Today would have been my Uncle Charlie's 73rd birthday. I have talked on this blog about Charlie before. Charlie was a kind and intelligent man who achieved his PhD in his mid-50's. He always cared about my welfare and the welfare of each of his family members. He was modest and when he gave a gift of golf clubs to my son Ryan several years ago didn't want anyone to know, even Ryan. We had a long talk about the benefits of golf one Tuesday night. His father and my grandfather Charlie was an avid golfer into his late 70's, and had golfed his age many times.
Perhaps Charlie's downfall is that he wore his heart on his sleeve. He was sensitive to comments made in the family realm and at work sometimes. Perhaps overly sensitive. He was very empathetic to people who were bullied, those who were the black sheep in life. Not everyone in my family knew the real Charlie, but I believe I did. In our many conversations I got to know his true moral character and deeply sympathetic humanism. My mother often calls me Charlie by mistake,(and so did Grandma Jane sometimes) and that is the biggest compliment in the world. And if I wear my heart on my sleeve, I hope it is to show an empathy that will teach lessons to others. In our conversations we talked about the courage it takes to be "totally oneself" in this world. Charlie told me that he was very proud of how I never gave up in the broadcasting industry even though the politics was constantly in my way. He told me he was so proud of how I never gave up and was able to get back on my feet after a job layoff of personal crisis. Charlie said he was deeply moved by the number and quality of the good comments I got from letters of recommendation from community leaders(over 4 dozen of them) after I was laid off of my job as News Director in Fond du Lac. He empathized with my journey because in many ways it was most like his own. I found Charlie to be very approachable and he was the kind of guy that would help somebody if their vehicle broke down on a busy road. He had great passion for politics and the direction this country was headed in. He was a strong backer of Dennis Kucinich and I'm sure would have backed Obama strongly in the presidential race if he would have lived long enough to find out who the Democratic nominee was to be. Charlie was a lot like me. But there were differences. I am married and he never married(and there is speculation that he may have been bisexual, but never pernicious because of the respect he earned). My father says he had a propensity towards paranoia which hurt him in his personal and professional life. I would say earning a PhD pretty much dispells any myths that he may have been intellectually unable to set and follow through with work goals if the desire was there. Charlie had many wide ranging interests and perhaps that kept him from being 100-percent focussed(somewhat similar to me).
When I tried to ask my brother Will whether Charlie was mentally ill, he dodged the question like any good attorney would. Will and I will have to talk about that more sometime because I see him as a supportive and compassionate brother who would want to elucidate. I would also like to talk to my sister about Charlie sometime, but so far the opportunity has not presented itself. Will and Sarah will be backers of mine in the long run and we need to have more of these important conversations. I love and care about them very much. I will also have to talk to Iris sometime about why Charlie once said she was a kind of soulmate of his. Very interesting, have to probe that one!
Perhaps to Charlie's surprise, nobody talked too much about him when he was not around, but perhaps that wasn't good because our true feelings and compassion toward the goodness and decency of man maybe never got articulated the way it should have. Those are my feelings and I stand by them.
In other notes: Senator Paul Wellstone died six years ago today in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. He is another hero of mine. Here is a tribute to Wellstone on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MjcGF1V-wMPaul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was a two-term U.S. Senator from the U.S. state of Minnesota and member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is affiliated with the national Democratic Party. Before being elected to the Senate in 1990, he was a professor of political science at Carleton College. Wellstone was a progressive and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate from 1991 until his death in a plane crash on 25 October 2002, 11 days before he was to stand in the midterm US senate election. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash. They had two other grown children, David and Mark, who now co-chair the Wellstone Action nonprofit group.
Paul Wellstone was born in Washington D.C to Ukrainia-Jewis immigrants, Leon and Minnie Wellstone, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. Originally, his family name was Wexelstein, but his father changed the name to Wellstone in the 1930s when he encountered virulent anti-semitism. He attended Yorktown High Schoo in Arlington. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil (UNC) on a wrestling scholarship, graduating with a degree in political science in three years and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was an Atlantic Coast Conference champion in his scholarship sport.
Wellstone married in 1963. In 1965 he earned his B.A. in Political Science; William Keech and Joel Schwartz served as his thesis advisers. Four years later he was awarded a Ph.D. in Political Science. Wellstone's 1969 doctoral dissertation at UNC was "Black Militants in the Ghetto: Why They Believe in Violence." Upon earning his Ph.D., Wellstone accepted a job as a Professor of Political Science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught until his election to the Senate in 1990.
During the 1970s, he became involved in community organizing, working with the working poor and other politically disenfranchised communities. The first organization he founded was the Organization for a Better Rice County, a group consisting mainly of single parents on welfare, which he organized to advocate for public housing, affordable health care, improved public education, free school lunches, and a publicly-funded day care center. During this same period, he also began organizing with union members, farmers, and liberal activists. Later, he would use these connections in his bid for the Senate.
In the early 1970s, the trustees of Carleton College considered firing him, and actually did fire him for a short time, but his students held a sit-in that resulted in him getting his job back and becoming the youngest professor at Carleton to ever get tenure.[citation needed]
Political career
In 1982, he ran for state auditor, but lost to Arne Carlson. In 1988, he was the Minnesota campaign manager for Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaign.
In 1990, Wellstone ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, beginning the race as a serious underdog. He narrowly won the election, after being outspent by a 7-to-1 margin. Wellstone played off of his underdog image by airing a number of quirky, humorous advertisements created by political consultant Bill Hillsman including "Fast Paul" and "Looking for Rudy", a pastiche of the 1989 Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me.. Boschwitz was also hurt by a letter his supporters wrote, on campaign stationery, to members of the Minnesota Jewish community days before the election, accusing Wellstone of being a "bad Jew" for marrying a Gentile and not raising his children in the Jewish faith. (Boschwitz, like Wellstone, is Jewish.) Wellstone's reply, widely broadcast on Minnesota television, was, "He has a problem with Christians, then." Boschwitz was the only incumbent U.S. senator to lose re-election that year.
Wellstone's distinctive campaign bus
Wellstone defeated Boschwitz again for re-election in
1996. During that campaign, Boschwitz ran ads accusing Wellstone of being "embarrassingly liberal" and calling him "Senator Welfare". Boschwitz accused Wellstone of supporting
flag burning, a move that some believe possibly backfired. Prior to that accusation, Boschwitz had significantly outspent Wellstone on campaign advertising and the race was closely contended, but Wellstone went on to beat Boschwitz by a nine-point margin in a three way race (Dean Barkley received 7%).
Wellstone's upset victory in 1990 and subsequent re-election in 1996 was also credited to a massive
grassroots campaign, which inspired college students, poor people and minorities to get involved in politics for the very first time. In 1990, the number of young people involved in the campaign was so notable that shortly after the election,
Walter Mondale told Wellstone that "the kids won it for you." Wellstone also spent a large portion of his Senate career working with the
Hmong American community in Minnesota, an immigrant community that had not traditionally been involved in American politics. Wellstone also spent a great deal of his Senate career cultivating the
veterans community - he served on the Senate Committee on Veteran's Affairs
[4], and successfully campaigned for
atomic veterans to receive compensation from the federal government
[5] and for increased spending on health care for veterans
[6].
In 2002, Wellstone campaigned for re-election to a third term (despite an earlier campaign pledge to only serve two terms) against
Republican Norm Coleman, the two-term mayor of
St. Paul, formerly a Democrat who had chaired Wellstone's 1996 re-election campaign. Earlier that year he announced he had a mild form of
multiple sclerosis, causing the limp he had believed was an old wrestling injury.
Wellstone was in a line of left-of-center or progressive senators of the
Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). The first three,
Hubert Humphrey,
Eugene McCarthy and
Walter Mondale, were all prominent in the national Democratic Party. Shortly after joining the Senate, South Carolina Senator
Fritz Hollings approached Wellstone and told him, "You remind me of Hubert Humphrey. You talk too much."
Policy views
Wellstone was known for his work for peace, the environment, labor, and health care; he also joined his wife
Sheila to support the rights of victims of
domestic violence. He made the issue of mental illness a central focus in his career.He was a solid supporter of increased immigration in the U.S. He opposed the first
Gulf War in 1991 and, in the months before his death, spoke out against the government's threats to go to war with Iraq again. He was strongly supported by groups such as
Americans for Democratic Action, the
AFL-CIO, the
Sierra Club, the
ACLU, and
People for the American Way.
In 1996 (facing a bitter re-election fight against Boschwitz), he voted in favor of the
Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and also excluded gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered married couples from receiving equal treatment under federal immigration, tax, welfare, Social Security and inheritance legislation.
[8] His vote angered many of his long-time supporters in the LGBT community, and it didn't help his cause when he explained that he voted because he didn't believe in re-defining marriage. However, he later asked his supporters to educate him on the issue and by 2001, when he wrote his autobiography, Conscience of a Liberal, Wellstone admitted that he had made a mistake. After voting against the
congressional authorization for the
war in Iraq on
October 11,
2002, in the midst of a tight election, Wellstone is said to have told his wife, "I just cost myself the election."
In the 2002 campaign, the
Green Party ran a candidate against Wellstone. Some Greens opposed this move. The party's 2000 Vice-Presidential nominee,
Winona LaDuke, described Wellstone as "a champion of the vast majority of our issues".
[9] The Green Party's decision to oppose Wellstone was criticized by some progressives.
[10]Wellstone was the author of the 'Wellstone Amendment' added to the
McCain-Feingold Bill for
Campaign Finance Reform, in what came to be known as the
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. The law, including the Wellstone Amendment, was challenged as unconstitutional by groups and individuals including the
California State Democratic Party, the
National Rifle Association, and Republican Senator
Mitch McConnell (
Kentucky), the Senate Majority
Whip, with critics agreeing on both sides of the political spectrum.
[11] On
December 10,
2003, the Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding the key provisions of McCain-Feingold, including the Wellstone Amendment; the vote on the court was 5 to 4. Wellstone saw McCain-Feingold's protection of "advocacy" groups as a "loophole" allowing "special interests" to run last-minute election ads. (Since corporate and union money was already banished in the bill, Wellstone was presumably worried mainly about money from rich individuals.) Wellstone pushed an amendment to extend McCain-Feingold's ban on last-minute ads to nonprofits like "the NRA, the Sierra Club, the Christian Coalition, and others." Under the Wellstone Amendment, these organizations could only advertise using money raised under strict "hard money" limits—no more than $5,000 per individual.
Presidential aspirations
Shortly after his re-election to the Senate in 1996, Wellstone began contemplating a run for his party's nomination for
President of the United States in 2000.
As the first stage in his nascent pseudocampaign, he embarked upon a cross-country speaking and listening tour that he dubbed "the Children's Tour" in May 1997. This tour, which took him to rural areas of
Mississippi and
Appalachia and the
inner cities of
Minneapolis,
Chicago,
Los Angeles, and
Baltimore, was intended to retrace the steps taken by Senator
Robert F. Kennedy during a similar tour in 1966, in order to showcase the fact that conditions had not improved, as well as to test his message.
The following year, 1998, Wellstone began to more openly investigate the possibility of running. He formed an exploratory committee that paid for his travels to
Iowa and
New Hampshire, homes of the two first contests of the nomination process, to speak before
organized labor and local Democrats. (His catchphrase from these speeches, "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party," would later be incorporated into the 2004 stump speech of Governor
Howard Dean.) He also met privately with the Rev.
Jesse Jackson, allegedly to determine which of them would challenge Vice President
Al Gore from the
left in 2000.
During this time, a college student named Paul Hogarth designed and put up Wellstone2000.com, a website intended to drum up grassroots support for Wellstone's candidacy. By the time it completed its two-year run, the site had led to the recruitment of nearly 700 official members into the Draft Wellstone movement, had sold hundreds of "Wellstone 2000" political buttons, and had led to the formation of "Students for Wellstone" clubs on campuses across the country.
Then, on
January 9,
1999, Wellstone called a
press conference in the Minnesota capitol building. Rather than announcing his candidacy, as had been expected, he instead declared that he would not be a candidate. His explanation was that his old wrestling injury (in reality, it would some time later be diagnosed as
multiple sclerosis) prevented him from mustering the stamina necessary for a national campaign. Later that year, he would endorse the candidacy of former Senator
Bill Bradley of
New Jersey, the only Democrat to run against Gore.
Gulf War
Senator Wellstone voted against authorizing the use of force before the
Gulf War on
January 12,
1991 (the vote was 52–47 in favor).
[5] He also voted against the use of force before the
Iraq War on October 11, 2002 (the vote was 77–23 in favor).
[6] Wellstone was one of only eleven senators to vote against both the 1991 and 2002 resolutions. The others were also all Democratic senators: Akaka-HI, Bingaman-NM, Byrd-WV, Conrad-ND, Inoyue-HI, Kennedy-MA, Leahy-VT, Levin-MI, Mikulski-MD, and Sarbanes-MD.
Other key military action votes
Wellstone supported requests for military action by President Clinton, including
Operation Restore Hope in
Somalia (1992),
Operation Uphold Democracy in
Haiti (1994),
Operation Deliberate Force in
Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995),
Operation Desert Fox in
Iraq (1998) and
Operation Allied Force in
Yugoslavia (1999). On July 1, 1994, during the 100-day
Rwandan Genocide from April 6 to mid-July 1994, Wellstone authored an amendment to the 1995 defense appropriations bill. The amendment expressed the sense of the Congress regarding the genocide in Rwanda and the need to expedite assistance in protecting populations at risk in that country but did not authorize military or peacekeeping aid.
Death
On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58. The other victims were his wife,
Sheila; one of his three children, Marcia; the two pilots, his driver, Will McLaughlin, and campaign staffers
Tom Lapic and
Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to
Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of
Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son
Tom Rukavina serves in the
Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator
Ted Kennedy. He was to debate Norm Coleman in
Duluth, Minnesota that same night.
Wellstone Burial Plot, Minneapolis, MN.
The
Beechcraft King Air A100 plane crashed into dense forest about two miles from the
Eveleth airport, while operating under
instrument flight rules. The charter plane Wellstone was traveling in had no
flight data recorders. Both pilots tested negative for drug or alcohol use.
Icing, though widely reported on in following days, was considered and eventually rejected as a significant factor in the crash. The Board judged that while cloud cover might have prevented the flight crew from seeing the airport, icing did not affect the airplane's performance during the descent.
[14]The
NTSB later determined that the likely cause of the accident was the failure of both the pilot and copilot to maintain a safe minimum airspeed, leading to a
stall from which they could not recover.
Michael L. Guess, the First Officer, was characterized in the NTSB report as being "below average" in proficiency.
[15] Significant discrepancies were also found in pilot Richard Conry's flight logs in the course of the post-accident investigation.
[16] He also had a well-known tendency to allow copilots to take over all functions of the aircraft as if they were the sole pilot during flights. After the crash, three copilots told of occasions in which they had to take control of the aircraft away from Conry. After one of those incidents, only three days before the crash, the copilot had urged Conry to retire
[17]. A few months before the crash, Conry told another pilot, Timothy M. Cooney, a childhood friend, that he had difficulty piloting and landing King Airs
[18]. The copilot Guess was cited by coworkers as having to be consistently reminded to keep his hand on the throttle and maintain airspeed during approaches
[16].
The final two
radar readings detected the airplane traveling at or just below its predicted stall speed given conditions at the time of the accident
[16].
The timing and circumstances surrounding the crash, along with inconsistent statements made by public safety officials and crash investigators, led to speculation that a
government conspiracy was behind the crash.
University of Minnesota Duluth philosophy professor
Jim Fetzer wrote several articles and a book alleging that the crash had been engineered by the Bush administration.
[19][20][
edit] Aftermath
Wellstone's death came just 11 days before his potential re-election in a crucial race to maintain Democratic control of the Senate. Campaigning was halted by all sides. Minnesota law required that his name be struck from the ballot, to be replaced by a candidate chosen by the party. The replacement candidate was former
Vice President Walter Mondale, who accepted the nomination and later lost the election to Republican
Norm Coleman.
The 20,000-capacity memorial service for Wellstone and the other victims of the crash was held in
Williams Arena at the
University of Minnesota and was broadcast live on national TV. Many high profile politicians attended the memorial, including former President
Bill Clinton, Senator
Hillary Clinton,
Al Gore, Senator
Ted Kennedy, Senator
Trent Lott, and Governor
Tommy Thompson. The White House offered to send Vice-President
Dick Cheney to the service, but the Wellstone family declined.
[21] After
Rick Kahn began urging that the crowd should win the election for Wellstone and that Republicans should stop their opposition to the Senate seat, Senator Lott and Governor
Jesse Ventura, were booed (Lott and Ventura ultimately walked out); Later in the service, Wellstone's personal eulogy was delivered by Senator
Tom Harkin, another notable Democrat and Wellstone's close friend in the
Senate, who urged those present to "stand up for Paul" in the election.
The event was criticized for its tone. Governor Ventura, who had the option to pick a replacement senator to serve out the remainder of Wellstone's term through January 2003, went so far as to declare he would solicit résumés for the senatorial position from everyone except Democrats. On the other hand, the pre-election outrage swirling around Wellstone's memorial was condemned by Democrats, like radio personality
Al Franken, who was at the memorial and claimed that the outrage was overblown in order to damage the Democratic candidate running as Wellstone's replacement.
Don Hazen, executive editor of
Alternet, wrote of Wellstone's passing, "Progressives across the land are in shock as the person many think of as the conscience of the Senate is gone."
[22]On
November 4, the day before Election Day, Ventura appointed state planning commissioner
Dean Barkley, founder and chair of the Minnesota Independence Party, to complete the remaining two months of Wellstone's Senate term; he had run against Wellstone in 1996.
[
edit] Legacy
Paul Wellstone markerwith stones.
Wellstone is survived by his sons David and Mark and six grandchildren. The
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations has created the AFL-CIO Senator Paul Wellstone Award for supporters of the rights of labor unions. Presidential candidate
Howard Dean and California state senator
John Burton both received the first award in January 2003. In 2004, the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dedicated the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Memorial Garden as a tribute to the couple, both graduates of the university.
Near the site of his plane crash, a memorial to the Wellstones was dedicated on September 25, 2005. His distinctive green bus was present, as well as hundreds of supporters and loved ones. The Senator and his wife were laid to rest at
Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, the same cemetery in which Vice President
Hubert H. Humphrey is interred. A memorial sculpture near
Lake Calhoun marks their gravesites. Visitors sometimes follow the Jewish custom
[7] of placing small stones on the boulder marking the family plot or on the individual markers. His legacy continues as
Wellstone Action, a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that trains citizens and potential candidates with a progressive agendum.
[23][24][25][26]In 2007, former
First Lady Rosalynn Carter joined with David Wellstone to push Congress to pass legislation regarding mental health insurance.
[27] Wellstone and Carter worked to pass the "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act" which requires equal coverage of mental and physical illnesses when policies include both types of coverage; both testified before a House subcommittee regarding the bill in July 2007.
[27] David said of his father, "Although he was passionate on many issues, there was not another issue that surpassed this in terms of his passion."
[27] Because Paul Wellstone's brother had suffered from mental illness, Wellstone had fought for changes in mental health and insurance laws when he reached the Senate.
[27]On
March 5,
2008 the
House of Representatives passed H.R. 1424, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007 by a vote of 268-148. It was sponsored by Representative
Patrick J. Kennedy (
D-
Rhode Island), who is a recovering alcoholic and Representative
Jim Ramstad, (
R-
Minnesota), also a recovering alcoholic. The narrower Senate bill S. 558, passed earlier, was introduced by Kennedy's father, Senator
Edward Kennedy (D-
Massachusetts),
Pete Domenici, (R-
New Mexico), and Mike Enzi.
