish Vice President Bush seem downright affable. When I turned from Dukakis to shake Norman’s hand, my excitement spiked. “Now, this guy ought to be running for president,” I thought. Norman proved to be more than a powerful political eminence; he became a mentor. The organization he founded, People for the American Way (PFAW), focused my political activities in a way for which I will always be grateful, both to Norman and to the group as a whole. Lear is a hero and a legend in the community of artist-activists I count myself among.
Over the course of the next decade, from 1988 to 1998, I tried to navigate the ups and downs of my career, but speaking on behalf of The Creative Coalition and PFAW and attending countless events, both issue-oriented and on behalf of individual candidates, became like a second job. I crisscrossed the country incessantly. On a few occasions, I landed in LA, forgetting that I had an event in New York within the coming forty-eight hours, and hopped on a plane to turn right around (something I could only do in my thirties!). The one thing I maintain about that period of intense political advocacy, and beyond, is that I never appeared on behalf of any cause in order to line my own pockets. The work I did never enriched me in any way. I think that has confused or frustrated some people, like some Republicans and conservatives for whom politics must always involve some form of profit taking. It’s as if my political opposites were saying to me, “You’ve made a little money. Why don’t you play eighteen holes, kick back, have a beer? Relax! The spotted owls and the poor people and hybrid cars, they’re all gonna take care of themselves.” My response to that is, “Convince me. Teach me. Show me how to be like you and not worry about all the things you don’t worry about.” I’m still waiting for a persuasive response.
I fought voter suppression in Florida after the 2000 election. I wanted to secure federal support for the arts in every state in the country, particularly for those communities that are not as culturally abundant as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. I argued for saner gun control laws and protested the death penalty not only as cruel and unusual but also as fiscally impractical. I fought for a woman to have control over her own reproductive choices. But my favorite issue was to urge both federal and state governments to take money out of politics. Burt Neuborne and Josh Rosenkranz lectured our TCC gatherings about Buckley v. Valeo, the case that they believe was rushed into the Supreme Court with the hope that its cleansing effects might impact the 1976 election. But the ruling proved to be porous in many ways. Since then, the systematic assault on campaign finance reform by elitist hacks like John Roberts or originalist fanatics like the late Antonin Scalia has only served to keep the White House, and a great many other offices in this country, in the hands of rich, white, corporate-leaning Christian men or those who will do their bidding. Campaign finance reform is the linchpin of nearly every problem we face as a nation, just as our oil-based economy is the linchpin of our issues abroad. If the first issue is not addressed, we will continue to see the US electoral system gamed by insiders who put forth enormous amounts of money on behalf of any candidate who will read from their script in order to get the role of a lifetime. Even if that candidate is a foppish casino operator who had heretofore shown no interest in national politics.
In 1994, the chance to serve the Kennedys came again. Senator Edward Kennedy was running for reelection in Massachusetts in a tough race with Mitt Romney. I met Michael Kennedy, Ted’s nephew, in Hyannis while we were (what else?) playing football on the front lawn. I knew Michael was full-on Kennedy when he climbed up onto the hood of a car to catch a touchdown pass, claiming the front end of the car was in bounds. We spoke about how I might help Ted. In the critical month of October, I traveled to western Massachusetts (as it was assumed Teddy had Boston sewn up) for four consecutive four-day weekends, most of them with Michael. We went to VFW halls, community colleges, and Democratic clubs, where I spoke in front of groups as big as a thousand people and as small as twenty. We made around seventy stops during that month, fueling ourselves with pretzels and Snapple. On October 25, Ted was set to debate Romney. Michael told me that in spite of the polls, Ted needed a good showing, especially in the first and more-watched debate, in order to nullify the issue of his age. Romney was now the fair-haired leading man, but Ted came out prepared, robust, combative. Everyone scored the first, pivotal round for Ted. On October 23, just before that first debate, as I was driving with Michael to Boston to catch my flight home, Ted called his nephew, who then handed me the phone. All of a sudden, I was reminded of driving around western Massachusetts (oddly enough) back in 1992, while shooting Malice, when the news came on the radio that Bill Clinton had defeated Bush. I choked up at that moment, thinking that there really was hope for this country. When I took the phone from Michael, I choked up again as Senator Kennedy thanked me and said, “If I win this thing, I really couldn’t have done it without your help.” And although I knew that was hyperbole, I felt that Ted’s 1994 campaign was one where I really had made a contribution. I thought, “If I can get people to vote for Ted, is there someone else I could get them to vote for? Could it be me?”
In 1997, New York magazine put me on the cover with the title “See Alec Run.” The mostly positive piece teased my aspirations to some state political office, but my allergy to campaign fund-raising told me I wasn’t ready. To run for office meant I would have to give up the work I loved (for the most part) on the stage and screen to play a part I didn’t want to play: a politician raising money. As fast as those rumors came, they went, and stories about me running for the Senate or Congress, for governor or mayor, were treated with a more dismissive tone, as in, “Yeah, we’ve heard all that before.” A year after the New York cover story, Bill Clinton came to East Hampton, the first sitting president to travel to the East End to attend a political event since FDR. My new home had yet to be remodeled, so the DNC stepped in to stage the event. A local builder who was my friend spruced up our house and put together some furniture. Then Kim and I hosted Bill and Hillary at our house with a concert by Hootie and the Blowfish for around a thousand people. That night, the Secret Service wanted a dedicated bathroom in the house for the president, so we had designated a powder room in the hallway and marked it as off-limits. When the president was eventually escorted to it, he found it was locked. The Secret Service men knocked on the door crisply, and a muffled reply came from inside, and after what felt like an eternity, the door opened and revealed my mother standing there. I moaned the most theatrical “Moooooooom” you could imagine. The president of the United States put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Alec. I understand. I’ve got a mother, too.”
After the event at our home, a group repaired to Turtle Crossing, a ribs joint on the highway in East Hampton, where every celebrity who had a home in the area—including Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate, Kathleen Turner, Roy Scheider, Lauren Bacall, Chevy Chase, Sidney Lumet, and Christie Brinkley, among others—was seated at picnic-style tables, eating chicken, ribs, coleslaw, and corn bread with the president and First Lady. At one point, Clinton sat in a corner with Kim and me, where he spoke intently about the brewing Lewinsky scandal. Eventually, he leveled his eyes at us, his long, thin fingers pressed into his breast in a plaintive pose. “Even if I did do it,” he said, “don’t I deserve to be forgiven?” Just then, someone pulled up next to the president and snatched him away. Kim spun toward me and squealed, “I think he just told us he did it!”
Whatever Clinton did or didn’t do, none of it warranted the despicable and offensive nonsense that followed. I watched the impeachment proceedings while in South Africa with Kim, who was making a film there. On satellite television, some British Sky channels came in and I was able to see the news reports of what the Republicans were attempting to do. The whole sordid story about this witch Linda Tripp setting up Lewinsky to get the president made me sick. I agreed with Hillary Clinton’s assertion that many of their troubles were the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy, and I detested Kenneth Starr (whom Pepperdine University disgraced itself by hiring, no matter its right-wing leanings) and Henry Hyde’s hypocrisy, and those feelings would eventually prove impossible to shake.
When I returned home, I appeared on Conan O’Brien’s show in what I thought was obviously a parody of the McCarthyite mentality Hyde had fostered. On Conan, I called for Hyde to be “stoned to death” as I rose out of my chair, shaking my fist and plainly overacting. Plainly, that is, to everyone except the media and the Republicans, who both seemed to think that I was actually serious about the threat. The Democrats have their hacks, too, so Jack Valenti piled on, voicing his disapproval, stating, “It’s not something you parody.” Looking back, I still believe that Hyde disgraced his office with his actions against Clinton. The GOP, with an Ahab-like obsession, would stop at nothing to settle the score over Nixon and nullify Clinton. And now, nearly two decades later, that’s still all that the modern GOP stands for, nullifying election results and settling scores, old and new.
In that vein, the 2000 election dealt me a devastating blow. PFAW had sent volunteers down to Florida as part of its “Election Protection” effort, and I traveled there to work on the Arrive with 5 program, whereby we helped register tens of thousands of new voters. However, many of those we registered were turned away or their votes were ultimately not counted. It was painful to watch Jeb Bush seem to rig an election on behalf of his less-competent brother, as I believed then and still do that George W. Bush was simply a variant of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan was a front man who brought to the table an indisputable electability, then turned the whole thing over to his handlers while he essentially performed the role of president. He did not, however, steal an election. Both parties are guilty of some rather brass-knuckled electoral tactics, but nothing compares to the 2000 election (until, of course, we learned about Russian hacking). Once Bush won, 9/11 presented his crew with what they were after: a war for oil during which they destroyed an entire civilization, then handed the rebuilding over to their friends in investment banking and multinational construction, often with no-bid contracts. How much money do you think Bush Family and Friends Inc. made in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq in the ensuing seven years and beyond? Along the way, the administration also squandered all of the goodwill we were poised to reap in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy.
During America’s forays into the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we’ve all seen photos of men and women either holding or standing over their dead child, the parent’s face a mask of suffering. Such images lead me to wonder what we can honestly expect from the people of these regions in terms of their feelings toward us? Even if the actions of the United States are well-intentioned, how much blood of innocent civilians is on our hands? I know that Americans live very sheltered lives in terms of the consequences of our foreign policy and that whoever is president must work to end that suffering.
After eight years of Bush, I wasn’t sure what the country was ready for. When Obama won, I sat in the kitchen of my New York apartment and cried. What a great day for democracy. When he was reelected, it was even sweeter. I think Obama was a good president, and I was sad to see him go. Those who believe that Obama has betrayed his promises about things such as closing Guantanamo or questioned his policy on an accelerated drone program are missing something, I believe. The military, the CIA, and the NSA have their own agenda. The president is the one official elected by all Americans, and yet he does not call the shots. When presidents come into office believing they are actually in charge, that’s how you get to Dallas in 1963 and people get killed. Then, maybe, his brother wishes to pick up where he left off and is killed as well.
I became complacent when Obama won, which is more a sign of my age than anything else. Our guy was in, so we were covered. Politics was also boring the hell out of me. I wondered who could right this ship after eight years of Cheney as puppeteer. Again, I thought of running for office myself. In 2013, some Democratic leaders from different corners of New York politics approached me, and we had a serious talk about me running for mayor, but my wife and I were expecting our daughter, Carmen, that summer, and we agreed that it wasn’t the time for an all-consuming race like that. What else would I run for? I believed that running for president, even building my way there by winning some other office, was impractical because the country remained stuck in the idea that the highest office should be held by someone inside of the current system. Also, I believed Hillary would win easily in 2016.
As Election Day approached, a couple of friends, both New York media execs, asked me if I wanted to join them at celebratory events they were producing to mark Hillary’s pending victory. The Donald Trump we had been presenting on Saturday Night Live seemed to delight nearly everyone in the People’s Republic of Manhattan, so I had many such invitations. The SNL Trump sketches prompted people to approach me, thank me, and beseech me to “keep going” more than any other portrayal or piece I have performed. It was ironic, to say the least. In 2013, Harvey Levin wanted the public to believe I was a hate-filled homophobe. The Post said I was a racist. Suddenly, liberal downtown types were coming up to me everywhere I went, all day, every day, urging me to continue with this funny way to channel all of their not-so-funny fears, as well as their hatred of the suddenly viable Trump candidacy. And then this god-awful nightmare descended.
There is no point in dissecting Hillary Clinton’s loss here. Enough analysis of that exists to last us all ten lifetimes. I had always admired Secretary Clinton’s mind, her courage, her self-control under painfully difficult circumstances, and her tenacity. Trump, of course, exploited the fact that voters across the country would accept him as the sharp, no-nonsense, can-do executive he portrays on television. And he knew that they would not consider the fact that in New York, his hometown and base of operations, Trump is endured, at best. I will not go so far as to say he is a punch line, because in New York, making a lot of money counts for something, and according to him at least, Trump has made a lot of money. But Trump was never an admired New Yorker, a sought-after speaker, or dinner guest. He has never shown an appetite for the Great Political Imperative that New York politicians must manifest in order to be a real leader: empathizing with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of working-class New Yorkers. In fact, he has actually been an enemy of the working class, refusing to pay many of his contractors and using undocumented workers on job sites going back to the 1980s. Trump has abused power at every station stop of his life. Now he has the most powerful position in the world. Some people make a lot of money, but it does not fundamentally change who they are. Others become rich while choosing to never honestly reflect on the role luck played in their good fortune, electing to tune out the cries and complaints of those who can only truly be helped by reforming the system that enriches the Donald Trumps of this world.
I could go on. In another book, perhaps, I might go into greater detail about what the president of the United States ought to do and who that person ought to be. We have so many problems in the modern world, and we can no longer plead ignorance of any of them. Prioritizing those problems, knowing what order we must proceed in, like triage, is essential. Foreign policy, education, war-making, jobs, environmental regulation, disease control, infrastructure, criminal justice and incarceration, climate change, a fair tax policy, immigration, and, yes, a government role in curating our diverse cultural heritage: all of these, and more, must be on the table. The presidential candidate who defeats Trump in 2020 must present a clear, transparent plan for what he or she will do and when. The thing that is clearest now is that Trump must go, either in 2020 or sooner. It is imperative that we replace those who think they own this country with those who built it.
On May 8, 1962, John Kennedy addressed the United Auto Workers in Atlantic City on the subject of the responsibility of both organized labor and auto executives to control inflation. This excerpt from that speech says it all. When we read it today, Kennedy exhorts us to raise the bar, increase our expectations, seek a man or woman who will at least attempt to work for all Americans and do as much good for as many of them as possible. As he put it:
Now I know there are some people who say that this isn’t the business of the President of the United States, who believe that the President of the United States should be an honorary chairman of a great fraternal organization and confine himself to ceremonial functions. But that is not what the Constitution says. And I did not run for President of the United States to fulfill that Office in that way.
Harry Truman once said there are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of other people, the hundred and fifty or sixty million, is the responsibility of the President of the United States. And I propose to fulfill it.
I believe America is a great country, but we are never greater than when we actually do great things: World War II, the moon landings, the Peace Corps, the billions upon billions of dollars we gift every year to a world in need. At times, we’ve also elected some truly great leaders. One thing we ought to do, however, is shore up the integrity of our electoral system. Because it isn’t really a democracy if you can’t honestly count the votes.