It is a mistake to perceive the struggle entirely in the context of race.
Vernon Jordan had met Morris Abram before he left Atlanta for New York in 1970 to become President of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF). Jordan was then heading the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project, the highly successful effort to raise and distribute funding to civil rights organizations in their registration and education campaigns in the South during the 1960s. Nearly two decades younger than Abram, the two did not become friends until after Jordan’s move to New York, since during their years in Atlanta, “I was not big enough, or known enough to be considered a peer or anything like that.”1
Jordan saw a lot of Abram after moving to New York. The two met frequently in the morning to play tennis at a court located near 42nd Street and 10th Avenue, followed by breakfast at the University Club at 54th and Fifth. When Jordan asked Abram to be the UNCF’s chairman, he readily agreed and was voted in unanimously by the fund’s board. Jordan wrote, “Morris, needless to say, I am personally elated that you will render this service to the Fund. I look forward to the closer working relationship that the Fund brings us.”2 Over the next year, the two spent much of their time together on the tennis court or at the club discussing projects the fund was undertaking.3
Incorporated in 1944, the UNCF provides scholarships for black students and contributes to the general scholarship pool of thirty-seven historically black colleges and universities around the country. During his brief tenure, Jordan transformed it from a mom-and-pop operation into a highly respected organization.4 But when National Urban League President Whitney Young died unexpectedly the year after Jordan assumed the top position at UNCF, he was offered the highly prestigious position and, after much soul searching, left the fund at the beginning of 1972.
Morris Abram saw the fostering of a sense of black consciousness in young adults as central to the mission of historically black colleges. In a speech he gave in 1970 during the first year of his chairmanship of the fund, Abram said that liberals, including himself, had been slow to recognize the need for black institutional power. UNCF colleges, he said, had excelled at nurturing black awareness, “the pride of black men in their heritage and accomplishments, which he contended was essential to the development of black leadership.”5 Abram would stay on as chairman of the UNCF for the remainder of the decade.
There is no question that the country’s upheavals of the 1960s had made a deep impact on his political thinking, including on matters related to race. For all his life Abram had considered himself a liberal, certainly as it was defined as an unwillingness to accept the segregationist milieu in which he spent the first forty-five years of his life. But with the growing impact of the New Left on major political and cultural institutions, including foundations, elite universities, and media outlets, combined with the growing militancy of groups preaching black nationalism, Abram was finding himself clinging to a liberalism that was being redefined in ways that were at odds with many of his most fundamental beliefs.
David Harris, the longtime CEO of the American Jewish Committee, believes that Abrams’s personal, political, and ideological viewpoints were deeply affected by three related developments of the late 1960s:
One was how many old friends and allies of Morris turned against Israel after the Six-Day War, and I think this shocked and dismayed him. The people he thought were our natural partners flipped and turned against Israel. The second was how a number of people, particularly in the civil rights community, had left the Jews behind in places like Ocean-Hill Brownsville. Wait a second—the African American community had no better ally and partner than the Jewish community and within the Jewish community there were few people who were more frontline and outspoken and courageous than Morris Abram, and now we are reinvented as the enemy, as the other side? How can this be? Now I think the third thing was his experience as president of Brandeis. It was a short stint, but there were protesters, demonstrators, trying to take over the president’s office. I know from subsequent conversations that in Morris’s mind that kind of breakdown of the norms of civility, of inquiry, of open discussion replaced instead by the mob, by intimidation, by occupation, I think really shook him to his core, because at heart he was a liberal in the best sense of the western term. People would disagree with each other, they would do it civilly, they would listen to each other, they would form their own opinions, but there wasn’t the thuggish quality to what was experienced on the college campuses in the late 60s. I think those three events, which in some ways drew on each other, were all very formative in Morris’s later political evolution.6
In 1972 Abram returned to his native state to deliver the commencement address at Emory University. Before preparing his remarks, he consulted with his son Morris, who was graduating from Harvard later that week, about what he should say. Morris Jr. recommended that he speak about what he had learned since his own college graduation in 1938, a period, Abram told the graduates, that encompassed “depression, war, political and cultural revolutions, the civil rights revolution, the development of the United Nations, the growth of megalopolis, the degradation of our cities, the emergence of a distinct American underclass, and the challenge to conventional mores and institutions.” Abram said that he had been connected to several of these changes “in some small way,” but touched by all of them.7 The address provides a window into much of Abram’s thinking at the time about large questions, including his evolving political philosophy.
At the time of his own college graduation, Abram told the graduates, he viewed things in black and white. Today, he no longer saw them in such absolute terms, his preference running “to the greys.” Dogmatism, he said, is “a bar to learning.”8 Describing advances in science and economics, he decried the worship of technology, noting that science had not, as previously hoped, been able to overcome the laws of nature, as attested to by the environmental crisis and the resulting rise of the ecology movement. Although democracies need to do everything possible to improve the condition of their deprived groups, even the one man, one vote principle established in the county unit case has its flaws, since dependents of working age who are either unemployed or unemployable “are naturally more likely to respond to the pangs of their stomachs rather than constructs of Cartesian logic.”
Turning to civil rights, Abram described the deplorable conditions for blacks in the South at the time of his graduation and for many years thereafter. And although their political and civil rights had finally been achieved, these victories had been relatively costless. The next phase of the struggle, which would come with a higher price tag, would come over economic, educational, and housing rights: “The problem arises because with the doors of opportunity now pried open, larger masses of economically and socially crippled blacks have not been able to cross over the threshold. However, the problem exists for an even larger number of whites, and in that sense, it is a mistake to perceive the struggle entirely in the context of race.”
From the time of his graduation until the year 1965, Abram said, his liberal faith led him to believe that these problems could be resolved through the passage of legislation granting civil and political rights. But after these victories had been won, they had hardly any impact on the conditions of the underclass in major U.S. cities, which, if anything, had worsened. Civil service reforms had only entrenched inefficient and insensitive bureaucracies. Trade unions had prevented entry to skilled jobs and adopted restrictive practices in contradiction of their stated goal of improving the lot of the common man.
In perhaps the greatest challenge to his previous beliefs, Abram had come to the realization that “government cannot rectify the most glaring defects in the society. Childhood mirrors manhood and the damaged child becomes the destructive man. The chain of causation is continuous from generation to generation, time without end. The primary environment of the child is the home, and it is pure self-deception to assume as we have that the school can make up for the home’s deficiencies. The alienation and violence in our society are a reflection of what has happened to the American home of all classes and races.”9
During the campaign for the 1972 Democratic Party nomination for president, Abram aligned himself with the heavily favored senator from Maine Edmund Muskie. Muskie had been widely praised for the balancing act he played as Hubert Humphrey’s running mate during the unsuccessful presidential campaign of 1968, when the party was torn apart by the divisions over the war in Vietnam. Coming out of that campaign as the prohibitive favorite for the nomination four years later, he and others in the “establishment” wing of the party were blindsided by the growing voices on the left for a “New Politics” that empowered those who favored a break with policies the party had championed dating back to the Truman administration.
Abram headed a task force for Senator Muskie on domestic policy and was already proposing cabinet choices for a future administration.10 But he would later fault himself for authoring a policy paper whose pessimistic tone reflected the dark mood growing about America, primarily on the left. As Abram later put it, he was following the same ideology that had led to the takeover of the party by its most extreme forces, “which downplayed America’s virtues and magnified its flaws.”11 It was these forces that Senator George McGovern rode to secure the Democrats’ disastrous nomination, paving the way for the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in November.
Abram’s relationship with Jimmy Carter began in 1971, when he shared a platform with the future president the year after he became Georgia’s governor. He thought it was odd that the two, who had grown up so close to one another in Georgia six years apart in age, had never met up to that point. But as a Georgia state senator, Carter had not involved himself in the civil rights battles of the 1960s. Running a campaign designed to appeal to segregationists, his landslide victory over former Governor Carl Sanders for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970 had yielded him only seven percent of the black vote in the head-to-head primary runoff.12 Still, the new governor’s assertion during his inaugural address that “the days of segregation are over” propelled him into the national spotlight as one of the new voices of moderation among southern office holders.
Shortly after Carter’s inaugural speech, he received a letter from Abram saying how pleased he was with it: “Your speech set a new standard of official discourse and your candor was so refreshing. As a native Georgian I have always felt that the South would lead the way in terms of a human solution to the problems of race and that the initiatives would come from a new breed of Southern public officials.”13
When Carter began his campaign for president two years before the 1976 election, he reached out to Abram, inviting him and Carlyn to join him and Roslyn at their home in Plains. There he asked Abram if he would help him meet members of the U.S. Jewish community outside of the state of Georgia. Following their breakfast together, Carter sent a handwritten note expressing how pleased he was with the discussion: “We enjoyed being with you and Carlyn this morning, and I appreciate your giving me this much of your precious time in Georgia. Your help and advice will be very valuable to me, and I’ll do my best never to disappoint you.” Carter added that his new friend should not hesitate “to load [him] down with information and suggestions.”14
In fact, Abram had already committed to supporting Washington senator Henry Jackson for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Jackson, a liberal on civil rights and other domestic issues, had become the leading spokesman in the Democratic Party for increasing military spending and taking a hard line against the Soviet Union. He stood in the tradition of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson as Cold War liberals ready to intervene internationally in the cause of freedom, as JFK expressed it in his inaugural address.
The leading critic of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union, Jackson had played the key role in the congressional initiative tying trade preferences for countries in the Soviet bloc to the lifting of restrictions to freedom of emigration and other human rights. The amendment that came to be known by the surnames of its sponsors, Henry Jackson and Congressman Charles Vanik (D-OH), targeted most specifically the Soviet persecution of Jews applying for exit visas to leave the country.
Abram agreed to serve as Jackson’s New York campaign chairman for a variety of reasons. For one, he believed Jackson to be “a thoroughly honest guy loyal to his principles.” Although Abram did not agree with all the senator’s positions, Jackson was prepared to argue them, “as I have done with him.” A less than dynamic figure, Jackson was not considered by Abram to be “an imperial president type” and “I don’t believe in all this charisma crap.”15
But there were more personal reasons as well. Jackson had called him twice during the early stages of Abram’s illness to cheer him up and had helped him secure the drug treatment developed in Israel that had not yet received FDA approval. And Abram believed that with a President Jackson, he had a realistic chance of a U.S. Supreme Court appointment.16 Although Jackson did manage to win the New York Primary, his loss to Jimmy Carter in Pennsylvania in April 1976 all but ended his campaign.
When Abram turned his focus and support to the all but guaranteed nominee Carter, it did not seem to be much of an ideological stretch. As Georgia’s governor Carter had put Henry Jackson’s name into nomination at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. In an interview with Time magazine shortly after he became the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination, Carter named Harry Truman as his favorite modern president, listing as one of his most admired attributes Truman’s vision on foreign policy. Carter also considered Winston Churchill the preeminent leader of our time.17
During the fall campaign, Abram became more than a lukewarm supporter of his fellow Georgian. Setting aside whatever misgivings he had about Carter’s absence from the civil rights struggles of the past, Abram jumped on the bandwagon to promote him as the best governor Georgia ever had, “and the first who truly felt, and more important acted, as if he were the chief executive of and for all the people—blacks and whites.”18
In June, Abram took to the pages of the New York Times to defend Carter against suspicions that his convictions as a religious Southern Baptist were incompatible with America’s political system. Abram told the story of his father’s friend Sheriff Elijah Dorminy of Ben Hill County, a “hardshell Primitive Baptist,” who warned a visiting Klansman who tried to recruit him that he would be run out of town if he disobeyed the law. Abram also mentioned that when Carter had asked him to help introduce him to Jews outside Georgia, he had readily complied, knowing that the governor had appointed a Jewish friend of Abram’s to head the state Board of Regents. It was a body he himself had aspired to serve on during his days in the state, knowing that, as a Jewish liberal, this was simply out of reach under any governor at that time. “I do not claim,” Abram wrote, “that Jimmy Carter knows all the nuances of American pluralism. But on his record, and knowing him, I believe he wants to learn. Nothing that has happened in the months of his presidential campaign has changed my mind.”19
In another op-ed written on the eve of the 1976 Democratic convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden that July, Abram pointed out that Carter’s ascendancy represented a turning point in American politics. While LBJ had to ride to prominence in national politics in a “western saddle,” Carter had no need to hide his “Southernness,” since Southern politicians were no longer captive to the segregationist demands of their constituents.
Abram described Carter as the best of the new breed: “Gifted with raw courage, monumental physical endurance, and sparkling intelligence,” he had overcome opponent and media attacks on his credibility by demonstrating to audiences around the country who saw him as someone “who truly believes in himself.” And though Abram confessed that he didn’t know him well, “we share the same roots and perceive the world through the values of a common generation.”20
Characterizing him as a “Southern liberal,” Abram said that like his cultural opposite FDR, Carter combined the two major strains of the Democratic Party: Jeffersonian theory and Jacksonian pragmatism. During the fall campaign, Abram’s support for the Democratic nominee turned from defending his background to offering advice. As the race, which had begun with a large lead by Carter, began to tighten, Abram sent a memorandum to the candidate saying that he had not come into focus and, as a result, “The fundamental differences between yourself and Ford are not perceived.” He reminded Carter of his distinguishing features: “integrity grounded on religious faith; a toughness born of self-confidence; a compassion derived from being an outsider.”21
His career, he pointed out to Carter, was more miraculous and more of a credit to himself than FDR at this stage. He proposed, as he had advised close Carter aide Charles Kirbo, that in the final debate he should remind himself of what he has become in contrast to Ford, who was still essentially the congressman from Grand Rapids. Carter should propose reform of the United Nations to emphasize human rights and not giving a pass to our friends on their abuses. For good measure he offered the text for an opinion piece that Newsday had agreed to run.22
Carter’s election that November proved a disappointment for Abram almost from the start. On a personal level, he was offered a midlevel position in the White House that he saw no reason to accept. As his friend Vernon Jordan put it, “Morris thought, and I agree with him, that the offer was not what Morris was up to.”23
And it was not long before policy disagreements would set in. By early summer, Abram was writing to the White House to express concern over the administration’s Middle East diplomacy.24 But what had started with early disappointments would soon bring Abram a strong measure of buyer’s remorse. Much of his advice to Carter as a candidate centered around the opportunity the presidency offered to emphasize human rights and the prospect of using the UN as a forum for articulating its importance. When early in his administration the president went before the General Assembly to announce his human rights initiatives, Abram joined him as his guest.
But while Abram had advocated calling out friendly regimes as well as foes for their human rights abuses, he still believed distinctions needed to be made between allies who were sensitive to Western criticism and completely unaccountable antagonists. And though human rights advocacy should be an important component of U.S. foreign policy, it should never be allowed to supersede a nation’s vital interests. Abram also believed that a human rights policy could benefit from emphasizing America’s recent advances in addressing our own historical shortcomings.25 In his choice for UN Ambassador, Carter selected someone Abram had known from his days in Atlanta. Andrew Young had been a close confidante of Dr. King as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Following King’s assassination, Abram had organized and co-chaired a fundraiser that raised several hundred thousand dollars for the SCLC.26
Young, who had represented Atlanta’s Fifth Congressional District in Congress, had been regarded as a political moderate. For example, he had been the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to confirm Gerald Ford as vice president in 1973.
It came as a surprise to Abram and others to see Ambassador Young making use of his new platform to praise Third World dictators, underplay Soviet threats, and atone for America’s sins past and present, the latter in his view giving us little standing to criticize Communist regimes. While it is true, Young said, that the Soviet Union represses its dissidents, “many of our own students were shot down on their own campuses” as a result of their political activities against the war in Vietnam. And even if we do not go in for literal torture, as some other countries do, the United States “still has subtle but very strong systems of intimidation at work that inhibit the possibilities of our poor, our discriminated against, and our dissidents, from speaking fully to address themselves.” During the trial of Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky, he said that there are “hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people whom I would call political prisoners” in the United States.27
President Carter offered lavish praise for his UN Ambassador, saying that he “has a great sensitivity about the yearnings” of Third World peoples, as well as an understanding of the reasons for their “animosities and hatred” toward the United States. “I think,” said the president, “he’s made great strides in repairing [the] damage that [has] been done.” For his part, Young returned the favor, saying that Carter “has the capacity as president of the United States to do more to put an end to racism than anybody since Martin Luther King.”28
In a speech he delivered at Columbia University in 1978 on the thirtieth anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Abram referenced the president’s emphasis on the linkage between freedom and bread: “I reject the idea that freedom of speech and press, indeed all political civil rights, are somehow to be tied to the imprecise and newly discovered rights such as that to development and a New Economic Order. These are but smokescreens blown by those who fear clear and well recognized rights such as those of speech, religion, and emigration.”29
Young resigned from his position in August 1979 following a secret meeting with the UN representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in violation of U.S. policy about which, it was claimed, he deliberately misled the Department of State. His dismissal resulted in an uproar among black leaders, many blaming what was to them clearly the result of pressure they alleged President Carter faced from the Jewish community.30
In an op-ed submitted to the New York Times (approved by two editors before being spiked by a third), Abram sought to ring the alarm bells of growing black hostility to Jews and Israel in the wake of the Young resignation. Black anguish is understandable, he wrote, “But the venting of this by wholesale anger at another group converts a very human reaction into the unfair and dangerous public malignancy of bigotry of the type which has afflicted blacks as well as Jews for centuries.”
While noting honest differences between black and Jewish organizations over the issue of racial quotas, Abram pointed out that many other American organizations oppose quotas without being the targets of abuse. He referenced a raucous meeting held in New York with two hundred black leaders where moderate voices were shouted down and others called for turning to Middle Eastern oil money for financial support. He contrasted these voices with that of Dr. King, whose “treasured” letter sent to him in 1967 condemned antisemitism as something that hurts blacks as well as Jews, since it endorses the doctrine of racism “which they have the greatest stake in destroying.”31
But these events, Abram pointed out, were not occurring in a vacuum. When the Young matter broke, “the dikes which hold the polluted stream of anti-Semitism were leaking badly.” From what? From the failure of President Carter to rebuke offensive remarks by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from his close friend Bert Lance, and from his brother Billy. He had maintained silence in the aftermath of the Young resignation when he could have set the record straight on the reasons his dismissal had created “a serious threat to public harmony.”32
Abram had other problems with the president as well. Racial preferences were becoming “a hallmark” of an administration that was getting “further and further ensnared in the competing demands for preference” by aggrieved groups. “There would not be enough of America,” he wrote, “to satisfy the insatiable grievances, real or imagined, in this country whose first and last settlers were refugees.”33
Despite his appointment toward the end of the Carter administration as chairman of the Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Abram had so soured on his adopted friend’s presidency that he could not see supporting his reelection. He set forth his reasons in a signed four-page document dated October 15, 1980. They included Carter’s “limited view of the moral obligations of the presidency; his dangerous vacillations on foreign affairs; and his disastrous domestic record.” Abram renewed his complaint about Carter’s “inadequate” response to the overt antisemitism of friends, relatives, and colleagues. Calling his domestic policy “appalling,” he criticized the president’s inconsistency in foreign policy and closed with the regret that a man from his native state who grew up so close to him “disappointed so many who expected perhaps too much.”34 In an interview with the Jewish newspaper Forward in 1982, Abram went several steps further, calling Carter “a feckless, hopeless leader of this country who was leading the country into a psychological depression.”35
Abram had voted for Democratic challenger Edward Kennedy in the 1980 New York primary. But voting in his party’s primary was one thing; now he was prepared to give his support to a Republican for the first time in his voting age life. In a move reminiscent of his jump aboard the Carter bandwagon when his candidate Henry Jackson pulled out in 1976, Abram reached out quietly to senior advisors of Ronald Reagan before the final 1980 presidential debate to provide them with information they could use against Carter if the president resorted to personal attacks on his opponent. They related to his lack of public support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his appeal to segregationists in his successful run for governor in 1970.36
Abram agonized over whether to make his presidential choice public. He made his decision to do so after consulting with his friend Theodore White, author of the Making of the President series dating back to Kennedy’s slim victory over Nixon in 1960, who assured him that Reagan was “a decent man.”37 Abram announced his decision in a joint statement with his law partner Edward Costykian, the man credited with reforming Tammany Hall while serving as the leader of Manhattan’s Democratic Party. Abram’s endorsement, he later said, was “the only honest way of voting against Jimmy Carter.” A second Carter administration, he believed, would continue to diminish U.S. support for Israel and erode the concept of equal treatment for all Americans.38 Abram told an interviewer around the halfway point of Reagan’s first term that despite some misgivings, the president demonstrated an ability to lead. His projection of authority was something he had found lacking in President Carter.
In addition to cutting ties with his party, it was time for Abram to say goodbye to an institution that had influenced his decision to move to New York nearly two decades earlier. By the mid-1970s, Abram and some other board members of the Field Foundation he chaired had begun to express their lack of enthusiasm for several key projects supported by its executive director, Leslie Dunbar. Abram had known and worked with Dunbar, the former head of the Southern Regional Council, since their civil rights days in Atlanta. Dunbar’s strong opposition to the war in Vietnam had led him to take a more critical look at the international as well as the domestic policies of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the mid-1970s the foundation awarded grants to the left-leaning Center for Defense Information and the Center for National Security Studies. Things came to a head in 1980 when Dunbar recommended grants to support an anti-draft organization and the continuation of a study by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) on the role of the United States in armaments transfers. Abram played the major role in blocking the two grants, saying that the board did not share Dunbar’s concerns over American foreign policy. The United States, he said, was “one of the most moral nation states.” This triggered Dunbar’s resignation.39
Following Dunbar’s departure, Abram was unsuccessful in blocking another grant to IPS. Although it didn’t immediately result in his resignation, as it did one board colleague, it was clear that he and most of the foundation’s board members were moving in different directions in their political thinking. There had been “deep rumblings” when Abram’s vote for Reagan had been made public. Now, when he tried to redirect the focus of the foundation to poverty in single-parent families, a problem that had only grown since the Moynihan report, the board was unreceptive. Abram’s formal departure from the Field Foundation took place on October 12, 1981, sixteen years after succeeding Adlai Stevenson as its chairman.40