Chapter Two

Love, California, and the War That Changed Everything

I was born on November 11, 1940, to Sophie (née Silvershein; born in Austria) and Ira Levy, on a big holiday that was then called Armistice Day, the official American celebration of the cease-fire in World War I, the war that they thought at the time was the “war to end all wars.” My mother always reminded me of this. It didn’t turn out that way, of course, which is why it’s now called Veterans Day, and honors those who fought and sacrificed in the wars that have happened since then.

In addition to my American name, Barbara Levy, my parents gave me a Hebrew name, which was traditional for Jewish families. Mine was barucha shalomis, which means “blessing of peace.” Turned out this fit me well, as I devoted so much of my life as a young mother trying to end the Vietnam War, and so much of my life as a grandmother trying to end the war in Iraq. However, it never described my personality.

There were many, many Jewish refugees in my neighborhood in Brooklyn who’d come over from the “old country.” Shopping on Nostrand Avenue with my mother after the war ended, I asked her why so many of the store owners and workers had little tattooed numbers on their arms.

“They were in concentration camps, sweetheart… Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Treblinka. They escaped or survived, but millions of others were killed in the Holocaust.”

The Holocaust. It seemed like it was always on my parents’ minds. They’d each lost dozens of relatives to the Nazis. It made me wonder why someone would want to kill me, not because I was doing something bad to him, but just because I was me. Seemed unbelievable to me. Crazy. Wrong.

The pervasive shadow of the Holocaust over my family, friends, and neighbors and what it revealed about the potential danger in the world beyond Brooklyn—people wanting to kill us just for being us—had a profound and lasting impact on my life. I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and thought how easily that could have been me, if my grandparents hadn’t left the old country when they did. When I was eighteen years old and visited Amsterdam for the first time, I saw the tiny space Anne Frank inhabited to hide from the Nazis, only to be discovered right before the liberation. I’ve been back to visit that space three times since.

I cannot overstate the impact of the Holocaust on me. It was far from the only example of man’s inhumanity to man, and whether it turns up in America in the form of prejudice or around the world in the form of genocide, it always arouses emotions within me and I have to act.

Education was everything to my father; my mother shared his fervor. Not one of Dad’s siblings, all born in Russia, was able to pursue a college degree. They had to work all the time to survive. Some of my uncles were entrepreneurial; one become a successful manufacturer of light fixtures, another manufactured children’s clothes, and one of my favorite uncles was Uncle Phil, who ran a diner which was referred to in those days as a “candy store.”

All of the siblings looked at my dad as the “true American” and he made them proud when he obtained his bachelor’s degree from City College of New York. He became a CPA, helping small businesses keep their books straight. Then Mom supported Dad’s goal of going to law school. She was so proud of him, she set aside her education dreams for him. He worked by day and went to school by night at Brooklyn Law School.

When Dad became a lawyer in the 1950s, it was the beginning of the McCarthy era, named after Joseph R. McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin. Along with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the Hollywood Black List, Red Channels, and other crazy hate groups, McCarthy created a terrible plague of accusations of treason and espionage, without proof or basis in reality, against thousands of innocent American citizens.

McCarthyism inflicted severe damage to many State Department and other government employees as well as celebrities including Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein, Dorothy Parker, and Gypsy Rose Lee. It even threatened my own father. When my dad took the bar, in those years they had an oral exam before a committee. He was asked by them whether he was a communist and had read Karl Marx. It was outrageous. But somehow Dad managed to convince the committee that he was a loyal American and he got his license. Maybe it was because he was such a big Dodgers fan.

When he passed the bar exam, my mom was so excited, she flung open the kitchen window of our fifth-floor apartment and yelled out to me:

“DAD PASSED THE BAR! DAD PASSED THE BAR!”

I was confused by her excitement. As I ran up the stairs, I was thinking, Of course Dad would pass by a bar. He never drank much except on holidays and sometimes a little when company came over. Sometimes I took things a little too literally.

President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower was a big hero to my father, even though the famous World War II hero was a Republican, while my father was a lifelong Democrat. Dad was grateful that Ike had led the Allies during World War II to defeat Hitler, who was trying to kill all the Jews in the world and nearly succeeded. A lot of Jews in America worried that the Nazis would win and then come across to the Atlantic to put them too in a gas chamber. No kidding. This was not a paranoid fantasy. From 1938 to 1943, Hitler appeared to be winning.

Ike prevailed, though, the war ended, and we were all safe—and eager to fulfill our American Dream.

Education was a big part of the American Dream. It was the way a first-generation immigrant could do better than their foreign-born parents, rising up the social and economic ladder. Education was therefore the most important thing to my parents. I was the eager beneficiary of their priorities.

One of my mother’s biggest regrets when she grew old was her lack of a high school and college degree. In her time, education was a much higher priority for men. So she kept putting it off, and frankly, she lacked encouragement. She had gone to business (secretarial) school and when she was sixteen, she went to work, very skilled at typing and stenography.

After I was married in the sixties, Mom studied hard for the high school equivalency test. By that time, she was in her late fifties. I can’t remember her ever taking it, but I do know this: degree or no degree, she knew her stuff and she taught us well. And she made sure her daughters had the opportunity for all the education they wanted, and we got it.

I am proud that I went to public school from kindergarten through college. I loved school, especially high school—George W. Wingate, a new high school in Brooklyn whose claim to fame was that it was shaped like a banjo and appropriately nicknamed “The Banjo School.”

I was in Wingate’s very first graduating class. All of our sport teams were called the Generals (after Wingate’s rank in the army). There were no girls’ sports in the fifties, so my best friend Juliette and I decided to be the first girl “coaches” of the boys’ baseball team. This caused enough of a stir because of its unprecedented nature to rate a story in the Brooklyn Eagle, and the first “Barbara” clipping my mom cut out and put in her memory drawer. Maybe that was the start of my going against the usual stereotype of a girl’s path at that time. However, the rest of my high school years were not particularly groundbreaking.

I sang in the chorus and was also the head of the Wingate Boosters, which turned out to be great training for my days as a cheerleader for the hard-working but hapless basketball team at Brooklyn College. Going to college wasn’t a choice. It was the way it was supposed to be, and of course it would be free. Only when the cost per semester went up to about eighteen dollars did my dad say it was getting really expensive, what with all the textbooks that I had to buy and all. Those were the days.

But we found a way. I majored in economics with a minor in political science, an unusual combination for college girls, 90 percent of whom majored in education so they could get one of the few good jobs open to women when they graduated. My dad gave me a sense of excitement about the stock market, so I went a different way. While he was supportive and proud, it was entirely my decision.

Another major event happened during my freshman year at Brooklyn College: I met Stewart Boxer.

I was sitting in the gym balcony watching a group of basketball players having a practice game. I’d never seen Stewart before, but what I was attracted to were his graceful jump shot and passing skills. It was wonderful to watch.

Lucky for me, he never looked up at the balcony, since what he’d have seen on that day was a silly-looking freshman sorority pledge in a ridiculous beanie and a bow. Who would ever take such a girl seriously?

I couldn’t get Stewart off my mind, so by asking around I found out that “Stewie,” as he was called, was two years older than me, a political science major and very popular. He belonged to Lord House, a fraternity-like organization, but only for athletes. I learned quickly where the Lord House brothers sat in the cafeteria and began to make frequent trips past his table, hoping he would notice me, but being very careful not to make any eye contact.

But soon after, a miracle happened. I was playing tennis as part of my physical education class when, as usual, I made a wild swing and the ball went soaring. Who happened to be walking just a few feet from where that tennis ball landed? Walking alone too. You guessed it.

Stewart retrieved the ball and took a good look at me, as if he were seeing me for the first time. Then, to my amazement, he tossed the ball back to my court and yelled at me.

“Are you going to the SING?”—so named because it was a singing contest between sororities where we made up lyrics about school set to Broadway tunes. We took it seriously and practiced for weeks on end. All of us sat around and crafted words about classes and teachers and things that made us laugh but had no other redeeming qualities.

“Of course,” I managed to reply. “I sure am.”

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” Mr. Cool said back. That was our first date. He suffered through the performance and then took me out for a soda at Wolfie’s, a popular diner for Brooklyn College kids. I had dated a few boys before this, but I felt different about Stewart, right from the start. He was both athletic and smart. He was generous on the basketball court, passing to others rather than hogging the ball. Where other guys dressed sloppily, he always looked very collegiate with his pressed khaki pants, button-down shirts, and, most of the time, a corduroy blazer.

I liked his dark black hair, which was buzz cut on top and long on the sides, and his black horn-rimmed glasses seemed cool to me. I liked that he would teach me about jazz. I liked his choice of hot dogs—Nathan’s in Coney Island. He would take me there for “dinner,” telling me, “Watch the way they handle those dogs over the fire! And notice how they cut the french fries and they add just the right amount of salt.”

I loved that he held a job after school to help out his mom, who had been widowed many years before. He worked as a shoe salesman at a chain store called National Shoes. He would ask me to meet him there occasionally. At the time, I wore a size 4B shoe, entitling me to buy sample shoes at ninety-nine cents each. Enough to make Imelda Marcos jealous.

I also like that Stewart was very poor. Does that sound crazy? I found it romantic, and it made me admire him so much, because it never made him down. It only fueled his dreams to become a successful lawyer. I also was moved that he had a special needs brother, whom he always looked out for.

I was smitten, but also leery of becoming “exclusive” with a guy when I was only eighteen years old. Several months after we met, as the summer of 1959 approached, I decided to take a three-month trip to Europe. Our first argument ensued, as he didn’t want me to go. But I did.

It was an amazing trip. I had a summer fling with a student musician I met on a student ship that transported us to Amsterdam. When I returned, I realized it was Stewart that I wanted. Unfortunately when I told him that, he wasn’t ready for an exclusive relationship.

I was heartbroken and couldn’t shake it. My grades left the “A” range and other guys were not the answer. I don’t remember how we got back together, but I know during this separation, we remained friends. Once he took the friendship too far, and I had to employ the art of tough. He asked to borrow my car to take out another girl in the Bronx. Boy, did I tell him off.

To this day, I cannot believe he asked for that car. In any case, we got back together soon enough, and on my nineteenth birthday, Stew gave me a beautiful Florentine gold watch with the inscription, “Together Forever.” It was a serious birthday gift, and we discussed marrying “someday.” I admonished him for spending so much. He admitted it was a lot—seventy-five dollars—but he wanted me to have it. When Mom saw the watch, she said, “This must be serious.” We said, “Yes it is.” So she took matters into her own hands and announced our “engagement.” We laughed so hard about it and still do.

We went along with it, and Mom threw an engagement party at our now much nicer apartment in Flatbush. We got married two years later. I often joke that Stew married Debbie Reynolds and woke up with Golda Meir. He has never refuted that.

Six months after we were married, we took our belated honeymoon to Europe, using the popular new guidebook called Europe on Five Dollars a Day. But there was one thing we splurged on: we bought a brand new Volkswagen Bug for nine hundred dollars and used it to take us to all the cities we longed to see, including Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Rome. Paris has remained our favorite European city ever since—especially the Left Bank, with its vibrant students, artists, and cafés, serving croissants straight from heaven.

So there we were, home again after our honeymoon celebration. Two youngsters, really. I was twenty-one and my husband was twenty-three. Stewart ended his job as a social worker to focus entirely on the tough job of going to law school, so as soon as I graduated from Brooklyn College, I marched out, hoping to use my degree in economics to get a job working on Wall Street and pay the rent for a new one-room studio on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn.

Our little place was in the back of the building, so the rent would be cheaper, only ninety dollars a month. The landlord promised us he’d fix up the lobby, which had a useless fountain in the center, but no paint or carpet, so everyone tracked cement dust into their apartments. Months went by and still no action from the landlord, so, feeling a rising tide of outrage, I typed up a petition and got everyone in the building to sign. There were at least a hundred doors in our building, and I knocked on every one of them.

We got the carpet. Maybe it seemed like a small matter to the landlord, but he was wrong. I knew if all the renters stood up for our rights, we would win. And we did. I think that petition organizing was an important moment in my political education, but I didn’t know it at the time. Later, I wouldn’t understand why the Republicans would make fun of President Obama because he was a “community organizer.” Organizing people to fight for their rights is a tough job that needs strong leaders, and he was one for sure. I’ll bet that if I’m ever put away in some nursing home for demented old politicians, I’ll be the one organizing for better tapioca pudding.

Nevertheless, for all my organizing skills, I couldn’t get a job as a stockbroker on Wall Street. They wouldn’t even let me into their training programs. Firm after firm told me “women aren’t stockbrokers.” The male college grads landed spots, but I had to settle for being a secretary, while I studied for the stockbroker’s exam on my own.

I worked at an old-line firm for Elizabeth Ellsworth Cook, one of the few women on Wall Street at the time, who was an expert in municipal bonds. Elizabeth put out a famous weekly newsletter on the municipal bond market, but always signed her name “E. E. Cook.”

“If men on the street ever knew my newsletter was written by a woman,” she explained, “they’d never buy it.”

This kind of discrimination was considered ordinary—fine and dandy. Elizabeth Cook didn’t complain about it and neither did I. In retrospect, that was as bad as the prejudice and discrimination itself. Racial discrimination was being attacked in the early sixties, but it took a few more years before women woke up to realize the injustices aimed at them.

When I finally passed my stockbroker’s exam and got my license, the bosses weren’t impressed. They didn’t even ask Elizabeth about me, and since she wanted to stay employed, she could only show me sympathy. No chance I could be a full-scale broker for them, no, none at all. I wasted no time: I left the same day and found a different firm that understood that my earning a commission meant dollars for them too. The firm was called J. R. Williston and Beane. I earned a small salary and commission, allowing us to move to a tiny and affordable apartment in Manhattan.

The 1960 presidential election had been the first presidential election Stewart voted in. I wasn’t twenty-one yet, alas, but we both had seen John F. Kennedy at a rally in Lincoln Center in New York and thought he was completely terrific. He was so youthful, handsome, charming, and energetic. JFK made us feel hopeful about our country and its huge problems. He made us feel that we could do it, stand up, be tough but compassionate, and change the world. When he was assassinated in 1963, it was a horrific blow. Devastating. Awful. Everyone remembers where they were at the moment they heard, and we were heartbroken, then and now.

JFK’s assassination was a turning point in my life. My determination to make money as a stockbroker began to fade and fall away. What an empty, hollow way to make money, one commission at a time, buying and selling! Suddenly, I wanted to get away, leave New York and escape the pressure to earn lots of money because it was so expensive to live there. We decided to move to San Francisco after we visited my sister, who had moved there several years earlier.

My sister is six and a half years older than me, and always led the way in terms of testing the limits of independence. She paved the way for me with my parents, who became more lenient about stuff like curfews and foreign travel after she proved it was okay. She was an extraordinary student and poet. (She’s also a very private person, so I won’t mention her name.) My mother saved my sister’s poems about the tragedy of war, some of which were printed in local newspapers. She had earned multiple master’s degrees, and without her having moved to California, I’m not sure we would have ever wound up there.

Anyway, while we stayed at my sister’s home in Marin County, we fell in love with the clear skies, the slower pace, and the gorgeous San Francisco Bay. The city itself reminded us of the neighborhoods we had seen in Europe. So when I asked Stew if we could pick up and move to San Francisco after law school, he agreed.

“Why not?” But he added, “I’ll have to get a job at least a year in advance.”

Fate played a role there too.

One day, tired of waiting for the bus, Stew hitched a ride over the Golden Gate Bridge. The guy who picked him up turned out to be a successful lawyer who advised him to go straight to the state courthouse, where Stew got several offers. In short order, he had a good job and we would soon be moving to California to pursue our dreams.

Stew was still immersed in classes and exams, so I quit my job on Wall Street and flew out alone to San Francisco to find us a place to live. I was also pregnant, but the baby wasn’t due for two more months, so I thought there would be plenty of time to find somewhere to live.

Wrong! Our son Doug decided it was time for him to emerge the day after I arrived in San Francisco—May 21, 1965. I was spending the first night of my arrival at my sister’s home in Marin County when something scary happened. My water broke. That wasn’t supposed to happen eight weeks before the due date. My sister and her husband took me to the ob-gyn, and my new doctor rushed me to the delivery room. The first thing I thought was how I would get through this without my husband. There were no cell phones then, so we had to call the Fordham law school, where he was a student, and ask them to tell Stew what had happened. Stew never forgot that moment. He pleaded with Fordham to let him miss one final so he could be with me for the birth, but they said no way. If he left, he wouldn’t graduate. They said no to an honor student and a member of their law review. So much for family values.

I can never forget the birth of both my children, especially Doug’s, which was so dangerous. My doctor, John Kerner, who was one of the most beloved and respected ob-gyns in San Francisco at the time, stayed with me every minute. He didn’t want me to have too much anesthetic, so I’d be alert throughout the birth. If anything went wrong, it would be much worse for the baby. So he talked to me the entire time, told me when to push and when to rest. In those years no relatives could be in the room, so I kept my eyes on my doctor and only wished that I had the opportunity to know him better before this ordeal. Doug was clearly in a rush and couldn’t wait to see our new home state. When he was born, Dr. Kerner moved him as fast as he could right into the incubator, which was next to my gurney. He didn’t even take the time to wash the baby. He told me he wanted to create a warm and calm environment for our newborn.

In those days, they didn’t have much in the way of preemie neonatal technology except an incubator. They told me our firstborn son had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, and it would cost a thousand dollars a day for the special care he needed. Oh, my God! They might have well said a million dollars a day. I was transferred to a ward at Mount Zion Hospital and given charitable care. Bless them. The doctor said that every day Doug hung on, he would increase his chances by 10 percent. Our whole family hung on with Doug.

Becoming a mother for the first time in most cases is not as complicated as it was for me. My joy for this nearly four-pound baby was indescribable, but so was my fear about the possibility of losing him. I didn’t have Stew with me for this poignant moment, but I never shed a tear because I knew in my heart that Doug would fight and make it—and he did.

About a week after Doug’s birth, after he finished his last exam at Fordham Law, Stew flew out from New York.

Doug was strong and came home after thirty days in the hospital. He has been strong ever since. His traumatic birth brought home what it’s like to be frightened to death about a loved one and then on top of that to have no health insurance. I’ve been fighting for universal health coverage ever since. And when male colleagues come onto the Senate floor to lecture American women about how they should accept government interference in their reproductive health care, and then go into what it’s like to give birth, I and the women I serve with roll our eyes. They don’t have the foggiest idea what they are talking about.

I remind them on the Senate floor quite often: “Keep government out of our private lives and instead make sure our families have the health care they need.”

After Doug was born, and with Stew’s law degree in hand, we moved into a small apartment in San Francisco. In 1967 our daughter, Nicole, was born, again prematurely but not as early, so she only had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks. By then we had insurance, since Stewart was working as a law clerk for Justice Byrl R. Salsman of the California Court of Appeals.

Stewart and I were very focused on raising our family. But we also opposed the escalating war in Vietnam and wanted to do something to help stop it. I remember our first peace march in 1966. Doug was an infant in his blanket and oblivious to the whole thing. Stew and I passed him back and forth, carrying him, so excited to be with other parents and children as part of the “parents’ brigade.”

We marched from the Richmond District to Golden Gate Park. Everyone was holding handmade peace signs and shouting slogans. I wore a large pendant that had these words on it:

“War is not healthy for children and other living things.”

When we arrived at Golden Gate Park, it was a real scene. Speaker after speaker called on President Lyndon Johnson to end the war now. One unpleasant memory I have are small groups of anarchists trying to distort our message to suit the one they had, which was something like “down with America.” They had it wrong. It wasn’t about “down with America,” it was about wanting to save America. We were there to end the disastrous war. So there were some altercations as some of these radicals tried to push Maoist literature on the rest of us. I thought then that I would defend their right to do what they were doing as long as they were peaceful, but really, it was so counterproductive.

In 1968, we moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to a beautiful little community in Marin County called Greenbrae. We bought our small three-bedroom American dream house for forty thousand dollars with a monthly mortgage payment of $156. Everything was going so well. We both were involved in presidential campaigns. Stew was for Robert Kennedy and I was for Eugene McCarthy. We spent the night of the California primary watching the election results with friends. Stew supported the winning candidate, as I was licking my wounds. After we paid the babysitter, Stew left to drive her home and I sat down to watch the news. What I saw was the horror of the live assassination on TV, as another Kennedy hero fell to bullets. As I sat there alone I was devastated.

I was stunned, frightened, a twenty-seven-year old mother with two small children. America had lost JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all assassinated. What was happening? Our country seemed to be in chaos with a new kind of horrible violence aimed precisely at those great leaders who were urging us toward our better angels. Having grown up in the sheltered America of the 1950s, I wondered how our kids would view a world where strong leaders were blown away, one by one, and the foolish, unwinnable war in Vietnam continued to escalate.

How could I sit back and do nothing? I had two choices: either withdraw into a psychological bomb shelter and pretend everything in our little bubble was safe and secure, protected from pain… or reach out and try to change things.

Not a difficult choice, and I haven’t stopped reaching out since. Overnight our home started to feel like Grand Central Station, with stacks of envelopes being stuffed, addressed, and stamped that spilled across the dining room table as the kids played around its edges.

I began to help organize community efforts to end the war in Vietnam, save the beauty of Marin County, help low-income teenage dropouts get job training, and other local causes. I worked with other young moms who were yanked out of their traditional lives by events beyond their control, but impossible to ignore. In retrospect, this was really the beginning of the political revolution of the women in America, the so-called “women’s liberation” movement, but no one knew that at the time.

We fought on, placing a peace initiative on the ballot in 1970. Nobody thought we’d win—it was thought to be just a gesture, since Marin was a Republican county in those days, and tended to support Richard Nixon and what was now his expanded war in Vietnam and Cambodia.

We were all volunteers. I did the publicity for the peace initiative campaign. And to everyone’s surprise and delight we won! A message was sent from Republican Marin County to Richard Nixon: end the war!

This first big victory inspired me to increase my nonstop political activity. I helped launch Marin Alternative, a progressive grassroots political organization, and a support group called Women’s Way, and helped found the Kentfield After School Child Care Center, The Education Corps, and Marin Community Video. I was most often the catalyst who stepped aside once the project had developed a life of its own.

In 1972, elections were being held for the Marin County Board of Supervisors. There were many exciting issues at the local level, including land use planning to preserve the beauty of our county, the need to address pockets of poverty, and human rights. Our kids needed after-school activities and care; our roads and overpasses needed attention. And above all, it was a platform to bring ideas forward. Stew and I decided one of us had to run. Our first choice was, logically, him. Why? Because he was a man, a lawyer, and therefore more electable. No woman had been on the Board of Supervisors for twenty years, when the amazing Vera Schultz had been instrumental in professionalizing Marin’s county government, creating the positions of county administrator, public works commissioner, and county counsel. She was most beloved for helping start the Marin General Hospital, and was the biggest powerhouse behind getting the world-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design the landmark Marin County Civic Center.

But Stew backed out. There was no way we could pay the mortgage and take care of our family on the eleven-thousand-dollar-a-year county supervisor’s salary.

So I ran.

One of the first people I told about my plans, hoping to get her to volunteer for my campaign, was my next-door neighbor, a well-regarded teacher and cordial friend. We sat down over coffee in her kitchen and I went into my spiel about the issues—preserving Marin’s natural beauty, opening up county board meetings, safe school crossings for our kids, after-school activities—while she remained totally silent. Uh-oh, I thought to myself. This wasn’t going well.

Finally she cleared her throat and spoke:

“I don’t think you should do this, Barbara. Your kids are young and it doesn’t seem right.”

I was stunned. She was a working woman who was divorced with two small kids. Hadn’t we made any progress since the fifties? Were we all doomed to be like Lucille Ball’s character on I Love Lucy, trying to be a professional performer like her husband, but falling on her face every chance she tried?

I said thanks to my neighbor and went home with tears in my eyes. I had learned a valuable lesson at the start-up of my first campaign and never cried again. The fact is, if you run for public office, if you put yourself out there, you will get hurt by a lot of people. So just expect it and toughen up. So I started without this neighbor’s support and never knew, actually, if she voted for me.

My first and only losing campaign was very exciting. Everyone volunteered, since we had a very low budget. I was so nervous asking people for money that every written appeal I made asked for just two dollars. I clearly remember sitting in our tiny headquarters on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Kentfield. It was a tiny room next door to a tiny dress shop. We waited for the mail to come in every day and ripped open the envelopes. Someone spotted an envelope with the return address of one of the biggest donors in the country, who had been an important part of the national Democratic Party finance operation. We couldn’t wait to see the size of the check she had written. Several of us stood around the desk and there it was… two dollars.

Later she told me, “Barbara, you get what you ask for.” A good lesson I never, ever forgot after that.

Everyone in our operation worked gratis and we were really running on adrenaline. We used whatever money we had for postage, sending out as much snail mail as we could, and taking tiny ads in the local newspapers. The focus of our message was the environment, but women’s rights and education played a role. My opponent, Peter Arrigoni, was a very nice person—the nicest I’ve ever run against—and he was caught off guard by the strength of our challenge. Our slogan was so over-the-top, I’m embarrassed to even mention it, but here goes.

SAVE MARIN: VOTE FOR BARBARA

Yes, that was our slogan. It related to my stand against unbridled development, which many feared would destroy the beauty of our county.

I had to learn by doing. I remember the first debate between Peter and me. I was so nervous that I went completely dry. It’s hard to talk when that happens. Luckily, I found a Life Saver in my purse and managed to get through it.

There was so much prejudice against women candidates then. There were times when it felt like I had won a few votes, when people in the audience didn’t ask me how old my kids were or whether my husband was supporting my running for office. But there were plenty of days when the old assumptions and prejudices prevailed.

At one luncheon, held at a community hall, the room was packed with more than two hundred women who agreed with me that we should control commercial development and preserve our environment. I was feeling great, when suddenly a voice from the back of the room piped up.

“So, tell me, Barbara,” a woman said, “when do you have time to do your dishes?”

I was surprised, but naïve. These were older women who probably didn’t have careers and couldn’t understand me wanting one. So I made a mistake. I tried humor.

“We use paper plates,” I wisecracked.

No one laughed.

Later, I thought it had also been a mistake to tell an environmental crowd that I used paper plates.

Dauntless, I began to go door-to-door, using old-fashioned “retail politics,” where you try to meet people in their homes and talk them into voting for you.

Knock-knock.

“Who’s there?”

“Barbara Boxer. I’m running for supervisor. Can I come in for a minute?”

The door opened a crack.

“I didn’t think you’d be so short… You’re the one with four kids under school age.”

“No,” I said, hoping to get to the issues. “I have two children.”

“Oh, no, you have four kids. They told me.”

At this point I had the feeling this woman wouldn’t vote for me if I stopped a guided missile barehanded from crashing into her house.

“Lady, giving birth is something you never forget, and I only did it twice!”

The door slammed. She probably thought I left two of my children in the woods, and without bread crumbs.

My mom and dad were thrilled that I was running, but in some parts of my own family, the idea of a woman running for elected office was hard to understand.

“Isn’t Stew making an excellent living as an attorney?” my mother-in-law asked me. It was embarrassing that I would even want to work at all.

“Of course he is, Mom,” I said. “But I can’t just sit around and watch our country escalate a war in Vietnam and ignore the real problems we’re having at home. I want things to be better for your grandchildren.”

I don’t think this changed her mind, but later I found out she had saved clippings from the race, which my mother had sent her. I kept going, and our campaign must have been doing pretty well, since one night Dr. William Filante, the other candidate challenging the incumbent, came over to see me.

“Barbara,” he said to me and Stewart as he leaned back on the couch in our living room, “I have a great idea.”

Stewart and I said nothing, waiting to hear what it was.

“You should drop out of the race.”

“Huh?” I was surprised but tried to remain calm and friendly. “I’m doing really well, Bill. Why would I ever do that?”

“I know you’re a good candidate, Barbara, and you’ve run a good campaign. But”—he paused for a moment and stared straight at me—“your candidacy and potential victory would be bad for women, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be responsible for that kind of damage.”

“What?” I was flabbergasted. “How can you say that?” Was this guy nuts?

“Only the oppressor can free the oppressed, Barbara. Women are oppressed by men, so don’t you see? Men have to free you.” He alluded to his wife, who was a doctor too. I thought, What? Did you take her exams for her? “If you win,” he said, “you’ll actually be hurting the cause of equal rights for women.”

I was stunned, and could see Stew was too, by this intellectual gobbledygook and his insane line of reasoning. But the time to step up and be tough had arrived.

“Excuse me, Bill, but this conversation is over.”

I stood and escorted him to the door. No way I was going to listen to any more of this garbage.

“You’re the one who should drop out,” I said, as I closed the door behind him. To be honest, I slammed the door behind him.

He wound up coming in third in that race, and I was first. But in the required runoff, he endorsed the incumbent, so I lost by a slender margin.

The next morning I phoned the kids, who’d been staying with their aunt and uncle. I was worried for Doug that his classmates might make fun of him about his mom losing. At five, Nicole probably wouldn’t get anything like that.

“Doug,” I said when he came on the phone. “Mommy tried to win but lost by a little bit. If anyone says anything about it, don’t you worry, it’s all okay.” I went on and on.

There were a few moments of silence while I wondered what kind of trauma I’d visited upon this poor child. Finally he spoke.

“Mom, can you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch today?”

Thank God for my kids. Without them I’d never have been grounded enough in real life to have made it in politics.

But we’d lost. It was disappointing. We’d spent a lot of time and money, fought hard, and almost won. But, bottom line: we lost.

So… how does the old song go, it’s one of my favorites: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.” Jerome Kern wrote the melody and Dorothy Fields the terrific lyrics. Years later, in his 2009 inaugural address, Barack Obama used the same lyrics, changing the end to “… and begin the work of remaking America.”

Steve McNamara, publisher of the local Marin County newspaper, the Pacific Sun, approached me after my loss. Apparently he had really appreciated some of the progressive and spunky things I said during the campaign.

“You know so much about local government now,” he said, “it would be a shame not to use it. Come and work for me.”

When I told him I had no training in writing, although I really liked to write and had done press for several of the campaigns I’d worked on, he said, “Can you make a good speech? Yes. Then just put the paper in the typewriter and talk to it. Don’t get hung up.”

It turned out very well. I was delighted to receive two awards for my writing from the San Francisco Press Club and the Press Bar Award—one for my in-depth story on the California Supreme Court and one for a story on a beautiful elderly lady who lost her home in a bank scam in which she faced a balloon payment on her mortgage that she never really understood.

While I was working for the Pacific Sun, I was approached by California state assemblyman John Burton, who was running for Congress in a district that included Marin County. He pretty much had San Francisco locked, since he and his brother, Phil, were very popular there, but he was relatively unknown in my home county. He asked me to join the staff of his campaign. It was a big decision to leave the Sun. I truly enjoyed my colleagues there, the team approach to producing the newspaper, and the fact that my stories were having an impact. Because the Sun had a progressive point of view, my stories were shaping public opinion in the county, calling attention to everything from local environmental challenges to the war in Vietnam, where soldiers were deploying in increasing numbers from Hamilton Air Force Base in the county.

I was proud to be a reporter. My two years with the Sun went flying by, but I was eager to get back into a political campaign and John was a great candidate. By this time I was known as a good writer and I took over the press operation for Marin County. I also had many contacts from the county supervisor campaign and so I called everyone I knew and organized many house parties.

These house parties were not frivolous. They were basically small community meetings where John would show up, lay out his platform, and take as many questions as he could. Then our staff would sign people up, give everyone a bumper sticker, and ask if we could actually place it on their car. John’s opponent was Roger Boas, a San Francisco supervisor who had many connections in the city but not in Marin. We moved so fast that Roger simply couldn’t keep up with us as we systematically nailed down the key people in Marin we had targeted.

In any case, John won and hired me in 1974 to staff his Marin County office with a terrific team. My job was to continue to do press for him in the county and help put together his schedule and appointments when he was home from Washington.

John became a mentor. I learned so much working for him. One time when he cast an unpopular vote, I asked him if he was nervous about the reaction.

“Remember always after you vote,” he said, “you still have to look at yourself in the mirror the next morning.” That said a lot in a simple way.

John also never led you astray. Once, after a gathering, a constituent asked him how things were going. He said, “Lousy.” When pressed, he went on.

“Nobody cares about poor people and my pleas are falling on deaf ears.”

And he had a dry sense of humor. I’ll never forget when John introduced a bill making it a crime to be poor, with appropriate punishment. Many people didn’t get it. He always said what he thought and was completely fearless. I was lucky to see how someone like John could survive in public life.

One day I called John and told him he had been invited to San Quentin Prison for the Inmates Council dinner. These were the leaders in the prison—prisoners and community leaders as well as the prison administrators. John had another event in San Francisco that night, and he suggested that I stand in for him.

I was proud to do so and appeared as scheduled, though I have to admit I was a little unsettled when I heard disconcerting shouts from behind the forbidding walls as I walked from my car into the prison.

I don’t honestly know what I was thinking when I sat down—maybe I was just a little nervous—but I asked the guy sitting next to me why he was at San Quentin.

“Murder,” he said. Then, noting the look on my face he added: “But that was a long time ago.”

Okay. Now what? I decided to ask him about prison conditions, and my heart rate slowed down as I took copious notes. Some of the things this inmate told me were awful. How little exercise they got; how hard it was to get books; how dangerous it was.

The purpose of the dinner was simply to expose the honor prisoners—those whom the warden and guards trusted—to the community. There were no speeches, just small discussions at the tables that were organized to facilitate the give-and-take. The next morning I called John and asked if I could put out a press release about the event and told him he should write a letter to the warden. John was nice about it, as always, but said,

“I don’t really want to do that, Babs. It’s a state issue. I’m glad you went, but I think we’ll leave it at that.” When John said “leave it at that,” the door was closed. He was the boss and I worked for him.

It was at that very moment that I realized I had to try one more run for office. It wasn’t fair for me to assume that John, or any other “boss,” would see things my way, or do things my way. No, I had to run again if I wanted to really make a difference in the things I cared about. It wasn’t that prison conditions were number one on my list, but I still felt it was something that could be addressed with a simple conversation with the warden.

It helped that I had recently read an article in Ms. magazine pointing out that women take defeat too personally, whereas men try two and three times. So I told John I was going to try for the supervisor seat one more time. The seat opened in 1976, so if I was going to run, I’d have to leave his staff soon. He was very supportive.

In 1976 I ran again for the Marin County Board of Supervisors… and I won. It was my first victory as a political candidate, and I was thrilled. I had learned from my mistakes and ran a much more effective campaign. I was more of a known quantity, and with a solid platform. People had read my newspaper articles and learned to trust me. I wasn’t afraid of debates, I had a long list of endorsers, and I knew how to raise the necessary funds. In 1972 I was outspent by about ten to one; this time I was competitive, because John helped with the donors who had given to his campaign. He said the word and they were more than willing to support his choice for county supervisor. We won by about two thousand votes against a strong female candidate, June Weden, who was quite conservative.

When I took my seat as a board member, the nuclear arms race was in full swing. I used my bully pulpit to point out the futility of “preparing” for nuclear war. If a bomb actually dropped in San Francisco, our little county, just a few miles away, didn’t have a chance. Believe it or not, the federal government gave us a grant to put in place a plan to evacuate Marin County, moving our people to Napa County to get away from the nuclear fallout. With my leadership the county supervisors decided instead to use the funds to print a booklet that we sent out to every resident explaining that the best way to move forward was a nuclear freeze with the Soviet Union. I still have a copy of that booklet. It was a proud moment to see Republican and Democratic supervisors agree on this strategy.

My happiness was short-lived when a year into my term I lost a hero, an idol: my dad. It broke my heart. And it was a premature death, in my opinion.

Dad had a dear family friend, a doctor at New York University Medical School, who had always been on the cutting edge of research. In retrospect, however, he evidently went too far out on the ledge. In those years there was a theory that large doses of aspirin a day would ward off heart attacks. Dad went on this regimen of six aspirins a day. Not baby aspirin. Full-dose aspirin. Dad was afraid of having a heart attack and was glad to be doing something his friend thought would prevent it. I don’t know how long he was on that huge aspirin dose, but one day, suddenly out of the blue, Dad died of a massive stroke.

Years later we learned that aspirin has benefits in very small doses for people at risk for heart attacks. My dad was sixty-nine and much of his family lived well into their eighties. To this day I believe I lost my dad because he was a guinea pig in a failed experiment.

For many years, I tried hard not to think about it. But I missed him so much. He was an inspiration and a pal. I wasn’t a kid. I was thirty-seven when he died, but I still needed him. I realized then how it hurts to lose someone we love, no matter when it happens. This personal loss and other experiences in my life made me committed to guaranteeing the right to know both the potential benefits and toxic side effects of medical treatments, as well as of the food we eat. Dad did see me handle many issues close to my heart as a county supervisor, such as working with colleagues to preserve the beauty of west Marin, supporting a transportation system that included ferries, and working to clean up the air. I was an advocate for stop signs to protect our kids walking to school and also strongly supported a program to use our extra dollars to assist organizations that helped the homeless, the helpless, and the addicted.

My fight as an elected official had begun.