“Our Father, Who Art in Congress”: the Political Beginnings of Father Robert F
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
“Our Father, Who Art in Congress”: The Political Beginnings of Father Robert F. Drinan, S.J. By Casey Bohlen Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: Luther Spoehr April 14, 2008 Contents Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... 3 Preface ............................................................................................................................................ 4 Chapter One: A Chronological Introduction ............................................................................. 7 Chapter Two: The Policy Platforms ......................................................................................... 15 Third District Democrats: The Policy Concerns of 1970 ......................................................... 17 Problematic Peace Campaigns: The National Context ............................................................. 23 Drinan’s Platform: A Dynamic (Peace) Campaign .................................................................. 27 Chapter Three: The Roman Collar ........................................................................................... 36 Catholic Opposition and Drinan’s Reassurances ...................................................................... 39 Non-Catholics, American Legal Theory, and the Issue of Abortion ........................................ 47 The Roman Collar as a Source of Moral Fortitude ................................................................... 52 One Last Speech, at Unknown Date and Location ................................................................... 57 Chapter Four: The Character ................................................................................................... 59 The Logistics: What It Took to Be a “New Politician” ............................................................ 61 The Substance: Grassroots Organizing and the Pursuit of Change .......................................... 65 The General Election: Philbin, McGlennon, and Smear Campaigns........................................ 70 Drinan’s Integrity: A Couple of Letter Exchanges ................................................................... 78 Chapter Five: The First Term and Beyond .............................................................................. 84 What “The Future” Entailed: A Freshman in the House .......................................................... 87 Looking Forward Despite the Past: A Second Campaign for Congress ................................... 96 Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................................................. 103 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 107 2 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Spoehr, who has been an exceptional advisor and intellectual companion throughout this process. He focused my lines of inquiry, pushed me to sharpen my prose, and always had time to talk about the present if I couldn’t take another minute of the past. I would also like to thank the immensely helpful professors, archivists, and librarians that I met along the way. Holly Snyder, Brown’s wonderfully talented North American History Librarian, was the first to mention Father Drinan’s name to me – and her off-hand comment quite literally became the foundation of this paper, for which I will be forever grateful. The helpful folks at Boston College’s Burns Library helped me navigate the confusion of Drinan’s recently opened Congressional Archive, and pointed me towards a Faculty Archive that became essential to understanding my subject’s early life. Professor Kenneth Sacks provided me with indispensable feedback on my prospectus, and the hours spent discussing historical writing in his seminar were central to my perspective and approach. And Professor Robert Self deserves more thanks than I can give – for schooling me in the ways of library research last summer, of course, but also for getting a directionless college student excited about the field of history just in time to file his concentration forms. My roommates and fellow thesis-writers, Matthew Cohen and Alan Gabel, deserve my thanks as well, for allowing me to blanket our living room with stacks of newspaper articles and for spending countless hours in their labs, helping to constantly remind me how glad I am to have chosen the humanities. Finally, I would like to thank the unceasingly supportive Eliza Congdon. Her presence over the last year and a half has helped to keep me sane – she knew precisely when to commiserate, when to make constructive suggestions, and when to lure me away from my work with the latest episode of Lost. She believed in me throughout this entire process, and I can only hope that the final product will make her proud. 3 Preface The collective vision that we commonly refer to as our “American History” is, in many ways, a complex amalgam wrought by expert story-tellers, which informs our present about the contours of our past in the hope that we may better direct our future. As academic trends ebb and flow, the characters in these stories also change, and these days scarcely an historical article can be published without focusing on an underrepresented race, gender, or class. This quest for diversity is an indisputably positive development, and it enriches and strengthens our portrait of the past. But it also limits the brush strokes of that portrait to categorical frameworks, and often assumes that a story is worth the telling simply because of its subject’s ethnic, gendered, or socioeconomic traits. These pages are thus, in one sense, nothing new: they contain the story of Congressman Robert F. Drinan, S.J., yet another old, white male, and his first campaign for political office. But in another sense, one that prioritizes the appeal of an individual story at the cost of trends and categories, it is quite a bit more – It is the story of a fiery anti-war crusader, a radical dove who ran for national office instead of taking his protest to the streets; who united an unusually diverse group of constituents by persuading them that American militarism contributed to a vast array of societal ills; who fought back against the rising tide of Nixonian fear-mongering and the thinly-veiled racism of calls for “law and order”; who was victorious in 1970, a year that was notoriously brutal for peace candidates across the nation; who strove to transform the idealistic dreams of the nineteen- sixties into the political realities of the nineteen-seventies; who waged war on war. It is the story of a Catholic priest, a Jesuit activist whose religious faith compelled him to help stop American military involvement in Southeast Asia; who was opposed by Protestants 4 worried about papist attempts to break down the separation of Church and State; who was opposed by fellow Catholics concerned about the corruptive and corrosive forces of American politics; who was nevertheless convinced that America desperately needed new public leaders, representatives who combined strong advocacy for dramatic social change with a robust respect for the Constitution; who brought both his Roman collar and his Georgetown law degree to bear on the pressing issues of his time. It is the story of a New Politician, a fresh face who ran against the encrusted corruption of a fourteen-term incumbent; who mounted one of the first genuinely grassroots campaigns, a massive get-out-the-vote effort that was years ahead of its time; who fought for Congressional reform and the abolition of the seniority system, seeking to open the door for a politics rooted in hope and change; who laid claim to an authentic public personality, which he believed would help him guide America to a brighter future, free of the patronage and personal favors that had damaged the endeavors of past generations; who was genuinely “new” in a diversity of ways. It is a story of disappointment, of the depressing steam that spat and hissed when the cold waters of political reality doused Drinan’s fires; of the obstacles and roadblocks that the Democratic Party hierarchy threw up in the way of reform; of the 92 nd Congress’ failure to stand up to the war-mongering of the President and the Pentagon; of the transformative effects wrought by political sea-changes in the early 1970s; of a politician’s re-election on a platform that he had run explicitly against just two years prior; of the often withering effects of American politics. And it is a story of a politician’s beginnings; of an idealistic priest’s first public fight to reform American society; of a hard-nosed lawyer’s first foray into the bitter battles of American politics; of a character forged in the world of academia, tested by the heat of an electoral 5 campaign, and then launched into the complexity of the U.S. Legislature; of the ways in which Drinan’s early years help to illuminate his later endeavors; of the ways in which those later endeavors can tell readers much about American politics writ large. It is, in short, a story that ought to be told. 6 Chapter One A Chronological Introduction: Father Drinan, the Third District, and the Citizens Caucus This story actually begins in 1968, two years prior to Father Drinan’s first campaign. Although the news cycle was dominated